Thin Ink is 5 years old this week 🎂
I marked it with a light-ish anniversary newsletter looking back (and a bit forward).
I reflect on how food systems thinking has gone mainstream (kind of) and what I’ve learned from publishing 242 issues 😅
I also share what I want to cover more: food as commons, procurement, food environments, more guest voices, & stories og change.
If you’ve read Thin Ink at any point over the past five years - thank you. If you haven’t, this is a decent place to jump in 👇
/p/thin-ink-is-5
📣 New Thin Ink is out, and this week's felt particularly connected — four different reports, but one thread running through all of them: how much of the mess we're in was deliberately built.
🥤🍬 🚬 There's a new analysis comparing ultraprocessed foods and cigarettes. Not just as a loose metaphor, but mechanistically — same dose optimisation, same engineered "moreishness," same health-washing tactics.
👩🏻🍳 Then there's a thoughtful commentary asking us to consider the gender dimension when regulating UPFs. The data on "foodwork" - domestic food preparation, procurement, and planning - shows women around the world are disproportionately responsible for this. Regulation that ignores this just moves the burden around.
💥 Also in this edition: what countries can do right now to protect their food systems from geopolitical shocks — with some surprisingly effective real-world examples — and a forensic look at greenwashing in meat and dairy that found 98% of environmental claims from 33 major companies showed indicators of greenwashing.
/p/from-food-shocks-to-foodwork
I'll be honest: the first time I heard the term "political economy," I had no idea what it meant. That was the summer of 2022 in Sacramento.
A veteran food and agriculture expert was explaining why smallholder farmers couldn't compete with mega-farms. I asked whether anyone had looked into antitrust policy to level the playing field. The answer floored me: "Oh, that's a political economy issue... We don't do this, partly because of capacity."
I heard variations of that same thing throughout the trip. Everyone agreed the system was skewed. Almost no one wanted to talk about who skewed it, and why.
I've been thinking about that ever since, and using the term at every opportunity — most recently at the Skoll World Forum, where I was again struck by how many brilliant, motivated people found it to be a new concept.
So this week's Thin Ink is my attempt to explain why I think political economy is one of the most useful lenses we have for understanding food systems and why we urgently need more people, especially journalists, to use it.
Because using it helps us answer these uncomfortable questions:
🌾 Why do a handful of corporations control seeds, grain trade, and supermarket shelves — and how did we get here?
🍽️ We produce enough staples for everyone, including in my home country, Myanmar. So why are is a third of children there stunted?
💰 Who is paying the bill for the hidden costs of our food system — on health, environment, and society — that are estimated at $10 trillion a year?
Political economy, at its core, is about three questions: who has the power, who wields it, and how does it affect the rest of us?
🗳️ When people say they're "not interested in politics," I think of some of my high school classmates who said the same, while growing up in an isolated, military dictatorship. They could afford to ignore politics because their families had the power to insulate them from it. Most people in the world don't have that luxury.
/p/the-political-economy-of-your-dinner
The world produces enough staples and calories to feed everyone. That's not a contested fact. So why did more than 1 in 5 people across 47 countries face acute hunger last year? And why does that number keep rising?
The latest issue of Thin Ink digs into four new reports that together paint a sobering picture — not of a food production failure, but of systemic failures in how we grow, distribute, finance, and protect food.
🌾 The problem isn't calories. It's diversity, access, and affordability. Our obsession with yields and a handful of staple crops has left almost every country in the world struggling with some form of malnutrition — while 80% of agriculture and food security projects screened by the OECD didn't even target nutrition.
🌡️ Extreme heat is now a systemic threat to food production. Crop yields for maize and wheat are already declining per degree of warming. Nearly half the world's cattle could face dangerous heat by 2100. Agricultural workers are 35 times more likely to die from occupational heat exposure than other workers. The feedback loops are deeply worrying.
📉 Food crises are worsening and our ability to measure them is shrinking. Last year saw the lowest number of countries with adequate food insecurity data in a decade, largely due to funding cuts and restricted access. We are increasingly flying blind.
💰 And then there's the financial system. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the actual shortfall in global grain exports was estimated to be less than 1% of the global crop. Yet wheat prices still spiked 50% in a single month, as hedge funds and commodity traders piled into futures markets. 122 million more people were pushed into hunger. Traders made $1.9 billion in the first three months of 2022 alone.
Full issue 👇
/p/on-hunger-heat-and-markets-making
I spent this past week in Oxford at the Skoll World Forum—my first time there—and it was… a lot.
A whirlwind of panels, side events, side-side events, and conversations with people building impressive, often life-changing things.
Me? I have a lot of opinions and statistics about our food systems, but very little else. Still, I was heartened that pretty much everyone I spoke to was shocked when I told them about food systems’ contribution to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the roots of the latest fertiliser crisis, and why food security isn’t just about availability.
It was a good reminder to never assume that the nitty gritty of food systems is widely understood, even among very smart, very motivated people.
I also learnt a few lessons from moderating a panel on women farmers (the reason I was at the event), and why “organise first” might still be the most radical idea in the room.
In Oxford next Thursday? Come listen to insights from these awesome women or join online if cannot make it in person.
Looking forward to moderating the session.
#skollwf
🥘🍳🔥 Why do we have laws protecting cultural heritage like art and architecture during war but not food? Isn't food, especially the kind cooked at home, a form of culture worth protecting, comparable to a manuscript or a monument?
♨ That's the argument Michael Shaikh, a friend, a former human rights investigator, and now an author, made in his beautiful, inspiring, and enraging book The Last Sweet Bite.
💥💣🚀 It tackles a difficult subject: the erasure of culinary traditions through state violence, including genocide. But it does so with a lightness of touch that keeps you reading.
🌏 It moves across places and histories: from the Czech Republic to Rohingya communities to the Uyghurs to New Mexico, showing how food cultures are reshaped or lost under pressure.
🍛 I spoke to Mike for this week's Thin Ink about the urgent need to protect our food cultures, not as something to preserve unchanged, but as something that carries history, identity, and meaning.
🌏 @thinink is bringing the power of storytelling to the Oslo Freedom Forum!
Born and raised in Burma, the award-winning multimedia journalist with two decades of reporting experience across Asia, Africa, and Europe joins us this June in Oslo, Norway, drawing on her work establishing Myanmar Now and co-founding The Kite Tales to share insights on documenting lived experiences.
