I grew up there and worked at the NB ministry of agriculture before heading to tech.

While Irving does have a chokehold on everything in NB, there's also a lot of agriculture in NB with very little resources to properly regulate. During my time there, small farmers would spray crops with unregulated herbicides/pesticides/fungicides, and even if we reported them, nothing would get done.

The area was also a huge test site for Agent Orange: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/corpora...

People aren't very rich and don't take good care of themselves. The education level is low and most people smoke and the rate of obesity is incredibly high: https://www2.gnb.ca/content/dam/gnb/Departments/h-s/pdf/en/P...

The area is a agricultural wasteland, scoured by repeated glaciation shoving everything down to and including the granite bedrock into the Atlantic. If nutritional value is coming out of something other than a bog or the ocean then someone first added it in as fertilizer.