Ultra-processed food furore leaves a woolly taste in the mouth
The writer is the FT’s food critic
Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have been having a bad week. Or more to the point, all those people out there gleefully ultra-processing food or investing in the companies that do, have been having an awful couple of years.
Everybody’s down on UPFs, from TV chefs and medics to MPs. It’s the bogeyman of the day. But UPFs aren’t primarily a problem of nutrition, but a matter, first, of language and then of politics.
There’s no doubt about the threat. UPFs will kill us in droves, through pushing up rates of obesity, cancer, heart problems and type 2 diabetes. Yet the terminology used around this reality is rubbish, the descriptions dangerously weak.
I’m eating a sandwich while I type this. Two slices of bread, baked from intensively farmed wheat, then industrially milled in a commercial bakery. There’s butter, made from milk harvested from cows that are, to some degree, genetically fiddled with and probably milked in a robot-operated parlour. The cheddar came in a brick, so is certainly mass-produced, and the pickles were made by the manager of one of my restaurants and her mum in the Czech Republic. The ensemble took weeks and dozens of processes. Is my lunch ultra-processed? Nope.
If, on the other hand, I open a can of Diet Coke, a packet of crisps, a pod of ready-made chicken tikka masala or a jar of pasta sauce with a gurning celebrity on the label . . . it definitely is.
Current working definitions come from the Nova classification that categorises foods “according to the extent and purpose of food processing, rather than in terms of nutrients”. This is recognised by the Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN body, and now accepted pretty much everywhere. There are four classes, culminating in UPFs, which contain ingredients that you couldn’t add at home: unfamiliar chemicals for colouring, sweetening and preserving. The principle culprits are “Chorleywood” process bread (invented in a lab in 1961 to extend shelf life), ready meals, reconstituted meat and almost all breakfast cereals.
Not simple when you’re pushing your trolley around the supermarket. In fact, a lousy, imprecise and unusable bit of language. So where does it get political? Well, in this classification, food often gets more dangerous the more it intersects with business.
We process foods to make them look and taste better and last longer. As soon as this reaches a degree of complexity where every process and ingredient is not clear to the person about to eat it, there is the opportunity, driven by a commercial imperative, to economise and boost profit margins.
One of the simplest practical definitions of an UPF for a busy shopper is heavily marketed products, because marketing costs money. It comes, in the first instance, from economies of scale but inevitably ends with cheaper or artificial ingredients and wonder chemicals. That’s market forces — and combating them would take a political intervention.
The really shocking insight is that, because UPFs are mass-produced and made of the cheapest ingredients, they are the only affordable choice for many, all the more so during a cost of living crisis. More than half the calories consumed by the average person in the UK now come from UPFs.
So the current furore doesn’t represent the discovery of a dangerous new food group or health threat. Instead it reveals the timeless philosophical truth that selling food, possibly the oldest and simplest human transaction, is depressingly zero sum. “Processing” is a continuum from some local artisanal baker, through businesses that preserve or enhance basic foods to companies whose profit endangers the health of millions of consumers. UPF is simply a new way to describe the extreme end of the spectrum.
A political definition is the only useful one here. It might contain unpalatable truths but it’s less woolly and leaves a far better taste in the mouth.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Tim Hayward
