Our Food System Is Broken, Profit Over Health, & Shift After Brutal Shift
Our Food System Is Broken, Profit Over Health, & Shift After Brutal Shift
The food system is busted. Patching it with good intentions is like taping up leaking pipes under a sink at 2:00 am: all you get is wet, broke, and more behind than you started. Walk your line, after midnight, when your team is still scrubbing up splatters, and tell me where the “health” is in what we cook, serve, push. The menu isn’t written with well-being in mind. It’s written for margin. It always has been. It always will be. You wrestle it away with both hands and a ledger of data.
Pull up a P&L, any restaurant will do. Ingredient costs hover, payroll aches, and you pray for enough covers to pay the rent. The food system doesn’t serve health. It serves the highest yield, the longest shelf life, and our “Fill them up, get them out” attitude. Major food corporations admit that public health is a secondary concern. Their core strategy is simple, market what sells, ignore what doesn’t, chase profit until legislation drags them kicking and screaming into compliance¹.
Processed foods are engineered for shelf life, not health². The system drips money for every added gram of sugar or salt. It lobbies to block regulations that could hurt bottom lines. The food industry pushes the government, which lately seems to be giving in, all while consumers wonder why “healthy” costs more and delivers less.
A plate of pasta used to be a meal, and not a dare. Portion sizes in American restaurants have doubled, and sometimes tripled, in the last 20 years³. It’s business. Every oversized entree helps reset the guest’s idea of what is “enough.” We move more product, clock higher check averages, and watch portion control become a thing of the past.
The results? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that millions of cases of food-related illness and chronic disease on these decisions every single year⁴. Menu labeling was meant to help, at 8:45 pm, when table 9 wants more fries, nobody’s counting calories⁹.
Chefs now average almost $84,000 a year⁶. No one talks about the speed at which that salary costs them and the stress it may cause. Restaurant labor markets in 2025 are brutal, with staffing shortages, rising minimum wages, and shrinking margins. Labor costs have soared, so the only way out for many owners is volume. Move more plates per hour. Health gets sacrificed for survival⁷.
Every Friday, our walk-ins overflow. Prep lists replaced by last-minute half-measures. We drown in speed, not quality. It’s no surprise that Yelp now flags restaurants with poor health inspection scores. One alert and our sales drop⁸. Owners hate it. But guests hate getting sick more.
This didn’t happen overnight. The system was designed to push as much food, fast, and cheap². High-margin, highly processed items drive brand growth. The average restaurant guest, in America, now eats out nearly three times a week. A third of their calories from food they didn’t cook⁹.
Those calories? They’re mostly engineered: “Ultra-processed food consumption was linked to a substantially increased risk of at least 32 harmful health outcomes” in a 2024 review².
You can cut corners or raise prices. You can’t do both and survive.” Menu price hikes in 2025 aren’t greedy. They’re reality. Labor costs are up, products are more expensive, and artificial lows on unhealthy options make it twice as hard to sell a salad versus a loaded burger⁷.
What To Do?
Audit Every Ingredient: Local, in-season produce, it’s fresh, resilient, and cuts waste from spoilage¹⁰.
Standardize Portions: Smaller, transparent portions reduce calorie intake by up to 30%, and nobody leaves hungrier⁵.
Menu Changes Are Not For Cowards: More whole foods, more veg, less ultra-processed anything¹¹. Every plant-based swap is a stand against the trash heap our system builds.
Empower and Train Your Team: Health and sustainability come from the bottom up. Think from our line cooks, servers, and bartenders, but not the boardroom. Offer to help improve skills and cross-train. Give people a path to stay, not bolt for a dollar more down the street.
Talk About It: Don’t let healthful changes hide in the fine print. Push them on the menu. Put providers’ names next to dishes. Own your choices. The pressure is fierce, but the wins are real. Sustainable changes mean repeat guests, less waste, and higher average tickets when diners trust you.
The industry, the food system, isn’t here for your comfort. It’s demanding, indifferent, cold steel under your skin, until you claim it for yourself and your community.
Start with one menu item. Commit to one portion size. Use great seasonally fresh ingredients. The rest, you build, one shift at a time, sweating side by side with your team, until health and profit look less like rivals and more like partners. No one else is coming to save you.
#RestaurantLife #BackOfHouse #KitchenConfidential #HospitalityLeadership #FoodService
Footnotes
¹ Mialon M, Swinburn B, Sacks G. (2023). Big Food’s ambivalence: seeking profit and responsibility for health. U.S. National Library of Medicine.
² Monteiro CA, et al. (2024). Ultra-processed food and multiple health outcomes: umbrella review. BMJ.
³ National Institutes of Health (NIH). (2023). Portion Distortion. NHLBI.
⁴ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2024). Chronic Disease in America Report.
⁵ National Consumers League. (2024). Standardized Portion Sizes to Curb Obesity.
⁶ Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Occupational Employment and Wages: Chefs and Head Cooks.
⁷ National Restaurant Association. (2025). 2025 State of the Restaurant Industry Report.
⁸ Fast Company. (2024). Yelp’s Restaurant Health Score Feature Could Kill Sales—Here’s Why.
⁹ USDA. (2024). What We Eat in America.
¹⁰ Nutritics. (2024). 10 Sustainable Practices to Implement in Your Restaurant.
¹¹ GloriaFood. (2024). Sustainability and Plant-Focused Menus: Why Restaurants Are Shifting.