When most of us think about food, it’s usually a question of how things taste or how they make you feel. Foodies are concerned with their palate and food critics toss around terms like texture, temperature, and presentation.

Behind the taste buds, however, is the wide and shadowy world of food production. The industry is packed with a handful of large companies that aren’t as concerned by every particular culinary experience as they are how to make food grow, both out of the ground, and in popularity. We rarely hear about the inner workings of those companies—names like Pepsi, Kraft, and the biggest food company in the world, Nestle–because of the competition of a $5 trillion global market, according to an