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There is a conundrum that big companies, try as they might, can't get around: As a business grows, it does more harm to the environment.

Food producers are doing relatively well thanks to recent declines in commodity and fuel prices. Many grocers, however, are struggling as suppliers hesitate to pass their lower costs on to them and to consumers.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that retailers are putting "pressure" on their suppliers to lower prices. What kind of pressure, beyond pleading, the Journal doesn't say.

Falling commodity prices are already helping some food producers boost profits. On Wednesday, both Kraft and Kellogg posted quarterly profits that were better than Wall Street analysts expected.

The creators of the "Smart Choices" product label, which gives calorie counts and is affixed to food items that meet certain nutritional standards, on Monday revealed the details of their criteria for which products will earn the label.

At first blush, the article published by SeekingAlpha and written by an equities researcher who believes that corn is the new tobacco and will similarly fall out of favor comes off like a screed that is so wide-ranging and speculative as to be nearly meaningless.

Many of the biggest food producers and grocers, along with nutritionists, have teamed up to devise a new food label that will identify some products as "Smart Choices" and will give calorie counts and serving sizes in big, bold type.

That's good. But we won't know until at least Monday just how "smart" those choices will actually be.

McDonald's major push into the coffee business has drawn a lot of criticism. The chain's plans to install coffee bars in its franchises, a frontal assault on Starbucks, would "alienate customers, confuse its menu and open up a black hole for capital," wrote Fast Company's Chris Dannen in January.

Teenage girls and young women in Japan, obsessed with that nation's latest silly diet fad, have caused a shortage of bananas.

The "Morning Banana Diet" has caused Dole Japan to boost its imports by more than 25 percent, but it's still hard to find the elongated yellow fruit in Japanese stores.

"Glory Days Fade for U.S. Farmers," declares the headline on a Wall Street Journal article Wednesday. But within the article itself are indications that the glory days may continue for some time to come.

Prices of corn and soybeans have fallen by half since midsummer, while other food crops have dropped as well. Meanwhile, farmers' costs, particularly of seed and fertilizer, have continued to rise.

Under pressure, makers of breakfast cereals aimed at kids are reducing sugar in some of their products, but in many cases they are raising the amount of salt to improve flavor and keep the kiddies hooked, according to a new report (pdf), "Cereal Offenses," from Consumer's International.

That's bad enough, but the report makes it clear the promises of cereal makers to reduce sugar content in many cases amount to little more than public relations.

Hormel won't release its third-quarter results until Nov. 25, so we probably won't know until then precisely why it cut its earnings outlook for the year on Monday.

Prices of food commodities have plummeted recently by an average of 50 percent from the highs they reached over the summer. Will that mean lower prices at the grocery store?

Of course not. "People still need to eat. I don't know how else to say it," said Joseph Victor, vice president of marketing at the commodity research company Allendale, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

So far, Hershey has been able to pass its rising ingredient costs along to consumers by raising prices -- or selling smaller chocolate bars at the same price. The company reported Thursday that its third-quarter earnings nearly doubled.

"Tap Water's Popularity Forces Pepsi To Cut Jobs," overstated the New York Times' account of PepsiCo's weak earnings report and its announcement that it would cut 3,300 jobs. Bottled-water sales are faltering in the United States. At Pepsi, they led the way in terms of weakening the company's profits. But pretty much all of Pepsi's bottled drinks, from the flagship cola beverage to Tropicana juice products, saw U.S. sales decline in the third quarter.

Like its rival PepsiCo, Coca-Cola is dealing with slack demand for beverages in the North American market. But much more so than Pepsi, Coke has massive overseas investments that are paying off handsomely, more than offsetting its losses at home. Coke posted a 14 percent increase in third-quarter profits on Wednesday, nearly all of it coming from foreign markets.

Earnings season so far is looking grim for the food industry, particularly among buyers of ingredients. Domino's shares have fallen a breathtaking (even in the current market) 29 percent so far on Tuesday on bad earnings news. PepsiCo reported that profits fell by 9.6 percent in its third quarter. Grocer Supervalu's profits were down 14 percent, thanks to its perhaps ill-advised attempts to keep prices down.

As it unveiled a new marketing push for its core soft-drink business last week, PepsiCo gave a hint that its third-quarter results might not look too good. And they don't. The company on Tuesday reported that profits tumbled 9.6 percent and announced that it would cut 3,300 jobs.

If the market has indeed bottomed out, look for gains among the stocks of some packaged-food producers, say the analysts at Credit Suisse. That assumes that the recession will deepen even as the stock market evens out. As consumers increasingly eat at home to save money, sales of packaged foods should rise, the analysts said in a note Monday. In fact, that's already happening.

Sadly, Michael Pollan's open letter to Barack Obama (OK, it's actually addressed to the “president-elect”) is likely to stay at the bottom of the new chief executive's memo pile for some time, given the several seemingly more immediate crises he will be dealing with.

Any way you look at it, things look grim for Ruby Tuesday. The casual-restaurant chain reported on Wednesday that its profits declined 97 percent in its fiscal first quarter. It is saddled with $857 million in debt. Like all of its competitors, it is dealing with sinking demand and rising costs of labor and ingredients.

Just two weeks ago, Canada's Clearwater Seafoods got the go-ahead from shareholders to go private. At that point, which seems so long ago now, nobody knew how bad the banking crisis really was or that banks in Iceland (Iceland!) would be among the hardest hit.

Now Clearwater says the deal is "delayed" because control of Iceland's Glitnir Bank, which had agreed to take part in the financing, has been seized by the national government.

John McCain and Sarah Palin may be less certain of this truism lately, but negative campaigning sometimes works.

In response to Campbell Soup's ad campaign mocking rival Progresso for using MSG in some of its soups, Progresso owner General Mills announced on Wednesday that it no longer will include the ingredient in any of its 80 soup varieties.

Tilman Fertitta, CEO of Landry's Restaurants, has finally admitted something that investors figured out weeks and even months ago: His $415 million buyout bid for the company was ridiculously high.

Fertitta has told his board that the bid is in jeopardy because getting it financed will be next to impossible.

"Mortgages," according to a major British company, are looking quite attractive as a line of business."

There are several layers of mystery to this declaration, which was made just last week. It would sound odd coming from any company. It sounds odder still coming, as it does, from Tesco, a big supermarket chain.

Given the credit crisis, InBev's acquisition of Anheuser-Busch might be one of the last huge mergers for a while. The deal has solid financing behind it—highly unusual in the current climate—and debt isn't likely to be a big problem for the combined companies.

But that doesn't mean things will be easy. As the companies work to make their huge and disparate operations work together, they are facing increasing costs and softening demand in key markets.