Letter to the Editor: Broadline distributors are not responsible for declining nutrition

The following is a letter to the editor and reflects the authors’ views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click here.

Angela Bahna’s Thursday column, “Students need to know where their food comes from,” asserts that the market dominance of broadline distributors like Sysco has “likely contributed” to a decline in food nutrition. That claim is unsupported, and it misinforms readers about what the research she cites actually shows.

The column offers no evidence that distributors play any role in declining food nutrition. Its source, a 2024 review in the journal Foods, rather attributes this decline mainly to how crops are grown and bred. It never mentions distributors, food service, or market concentration. Bahna also does not provide a well-substantiated mechanism by which such an effect would be observed in the first place.

Also, the column’s main example of a product from Sysco — pre-made scrambled eggs — does not support the author’s claim.

According to the product’s label and USDA reference data, Sysco’s pre-made scrambled eggs have nearly the same calories, protein, fat, and minerals as ordinary scrambled eggs. Further, the author criticizes the “seven additional ingredients” in Sysco’s eggs. However, a longer ingredients list doesn’t necessarily mean that a food is bad. The only meaningful difference is added sodium. Considering the list of added ingredients, that appears to come from added salt, roughly at the amount you’d use when cooking eggs at home.

While food nutrition is indeed declining, broadline distributors are not the primary culprit — and we should make sure to be honest about that fact.

Benjamin Garcia de Figueirdo is a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics. He can be reached at bg0729[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.