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

At first bite, I spotted that something was amiss and called the cook over.

“This is going to sound daft, but can we put some salt on this bacon?”

It turned out that the cook, too, had been sprinkling extra salt on her own bacon roll. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she said, “but it tastes better that way, doesn’t it?”

Bacon is salt pork. Before refrigeration, we used to salt it so it could be hung somewhere dry and cool where it would remain good to eat through most of the winter. Today, we refrigerate bacon, so it doesn’t actually need the salt for preservation. But bacon without salt is just joyless slices of wet pork. I got straight onto the phone with my wholesale butcher. “What the hell’s going on with the bacon?”

“Weird, isn’t it?” he said. “We buy it in, from a specialised processor. But it seems to have changed recently. Y’know, I sometimes sprinkle a bit of extra salt on mine when I’m cooking.”

Bacon without salt is just joyless slices of wet pork

A fortnight and hours of phone time later, I’m talking to a man in Denmark who’s explaining that, yes, they’ve radically reduced the amount of salt in the cure because their customers, the supermarkets, are demanding reductions in salt. It’s still the best-quality pork, he reassured me. “It’s just not as salty… which is better.”

That’s an interesting position and one on which you’ll find most people agreeing, though most are not sure why. There’s a great deal of government advice about salt reduction for producers, retailers and consumers. There are regularly updated schemes, plans and targets. Salt reduction has become firmly part of the public discourse as a general, if non-specific, good. But the medical evidence is nuanced. I’m personally intrigued by a 2013 study that indicates as few as 25 per cent of the population have any sensitivity to sodium when it comes to their blood pressure. Other studies suggest that low-salt diets are as risky for our health as high-salt ones.

According to perceived wisdom, it is an appalling solecism to add salt to a meal in a restaurant. The chef, we are told, has used skill and judgment to season the food and we should accept this. We believe it’s rude to ask for salt, or that it marks a diner as some kind of artless rube, “drenching” his meal with salt because he lacks the refinement of palate to do without. Nico Ladenis, Marco Pierre White and Gordon Ramsay are all reported to have thrown customers out of their restaurants when they asked for salt and, if that’s a myth, it’s one they’re all perfectly proud to stand by.

This has taught us that salt isn’t just a deadly poison but worse, inexcusably naff. If a restaurant puts salt cellars on the table, it might as well hang a sign outside saying “Greasy Spoon”. Here’s where the problems overlap. We know that chefs and food producers are reducing their use of salt across the board — likely catering to that significant proportion of worried consumers who have been convinced that if food tastes perceptibly salty, they will surely die. Yet we also know that, for most of us, food that is less salted simply won’t taste as good.

The reason restaurant food tastes better than yours has always been that they use more butter than you can believe and more salt than you’d dare

This puts me in a variety of interesting positions. As a restaurateur, what the hell am I supposed to do? I’m not going to tell my grill cook to salt the bacon. It’s an open kitchen. Can you imagine what would happen if a customer caught sight of a cook strewing salt over a griddle full of hot pork? They’d be happier to see her sprinkling rat poison. I’ve tried my best with the butchers and their suppliers but nobody is going to be the first to put a load of salt back at their stage of the process either.

As a consumer, I’m incandescent with impotent fury that everything I buy that’s been cooked or prepared by someone else is increasingly gutless. I’m worried that there’s a generation out there that will grow up unaware of how damn good salt makes things taste.

I know that salt is one of the principal weapons in the armoury of evil “ultra-processed food” producers and should be stopped, but I also know the ultimate secret of restaurant cooking — the reason restaurant food tastes better than yours — has always been that they use more butter than you can believe and more salt than you’d dare.

The simple answer, of course, is to remove the stigma and bring back the salt cellar. But until that lucky day, I carry a small vial of salt in the bottom of my bag. I discreetly whip it out in restaurants, so I can correct the seasoning of a chain of confused, misguided and neurotic people without embarrassing anyone. Well, I say “anyone”. Just before Christmas last year, a maître d’ saw it and thought I was using cocaine at the table. I had to explain it wasn’t a Class A drug. It was more enjoyable than that. And far less socially acceptable.

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This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Tim Hayward