Never-ending process

In recent weeks, there has been a wave of scaremongering in the media on the subject of ultra-processed food. The argument seems superficially plausible, that the further food is removed from its natural state the more nutrition is taken out of it. What is more, such foods are often heavily promoted for commercial gain. But do these arguments really stack up, or do they simply reflect nostalgia for a vanished pre-industrial age?

A key problem is that the net is drawn extremely widely. If you confine your diet to unadulterated fresh ingredients cooked from scratch, and snack on nothing but fresh fruit, then you won’t be eating any processed food. But as soon as you combine ingredients to make a curry or casserole, or bake a cake using flour, sugar and dried fruit, you are processing food to some extent. If this is done by a local artisan butcher or baker, it is one stage further removed from nature.

Move it into a factory, even if the ingredients remain identical, and it is magically transformed into UPF. The definition is drawn extremely widely, and everything ends up being tarred with the same brush. We have already seen campaigns against so-called HFSS foods (high in fat, sugar or salt), which at least has an objective definition, even if while it leads to numerous absurdities. But here everything ends up being demonised, regardless of any consideration of what actually goes into it, or what the process is. Anything that you buy commercially in a ready-made form, whether bread, biscuits, cakes, pies, pizzas, cooked meats, ready meals, breakfast cereal or yogurts, is deemed to be UPF and thus bad for you.

However, in the pre-industrial age, people often ate very restricted diets, and keeping food fresh was a constant challenge. The invention of canning and freezing brought about a huge improvement in the standard of people’s diets, and in the choice of food available to them. The idea that populous modern societies could survive on a system of small-scale artisan or home production of food from fresh ingredients is delusional. If nothing else, it would pose an insurmountable problem for the distribution and storage system. Wouldn’t it make more sense to try to improve the nutritional standards of industrial food rather than claiming everything that comes out of a factory is inherently bad?

Of course, living primarily on crisps and sausage rolls isn’t going to do you much good in the long term but, as often said, there are no bad foods, only bad diets. Eating a few indulgent treats from time to time isn’t really going to cause you much harm, and indeed there are many recorded cases of people maintaining reasonable health over a long period while eating an extremely restricted diet, often stemming from autistic spectrum conditions. The best dietary advice is to eat a wide variety of different food items and not overdo any single category.

There is also a huge amount of snobbery involved in this whole campaign. Anything that is bought in, rather than prepared from scratch, is seen as inferior. This is especially true of hot takeaway meals. Very often, of course, the people doing the judging are those who have servants to do the hard work for them

An ironic aspect of this is that the meat-free alternatives to dishes like burgers and fried fish, which are often portrayed as a “healthier” option, involve much more processing than the original items, so the two agendas find themselves in conflict with each other. And beer is pretty highly-processed, isn’t it? Should we confine our alcohol consumption to products made from natural grape and apple juices spontaneously fermented by wild yeasts?

In reality, the proportion of the food market accounted for by UPF isn’t going to significantly diminish, let alone disappear entirely, but it will always provide a way for those who regard themselves as superior to make ordinary, budget-conscious people feel guilty about their food choices.