Part V of Ten Ten Ten’s seven-part Obesity Series is now live.

Four decades of mergers gave a small number of companies the power to decide what most Americans eat. The food environment we live in today isn’t an accident: it’s a business strategy that worked exactly as intended. The industry books the profit this quarter. The healthcare system pays the bill for decades.

The portion sizes and engineered products covered in Part IV didn’t come from what Americans wanted to eat. They came from an industry so concentrated that a small number of companies could set the defaults for the entire country’s diet.

The top four corporations control more than 80% of the market for beef processing, corn seed, soybean processing, baby food, pasta, cereal, and soda.[1] Four control more than 60% of pork, coffee, cookies, and bread.[1] Antitrust scholars treat 60% top-four control as the line where a market becomes a tight oligopoly, the level at which firms can coordinate on price without ever agreeing to.

Read Part V of VII: Food Industry Consolidation and Market Power (https://substack.com/@tententenorg/p-211729590)