Who Gets to Feed the Future?

As ultra-processed food companies take governments to court over public-health rules, the struggle over the modern diet is becoming something larger: a contest over childhood, culture, care, and who gets to shape the conditions in which we eat.

At the Farm at Kelly Miller in Washington, D.C., where WANDA convened its Juneteenth Sisterhood Supper this summer, the setting made an argument before anyone needed a PowerPoint. A farm. A table. Women and families gathered around questions of food, health, heritage, and community. These are the places where we usually locate responsibility for nourishment: in kitchens, gardens, schools, churches, clinics, and the hands of whoever remembered that the children needed dinner before everybody else could sit down.

But some of the most consequential decisions about what families eat are being made nowhere near a stove.

They are being made in corporate research departments deciding how a product should taste and feel; in advertising firms calculating what will capture a child’s attention; in legislatures debating labeling and marketing restrictions; and, increasingly, in courtrooms. An investigation by The Guardian, Lighthouse Reports, academic researchers, and other media partners identified 235 lawsuits filed from 2010 through 2025 over public-health measures targeting unhealthy and ultra-processed foods in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

Three-quarters of the resolved cases were lost by the corporations. Yet those cases collectively represented nearly 600 years of litigation and delayed policies by an average of roughly two and a half years. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that the resulting legal costs and delays can create a regulatory chill, particularly for countries with fewer resources to fight multinational companies.

That imbalance forces a different nutrition question. For generations we have asked families, disproportionately women, to exercise discipline in the grocery aisle, at the stove, and around the dinner table. What happens when the institutions selling the food are permitted to exercise vastly more power over the conditions in which those choices are made?

A rigged contest disguised as choice

Public health loves the language of choice. Choose water. Choose vegetables. Cook at home. Read the label. Pack a better lunch. Parents absorb those instructions and then attempt to translate them into real life, where food must coexist with wages, transportation, work schedules, childcare, school meals, picky eating, kitchen equipment, neighborhood retail, cultural preferences, and the rising cost of groceries.

The economic reality is difficult to reconcile with the simplicity of that advice. The 2026 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World focuses on the high cost of a healthy diet; reporting on the findings, The Guardian noted that 2.69 billion people about one-third of humanity could not afford a healthy diet, with the proportion reaching 66.6 percent in Africa. A healthy diet was estimated to cost about $4.28 per person per day in purchasing-power terms.

Against that constraint sits one of the most sophisticated persuasion systems ever built.

Recent research from the University of California, San Francisco offers an extraordinary window into how sophisticated it became. After Philip Morris acquired General Foods in 1985, internal corporate records show the company shared expertise developed in tobacco including flavor science, sensory research, packaging, and behavioral insights with its food businesses. Researchers found that these capabilities influenced the development of Lunchables, which was designed not simply as a collection of ingredients but as an experience that appealed to children’s desires for independence and play while offering parents convenience and recognizable brands. When developers struggled with the sensory qualities of one lower-fat version, researchers even consulted tobacco expertise in flavor perception and neuroscience.

The historical connection matters because it reminds us that food preference is not merely discovered by companies. It can be cultivated. A child does not encounter a brightly packaged product as a neutral substance. She encounters the character on the box, the commercial between videos, the influencer holding it, the convenience of opening it herself, the familiar crunch, the collectible prize, the placement at eye level, and perhaps the exhausted adult grateful for something the child will eat without negotiation. The product solves real problems while simultaneously creating relationships, memories, and expectations.

That last point matters. Convenience should not become a moral accusation against families. Convenience answers genuine needs. Shelf stability matters. Predictability matters for children with strong sensory preferences. A packaged food can help a parent get through a brutal Tuesday.

The more useful question is why our food economy has devoted so much ingenuity to making highly formulated products convenient, desirable, and profitable while asking individual households to supply the missing ingenuity required to make healthier foods equally affordable and easy.

There is also legitimate scientific debate about how broadly the term “ultra-processed food” should be applied. NOVA, the most commonly used classification system, groups foods according to the purpose and extent of industrial processing, but scientists continue to debate its boundaries and whether foods within the category have sufficiently similar health effects to warrant treating them as one group. Recent reviews note meaningful heterogeneity within the category, even as other scholars defend NOVA’s usefulness for public-health research and policy.

That scientific nuance makes transparency more important, not less. It is possible to reject simplistic equations of “processed” with “bad” while still asking why companies should be able to obstruct warning labels, marketing restrictions, or other democratically enacted health protections. The policy issue is not whether every loaf of packaged bread belongs in the same moral bucket as a soda. It is whether commercial actors with extraordinary resources should be able to shape the scientific conversation, the consumer environment, and the rules meant to govern that environment simultaneously.

