Commentary

Everywhere we look, our food system is consolidating.

Power is consolidating. Money is consolidating.

As that happens, something else quietly shifts beneath our feet. As consumers, we have fewer real choices. As farmers, we are pushed further away from being price makers and closer to being price takers.

The proposed deal between McCormick & Company and Unilever, with Unilever spinning off its food division and merging it with McCormick, is a clear example. It sits somewhere between a merger and an acquisition, but the outcome is the same. The condiment and spice aisle becomes more consolidated. Ownership concentrates. Even when we think we are supporting different brands, more of that money flows to the same place.

We are watching this pattern repeat across the entire food system. Distribution consolidates. Processing consolidates. Inputs consolidate. At every level, fewer entities hold more control.

This is often framed as efficiency, but it comes at a cost. True competition becomes harder to find. Local resilience weakens. Farmers lose leverage. Consumers lose transparency.

There has also been renewed conversation around McCormick due to lawsuits and online claims. It’s worth clarifying what actually happened. The widely cited $3 million settlement was not for contamination. It was for misleading labeling, specifically the use of “natural” claims on products that allegedly contained synthetic ingredients. Separate lawsuits have alleged heavy metal contamination, but those claims have been contested and, in some cases, dismissed.

In some ways, misleading labeling is more concerning. Contamination can take place through soil conditions and growing environments. Labeling is a human decision.

That said, this is not ultimately about one company. We have used McCormick products ourselves in restaurant settings. They supply at scale, and they offer organic lines. The deeper concern is what happens when consolidation becomes the default structure of our food system.

Because when everything consolidates, power moves upward and outward, away from the people growing the food and the people eating it.

So the question becomes, what do we do about it?

Most of us cannot stop mergers. We cannot rewrite antitrust law from our kitchens. But we are not without agency.

One of the simplest and most overlooked ways to push back is to grow something.

Herbs are the easiest entry point. They do not require acreage. They do not require perfect conditions. A windowsill, a patio, or a small patch of soil is enough.

And herbs are not just flavor. They are medicine and preservation. They are tradition.

Around my own home, we grow basil, lemongrass, oregano, mint, lemon verbena, bay leaf, and rosemary. Many of these are perennials, and even annuals like basil are easy to replant and grow abundantly. Once established, they return year after year or season after season with very little effort. You can harvest them fresh, dry them for later, store them, share them with neighbors, or combine them with salt to create your own seasoned salts. It’s a simple way to step outside of the packaged version of flavor that the modern food system has trained us to depend on.

This is not about rejecting the grocery store entirely. It is about shifting the center of gravity.

Buy from a local farm when you can. Choose organic suppliers when local is not available. Grow what you are able, no matter how small the scale.

Because decentralization does not begin with policy. It begins with participation.

We have grown accustomed to convenience, to walking into a store and accepting whatever is on the shelf. But if we want a different system, we have to be willing to face some inconvenience.

The good news is that these acts are not a burden for long. There is real joy in growing your own food, even in small ways. There is satisfaction in stepping outside the system, even partially.

And if you have land, the opportunity expands. You can grow more than you need. You can share with neighbors. You can create pockets of abundance that ripple outward into your community.

What might seem like a small act, repeated across enough households, becomes something much larger.

We may not be able to stop consolidation at the top. But we can build something different from the ground up.

And it can start with a single pot of herbs on your windowsill.

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