Food is power
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Many communities have foods that define them: Los Angeles has tacos, Green River, Utah, has melons, while New Mexico’s Hatch Valley is famous for its green chiles. Historic power dynamics — from colonization to migration — have always influenced how and why people began growing, cooking and consuming these symbolic dishes and crops. Today, these foods and those who prepare, raise and sell them carry cultural power; people travel hundreds of miles to buy a juicy Crenshaw or sweet canary melon from a family-run stand in Green River. And yet the farmers themselves often struggle to stay afloat. They lose access to markets as large companies buy up smaller, locally run grocery stores.
Most grocery stores across the West trace back to a few major corporations. Whether you’re visiting King Soopers in Colorado, Smith’s in Utah or Fred Meyer in Oregon, you’ll find the same Kroger-brand products. The original names of the once-locally owned grocers might remain, but the shops are now just part of one of the nation’s largest grocery corporations.
A handful of companies control the production and distribution of most of our food, and the West plays a leading role in that system. The U.S. headquarters for the world’s largest meatpacker, JBS S.A., is in Greeley, Colorado, while Driscoll’s, the largest berry producer, is headquartered in Watsonville, California. These companies rarely confront the riskiest parts of agribusiness, raising the cows and growing the berries. Instead, they produce, brand and ship them.
This global food system has profound impacts on the West’s farmers, workers and consumers. It’s getting harder for family farms to turn a profit, and those who seek alternatives to the consolidated corporate market must navigate complicated policies and finances in order to sell directly to consumers. Berry-pickers and meatpacking workers — often immigrants — face exploitation and unsafe conditions, with workplace protections varying from state to state.
Meanwhile, food insecurity has increased across the West, and yet Republican-led states, including Utah and Idaho, opted out of a federal summer grocery program for kids last year, in part because of anti-welfare politics.
Beyond its connection to this international system, the West has deeply rooted myths and policies around water and land that create and sustain other layers of power. In the 1800s, settlers stole land from Native people and killed off bison as they drove tens of thousands of cattle westward. Ever since, the cowboy and his glorified cattle have held cultural power that politicians are rarely willing to tarnish.
As “The Big Four” meatpackers have consolidated most of the beef industry, the economic power of ranchers has dwindled. Only 2% of U.S. beef comes from cows that graze on public lands, and yet multigenerational ranching families and large landowners continue to influence and benefit from antiquated federal grazing policies.
Most land in the Eastern U.S. is privately owned, but the federal government owns nearly half of all land in the West. Ranchers graze cows on huge swaths of public lands, paying fees well below the actual cost of managing those lands. Over the past century, grazing policies have changed little even as cows destroyed native vegetation and degraded waterways. State and federal policies often put the health of livestock above that of the region’s arid soils or the lives of large carnivores like wolves and bears.
Ranchers and Big Beef also intersect and overlap with those who control water in the West. Agriculture consumes nearly 80% of the water diverted from the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, primarily to grow alfalfa and other cattle-feed crops. An investigation by ProPublica and The Desert Sun found that most of the water consumed in California’s Imperial Valley goes to just 20 farming families, with one of them using more than the entire metropolitan area of Las Vegas. Only four of those families use the majority of their water rights to grow foods people consume, like broccoli or onions. The rest use their water to grow hay for livestock.
Many of these families have senior water rights, and that increasingly means power in the arid and rapidly growing West. Together with livestock associations, irrigation districts and their political allies, they have sought to influence food and water policy.
Yet in some parts of the West, other interests are gaining power. In the Northwest, years of advocacy from tribes and environmental groups led federal agencies to decommission dams on rivers like the Elwha and Klamath. The farmers might worry about their ability to continue irrigating, but tribes are reclaiming their traditional foodways as salmon return.
And the Northwest’s rivers aren’t the only places where tribes are reasserting their culture and food sovereignty: Indigenous-run restaurants, farms and cooking classes are springing up across the West.
Farmers markets, mutual aid efforts and community gardens are creating new forms of cultural, social and economic power, often led by and benefiting those who are excluded and marginalized, including queer, immigrant and Black farmers. Their efforts encourage people to take back intrinsic food traditions while they act in resistance to the global, capitalist food system.
Still, the corporate structures of our food system are so deeply entrenched that they can be hard to fully comprehend or even notice. In this region, food is power, and that power is not equally shared. Before that can change, however, we need to understand the complexities of this system, tracing its roots to the growth of retail giants and the consolidation of Western agricultural production.
The grocery giants
A handful of powerful corporations dominate the U.S. grocery market. Over the last few decades, these firms have consolidated their control, leaving a shrinking share of the market for local, independent grocers. Grocery giants and their supporters claim that economies of scale enable them to offer lower prices to consumers. But critics say that these conglomerates’ size gives them too much power, not only over their consumers, but also over suppliers and workers.
Corporate consolidation in U.S. grocery
Breaking down the big grocery firms
Walmart & Costco: The West’s superstore empires
SNAP-authorized Walmart & Costco stores in the West
stores, which are owned by Walmart. Store totals
are for the 12 Western states.
The illusion of competition
Confronted by Walmart’s growing power, traditional grocers like Albertsons and Kroger responded with a spate of mergers and acquisitions starting in the early 1990s. Albertsons now owns over 1,300 stores in the West, though few of the shoppers patronizing Safeway and Haggen may realize that those stores are owned by the same firm. In December of 2024, the Federal Trade Commission blocked a proposed merger between Albertsons and Kroger after a number of Western states sued, arguing that it would further limit competition and raise prices for consumers.
Farmers markets — a bright spot in the grocery landscape
The rise in the popularity of farmers markets since the mid-1990s has been a positive counterpoint to the relentless march of corporate consolidation. Nationally, the number of farmers markets more than quadrupled from 1994 to 2019.
Get big or get out: Consolidation in agricultural production
The small family farm holds a special place in the American imagination. Today, however, a modest and diminishing portion of our nation’s food is grown on smallholder farms. Production is shifting to larger-scale factory farms in every Western state and across nearly every commodity.
Production shifts to larger farms
Marked growth for select goods
Giants of agricultural production
Net loss of 600,000 U.S. farms 1982-2022
The trend towards consolidation in the food system has made it increasingly difficult for smaller farmers to compete and stay in business.
Concentration in meatpacking
The meatpacking industry is concentrated to an extraordinary degree, with an estimated 81% of U.S. cattle and 65% of hogs processed by “The Big Four” meatpacking corporations as of 2021. Critics say this market stranglehold gives The Big Four too much control over both ranchers and consumers.
The above hourglass power dynamic is not unique to meatpacking; it’s also conspicuous in the seeds, agricultural chemicals and food retail markets. The concentration of power in these industries allows a handful of companies to dictate prices and production methods, trapping Western consumers in a food system that prioritizes corporate profits over sustainability, diversity and equity.
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