Culture cannot carry the whole burden

Italy provides an uncomfortable lesson. For decades, the Mediterranean diet has been presented around the world almost as cultural inoculation against diet-related disease: vegetables, legumes, olive oil, grains, modest portions of animal foods, meals eaten together. Yet Italy has remained among European countries struggling with high rates of childhood excess weight.

Earlier WHO surveillance found 20.4 percent of Italian children in its sample living with overweight and another 9.4 percent with obesity; one in four ate fruits and vegetables less than once a day, and 38 percent ate legumes less than weekly. More recent surveillance across Europe continues to find especially high childhood obesity prevalence in several southern European countries.

The lesson is not that Mediterranean foodways were fraudulent. It is nearly the opposite. A cuisine can carry centuries of agricultural intelligence, family memory, and nutritional value and still encounter an economic environment powerful enough to alter what the next generation eats.

That lesson should command attention across Africa and its diaspora. Fonio can survive centuries. So can millet, sorghum, cowpeas, okra, greens, groundnuts, tubers, beans, and the cooking knowledge that followed African people across borders and oceans. Their persistence testifies to extraordinary human ingenuity. But heritage foods do not possess supernatural resistance to urbanization, changing work patterns, trade policy, aggressive advertising, supermarket expansion, digital food delivery, shifting status symbols, or the economics that make one meal cheaper and easier than another. WHO now describes the expansion of industrially formulated foods as part of a transformation in global food markets and supply chains that intersects with agriculture, trade, environmental policy, and public health.

Culture is therefore necessary, but it is not sufficient. This is one place where the history of Black food and agriculture complicates modern nutrition policy. Ashanté Reese’s Black Food Geographies, based in Washington’s Deanwood neighborhood, shows how segregation, racism, corporate distribution, and neighborhood change shape food availability while Black residents continually create strategies of self-reliance and care. Psyche Williams-Forson’s Eating While Black examines how nutrition science, media, economics, and public policy contribute to judgments about what Black people eat, too often turning the consequences of structural conditions into evidence that Black people themselves need correction.

The danger in romanticizing heritage food is that it can reproduce the same mistake from the opposite direction. Instead of saying, “You should have made healthier choices,” we begin saying, “You should have preserved your ancestral diet.” Both formulations can place the burden on the household while leaving the surrounding economy untouched.

A grandmother can save a recipe. A mother can introduce a child to a food she loved growing up. A farmer can preserve seed. None of them can individually regulate digital advertising, restructure agricultural subsidies, shorten a caregiver’s workday, or make nutritious food affordable throughout a neighborhood.

Monica White’s history of Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative offers a different model. Hamer did not treat food merely as a collection of nutrients or a matter of personal taste. Freedom Farm eventually encompassed hundreds of acres and linked agriculture to community wellness, economic self-reliance, and political resistance. Food was infrastructure for citizenship. That history feels unexpectedly contemporary.

Who performs the work of a “healthy choice”?

Almost every recommendation to improve a child’s diet contains invisible labor.

Someone has to locate the food, earn enough to purchase it, bring it home, store it, wash it, prepare it, convince a skeptical child to taste it, tolerate the rejection, try again next week, clean the kitchen, remember the dental appointment, monitor the school lunch, read the ingredient label, interpret conflicting nutrition headlines, and somehow avoid projecting her own childhood dislikes onto the child she is trying to feed.

A food system can quietly privatize all of that work and then measure the result as individual behavior. Much of that labor has historically rested with women. Black women, in particular, have performed food labor under a striking contradiction: feeding families and communities while also working in other people’s kitchens, agricultural fields, school cafeterias, hospitals, restaurants, and domestic spaces. They have carried knowledge about nourishment while their own food practices were alternately exploited, caricatured, medicalized, and marketed back to them.

That history changes how we ought to think about childhood nutrition. The parent is neither an all-powerful gatekeeper nor a powerless victim of marketing. She is a participant in a much larger food environment. She may introduce vegetables and also dislike some of them herself. She may value cultural food and lack time to prepare it. She may want to limit sugary drinks while sending a child into schools, stores, media environments, and celebrations where those products communicate pleasure and belonging far more loudly than a nutrition handout ever could. If we want children to develop healthier relationships with food, then adults need something more useful than blame.

Can healthy food compete for a child’s imagination?

This is the question being tested inside WANDA’s World, an emerging animated nutrition initiative built around Little WANDA, a young “food shero” who explores foods of Africa and the diaspora with a cast of foodie friends.

The premise sounds simple. A child might follow Little WANDA on an adventure to discover fonio: where it originated, how it grows, who has cultivated it, what it contributes nutritionally, and how a family might prepare it. But the more interesting experiment begins when the video ends. Could a child then taste fonio, grow something, cook with a caregiver, dance to a movement song, read about another food culture, or send in a drawing showing what she discovered?

