Edible Empire
Planet Pulse Pacific—your go-to podcast for conversations about people and planet—is proud to host a special series: Edible Empire.
As the climate and global health crises intensify, the need for meaningful change has never been more urgent. This six-episode series brings together leading voices from around the world to explore the concept of food imperialism, uncover the hidden social and environmental costs of what we eat, and examine how we can build a more just and sustainable food system.
Join your hosts, Ben Eitelberg and Emma Strutt, alongside special series co-host Dr Neal Haddaway, as they dive into the complex and often unseen world of food—how it is produced, traded, and consumed across the globe. Kelly Allum edits the series.
Edible Empire
Edible Empire: Epilogue
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This is the epilogue of a six-part series on food imperialism. Welcome to Edible Empire, a podcast by Planet Pulse Pacific about the hidden cost of our food.
This episode explores the systemic hidden costs of the global food system by reflecting on the core themes of the Edible Empire series, examining how modern corporate power and historical food imperialism drive global resource extraction and labour exploitation. Hosts Ben, Neal, and Emma look back across the series to dismantle the complex mechanisms that keep consumers blind to the true human and environmental price of the food on their plates.
Welcome to the epilogue episode of our podcast series. As we bring this journey to a close, we return to the questions that started it all: what are the true costs of our food, and who pays them? Can we imagine a fairer world where the food on our plates doesn’t cost the Earth?
This podcast series has traced the hidden links of food imperialism from New Zealand dairy backed by Western Saharan "blood phosphate" to West African palm oil on modern supermarket shelves. Today's food empire is driven by corporate power and annual reports rather than national flags, relying on a playbook of resource extraction and labour exploitation. A few massive multinational corporations dominate the global supply chain, creating an "hourglass squeeze" that exploits both producers and consumers whilst masking the true ecological and human costs of cheap, intensively produced food.
A fairer future demands that we challenge these corporate middlemen and rebuild transparency through concepts like food sovereignty, degrowth, and stronger protections for small-scale farmers and workers. This journey requires reclaiming our relationship with food, moving away from a system that treats the consumer as just another commodity. As several of our wonderful guests noted, our current food system was constructed by humans, meaning that we can be the ones who change it!
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Resources from this episode:
To view all the links to the websites and documents, visit the show notes on our website.
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