Food Wars

A powerful look inside industrial food marketing and the unlikely coalition of advocates in Latin America who took on the corporate food system^—^and won.Every day, billions of people navigate food environments designed to sell ultra-processed products linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other chronic illnesses. Yet behind the apparent abundance of choices lies a remarkably concentrated industry, giving a small number of multinational corporations enormous power over what people eat and the environments in which they make those choices. Weaving together global health, communication studies, and political economy, Food Wars reveals how corporate power came to shape not only what people eat, but the environments, meanings, and policies surrounding food. Across Latin America, scientists, advocates, and policymakers built the regulatory counterpower to challenge it. Drawing on the author's childhood in Guadalajara and years of fieldwork in Mexico and Chile, the book traces transnational coalitions that transformed traditions of resistance to foreign and corporate power into some of the world's most ambitious public health policies. From Mexico's soda tax to Chile's sweeping food labeling and marketing law, their innovations have inspired governments from Buenos Aires, to Ottawa, Praetoria, and beyond to reclaim authority over the commercial forces shaping what people eat.Urgent and revelatory, Food Wars is both a critical examination of industrial food marketing and its legacies of colonial extraction and a call to action for policymakers and citizens seeking to challenge corporate power in the pursuit of healthier, more sustainable food systems.