In other words, can a screen send a child back into the physical world rather than simply demanding more screen? WANDA is preparing to test that question with caregivers, educators, and health professionals rather than assume the answer. Its formative research will examine not only whether children like an animated character but how caregivers decide which foods children encounter, what makes a piece of digital health content trustworthy, how long an episode should last, when educational media becomes just more screen time, and whether storytelling can increase curiosity about unfamiliar foods.

The work also exposes a tension worth examining rather than hiding. Producing high-quality children’s media costs money. Food companies have that money. If healthier food brands underwrite episodes, provide birthday rewards, sponsor family events, or appear alongside WANDA’s educational content, at what point does the alternative to commercial food marketing become commercial food marketing itself?

WANDA founder Tambra Raye Stevenson describes the aspiration as raising “healthy eaters, conscious readers, and global food citizens.” The middle phrase may ultimately be the most radical. A conscious reader does not merely decipher words. She learns to read the world around the food: Who made this? Who grew it? Why is this character on the package? Who paid for this message? Why does one product appear everywhere? What happened to this food before it reached me? What does my family remember about it?

That is health literacy. It is also civic education.

From consumers to food citizens

The lawsuits documented by The Guardian reveal why this distinction matters. Governments in multiple countries have tried to impose warning labels, taxes, or marketing restrictions. Corporations have repeatedly challenged those efforts, even while publicly describing themselves as partners in improving consumer health. The Aug. 7 commentary by investigative food journalist Felicity Lawrence places the lawsuits within a longer pattern familiar from tobacco and fossil fuels: contest the evidence, emphasize personal responsibility, resist regulation, and prolong the political life of a profitable model.

A consumer is expected to navigate that environment wisely. A food citizen asks who designed the environment in the first place. That shift changes the solutions available to us. Reading nutrition labels remains useful, but food citizenship also means defending the public’s right to meaningful labels. Teaching children to enjoy vegetables matters, but so does limiting marketing designed to undermine that lesson. Celebrating African heritage foods matters, but so do investments that make those foods affordable, available, and economically viable for farmers and entrepreneurs. Parents matter, but schools, healthcare systems, food retailers, technology companies, advertisers, and governments cannot outsource their responsibilities to parents.

And public money matters. Schools, hospitals, childcare centers, government programs, and healthcare institutions collectively purchase enormous quantities of food. Procurement is policy in edible form. A society that tells people to eat well while spending its institutional food dollars in ways that reproduce the opposite environment should not be surprised when education alone produces modest results.

The same is true of digital space. If children increasingly learn, play, socialize, and encounter brands through screens, media literacy should become part of nutrition literacy. Children can learn to identify advertising, sponsorship, influencer persuasion, and AI-generated information alongside learning where carrots or cowpeas grow. The purpose should not be to make young children suspicious of everything. It should be to give them developmentally appropriate agency inside an environment specifically designed to capture their attention.

That agency must eventually extend beyond childhood.

Food citizens can ask school districts how wellness policies are implemented, demand that governments protect children from predatory marketing, support farmers and culturally rooted food businesses, question subsidies that make some ingredients artificially cheap, participate in food-policy councils, and insist that healthcare investments include prevention and food access rather than only treatment after disease emerges.

None of those actions requires abandoning pleasure. The false choice between health and pleasure may itself be one of the modern food system’s most successful stories.

Black food traditions have never been reducible to deprivation. They contain celebration, improvisation, seasoning, hospitality, memory, ritual, migration, grief, resistance, abundance, and joy. The political task is not to return people to an imagined pure past. It is to build a future in which nourishment does not require surrendering convenience, culture, dignity, or delight.

Back at the table, that future can look deceptively ordinary: someone passing a bowl, a child tasting something unfamiliar, an elder explaining where it came from, a family deciding whether they will make it again. But the conditions surrounding that moment are anything but ordinary. Whether that bowl is affordable, whether the food inside it survived the market, whether the child recognizes it, whether a farmer can profit from growing it, whether an advertiser has spent years teaching her to desire something else, and whether her government can regulate that advertiser without being dragged through court are all political questions concealed inside an everyday meal.

We have spent decades teaching families that health begins with personal responsibility. Perhaps the next era of nutrition should begin with collective responsibility: corporations responsible for what they sell and how they sell it, governments responsible for the environments they permit, institutions responsible for what they purchase, and communities empowered to participate in decisions about the food systems that shape their lives.

A healthy democracy should offer more than the freedom to choose among products placed before us. It should give us a meaningful voice in deciding what kind of food world is placed before our children at all.