The Enshittification of Big Food
A digital-economy idea explains why the food on your shelf keeps getting worse
In 1990, McDonald’s gave in to public pressure and replaced beef tallow with vegetable oil in its fryers. The vegetable oil contained partially hydrogenated fat. Trans fats turned out to be more dangerous than the saturated fat they replaced, and by the late 1990s they were estimated to cause around 50,000 premature deaths a year in the United States. A McDonald’s meal in 1982 contained 2.4 grams of trans fat. By 1992, the same meal contained 19.2 grams.
The biochemist Fred Kummerow had warned about this in 1957, in a paper in Science showing trans fats in every diseased artery he examined. The American Heart Association printed 150,000 copies of a warning in 1968, then destroyed every copy under pressure from margarine industry lobbyists. The FDA didn’t get trans fats out of the food supply until 2015. Kummerow sued the agency at age 98 to force the issue, and died at 102.
The replacement was worse than the original, and everyone who needed to know, knew. The people running the food companies were not doing anything irrational. They were operators inside an incentive system that rewarded cheaper, more shelf-stable substitutes and punished anyone who paid more for raw materials than the competition. The system, not the operators, is the story.
A Useful Word From The Internet
In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow gave a name to a pattern he had been watching unfold across the internet. He called it enshittification. The word is ugly on purpose. He was describing how digital platforms get worse over time, in a way that isn’t random and isn’t a mistake.
The pattern goes like this. A new platform shows up and is genuinely good. Facebook shows you posts from your friends. Amazon has the lowest prices and ships fast. Google gives you the best search result at the top. The platform is good because it needs you. It is buying your loyalty.
Then, once you are locked in, the platform stops being good to you and starts being good to the businesses that pay it. Your Facebook feed fills up with posts from pages you never followed. Amazon search results are mostly ads. Google’s first page is sponsored. The platform is still useful enough that you stay, but the experience is worse. The value is being pulled out of the user side and pushed toward the advertiser side.
In the third stage, the platform stops being good to the businesses too. It squeezes them on fees and rankings, because by then both sides are stuck. Anyone who has tried to leave Amazon as a seller, or get reach on Facebook as a brand, knows this part. The platform is now bad for almost everyone using it, and still extremely profitable, because everyone is too tangled up to leave.
Doctorow’s point is that this is the strategy working as designed. A public company that doesn’t grind more margin out of a captive audience loses to one that does. The better the product was at the start, the more loyalty there is to monetize on the way down.
I think packaged food has been running this same play for a hundred years, just slower.
A Century of Cheaper Substitutes
The 1876 Heinz ketchup recipe was tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, salt, onion, and a spice blend. Coca-Cola in 1886 was cane sugar and an extract sold from a soda fountain in Atlanta. Hellmann’s mayonnaise in 1905 was eggs, oil, vinegar, and seasoning, mixed by hand at a New York deli. The Oreo in 1912 was flour, sugar, lard, cocoa, and vanilla. The Big Mac in 1967 was beef, bun, cheese, lettuce, onion, pickles, and a mayonnaise-based sauce.
Those short ingredient lists existed because the technology to make cheaper functional substitutes mostly didn’t exist yet. High fructose corn syrup wasn’t industrially viable until the 1970s. Modified food starches and protein isolates were either decades away or available only at scales too small to matter. Most of these companies were also privately held or founder-run, so quarterly earnings pressure wasn’t yet the only thing the business answered to.
In 1974, sugar prices spiked. Coca-Cola began replacing cane sugar with high fructose corn syrup. By November 1984, Coke and Pepsi had jointly completed the transition. They were responding to a price differential the federal government had spent the previous decade engineering: New Deal-era set-aside payments to farmers had been killed off, the 1973 Farm Bill had institutionalized direct payments that drove chronic corn overproduction, and sugar import quotas kept domestic sugar prices around 25 cents a pound while world prices sat near 7. Today, bulk corn syrup runs about 35 cents a pound. Refined sugar runs $1.01.
The same logic operates at smaller scales across every aisle. Butter gets replaced by margarine, then margarine gets replaced by cheaper processed vegetable oils. Real vanilla gets replaced by vanillin. Whole milk solids get replaced by milk protein concentrate. Each substitution is individually defensible inside a procurement spreadsheet. Cumulatively, they produce food with the shape of the original and almost none of its content.
The food version of this story diverges from the digital one in one specific place: the customer’s tongue. Coke didn’t lose drinkers when it switched to corn syrup. A whole generation grew up on the new version, and the new version is what their brains learned cola was supposed to taste like. The cheaper formulation didn’t just survive the swap. It became the reference point. By the time anyone tried to sell a cane-sugar Coke back to Americans, it tasted off to most of them. The substitute had become the original.
From Cereal to Cornstarch
Before there was a substitution economy in soda, there was breakfast cereal. Corn flakes, puffed wheat, the whole enriched, extruded, sugar-glazed catalog the postwar grocery aisle was built around. Cereal is the original sin of this whole arc, because cereal was where Big Food learned that you could industrialize a grain into a shelf-stable shape, fortify it back to barely meeting a nutrition label, print “whole grain” on the box, and sell it as a wholesome family breakfast for a hundred years. There is nothing whole about a Frosted Flake. The grain has been milled, cooked, extruded, dried, sprayed with sugar, and stamped into a flake. What survives is the silhouette of food and the marketing language of food, with most of the actual food removed.
That template, perfected on cereal, then got applied to almost every other category. Yogurt got the cereal treatment. Bread got it. Snacks got it. Eventually entire meals got it. We are still inside the consequences of the cereal precedent, and the reason we are now stuck having a public debate about ultra-processed food at all is that the cereal-style product, the one with the shape and marketing of a real food and almost none of its substance, finally metastasized into the majority of the calories most Americans eat. The UPF debate is not new. It is the original con catching up with us.
The sharpest recent example of how the trick keeps refining itself is what happened to Annie’s. In 2014, General Mills bought Annie’s Homegrown for $820 million. Annie’s had built its whole brand on being the un-Kraft: organic pasta, real cheddar, butter, milk, a back-of-box ingredient list that read like a recipe. Parents paid a premium for it. For about a decade after the acquisition, that mostly held.
In September 2025, General Mills announced what its press release called a “delightful upgrade” to Annie’s Classic Shells & White Cheddar, with “even more ooey gooey real cheese.” What the press release did not mention, and what Retail Brew caught by comparing labels, was that butter and nonfat milk had been removed and replaced with cornstarch. The new version has 22 percent less protein and 18 percent less calcium. Asked why, General Mills declined to answer, saying only that the new recipe had been “well received overall.”
The cornstarch swap works because mac and cheese is, at heart, a textural product. The cling and thickness of the sauce on the pasta is most of the eating experience. Butter and milk used to do that work and bring some actual nutrition along with them. Cornstarch can do the texture alone, more cheaply, by thickening the sauce as it cooks. The customer keeps eating. General Mills keeps the difference.
This is the third stage of the Doctorow arc, applied to a box of pasta. The brand built loyalty on a promise. Once the loyalty was reliable, the promise got cheaper to keep.
What This Actually Costs
The trans fat story already told us the price of leaving this system to run on its own incentives. Fifty thousand premature deaths a year, for decades, while the warning sat in a drawer. The cereal aisle taught a country that an extruded grain product sprayed with sugar was a wholesome way to start the day. The cornstarch Annie’s is the same machinery, smaller scale, friendlier branding. Different generations, same play.
And the rewriting isn’t only happening on the tongue. It’s happening in how people think about food at all. We are now in a world where a brick of silly putty in a gold foil wrapper gets sold as a smarter source of protein than a piece of well-raised meat. Where an ultra-processed patty engineered to bleed is positioned as a more virtuous dinner than a bowl of rice and beans. Where a small scoop of real ice cream is treated as the dietary failure, and a whole pint of “zero sugar” novelty loaded with synthetic sweeteners and gums is treated as the win. None of that is nutrition. It is marketing dressed up as nutrition, and a generation has been trained to mistake one for the other.
That is the part that gets to me. Not that Big Food cuts corners. Of course it does. The system pays it to. What gets me is that the corner-cutting compounds inside our children’s mouths and inside their heads, and by the time anyone notices, the better version of the food tastes wrong and the simpler version of the meal sounds naive. Regulation can pull a poison off the shelf. It cannot give a generation back the tongue they would have had, or the common sense.
I do not think this is hopeless, and I do not think cornstarch has won. I know the people making real food. I have spent years around the farmers, ranchers, dairy operators, fermenters, bakers, regional brands, and chefs who are putting better products on shelves and tables every year. Some of them are growing. A few are scaling. The clean-label movement of the 2010s did not deliver on every promise it made, but it permanently raised the floor on what a serious eater expects from a label, and it created customers who can taste the difference. That is real, and it is more than the system was built to allow.
What I will not do is pretend the score is even. The incumbents still own most of the calories, most of the shelf space, most of the marketing budgets, and, more than anything, most of the palates. The people building the alternative are doing it against a tongue and a culture that the substitution economy spent a century training. Winning that fight is going to take better food, better stories, and a generation of eaters willing to be re-trained on what real tastes like. It is doable. It is not done. Anyone who tells you we are ahead is selling you something, probably in a gold foil wrapper.
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Mike Lee is a food futurist and innovation strategist, author of Mise: On the Future of Food, host of The Tomorrow Today Show podcast, creator of Mise Futures, and is on Instagram at The Book of Mise.