The Truth About Ultra-Processed Foods - Part 3
The Truth About Ultra-Processed Foods - Part 3
Who Gets To Reimagine The Food System?
Over the past two weeks we have been exploring the vague and sometimes confusing way we categorise ultra-processed foods, and how the media demonisation of these foods has leapfrogged the science.
My intention with this series was to bring some balance and nuance to these conversations, and offer some perspectives that are missing. Here’s where we’re at:
While I think we all instinctively understand that subsisting entirely on Quavers would compromise our wellbeing, many everyday foods are ultra-processed and can be an important source of nutrition. For example, fortified breakfast cereals can help kids meet their iron requirements, and half a tin of baked beans is a good source of fibre and protein and counts as one of our 5-a-day. And while there are associations between higher ultra-processed food intake in our diets and poorer health outcomes, it’s difficult to establish cause and effect and tease out dietary factors from other social and structural determinants of health. We have yet to establish what constitutes ‘a little’ and what is considered ‘a lot’ of UPF in the diet. And, there’s significant variability between foods that are all lumped under the same ultra-processed barrier.
That is all to say that there’s a lot we still don’t know. And a lot of conjecture from food elites about how removing UPF from our diets would help us return to a simpler time, when people ate seasonally and locally, in a way that would be both better for us and for the planet. This is clear in the ubiquitous and reductive advice ‘don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food,’ popularised by Michael Pollan. Not only is this deeply insulting to great-grandmothers all over the world, it minimises how much work it was for your great-grandmother just to have something to eat. That without your great-grandmother's labour, skills, and knowledge, nobody would eat anything (rural households in the UK in the 1940s grew 92-98% of their own fruit and vegetables).
Food elites evoke the fantasy of great-grandma, without acknowledging just how essential her unpaid labour was, nor how she felt about doing it. It also glosses over how monotonous, and sometimes nutritionally inadequate these diets were, with calcium and riboflavin (a B vitamin), being particularly low in the diets of pre-war Great Britain. As with today, working class people were even more at risk of deficiencies (because of structural inequity) in particular vitamin A, B1, and C, plus iron, calcium and riboflavin - many of which are added to fortified foods now.
Indeed, as soon as they were available, women embraced the technological advances that made food work less laborious. ‘As more families were able to buy fridges and freezers in the 1970s, the popularity of convenience food reached a new level and by the end of the decade, almost all families across the country (95%) owned a fridge,’ revealed a 2016 report examining family food trends dating back to the 1940s. The report also cites that the rise of frozen foods, ready meals, and takeaways coincided with women entering paid employment - indicating that women, of course, are responsible for the undoing of the UK’s diet and minimising the double-burden of work that many women now face, inside and outside of the home.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s clear that our food system is neither sustainable, nor is it equitable. Food production is responsible for around ¼ of global greenhouse gas emissions. Of those greenhouse gases - just over half (around 53%) is attributable to animal agriculture (see chart below). The supply chain - i.e. food processing, packaging, transportation and retail, a lot of what we associate with UPFs - makes up about 18%.
I am not any kind of authority on the environmental impacts of the food system but even from my limited perspective, it’s really fucking complicated.
While it may seem obvious that UPF is the culprit for environmental devastation - and certainly that is the claim that is being made by folks with books to sell - my read on things is maybe more nuanced. UPFs are implicated in environmental destruction because they rely on practices like large-scale mono-culture farming, deforestation, and contribute to biodiversity loss. Manufacture and distribution of UPFs require significant energy inputs that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and waste. And finally, ‘UPFs rely on large multinational supply chains which are likely to result in transport, waste and packaging-related environmental degradation’.
There are a few problems here. First of all, the evidence base on UPFs and environmental impact is much smaller than just total food systems, particularly animal agriculture, and environmental impact, making it hard to tease apart what is a byproduct of industrial agriculture per se, versus the contribution made by UPFs.
Secondly, most of the evidence base seems to be concentrated to Minority World countries (Australia, Europe, USA), which tells us little about Majority World land and populations who are more likely to be exploited.
And lastly how ‘bad’ UPFs are for the environment depends a lot on which metric you’re looking at.So depending on how you slice the evidence - land use, water use, fertiliser and herbicide use, eutrophication, energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and so on, you can get a more complex picture. If we look at the few studies that have interrogated UPFs, land-use and land-related impacts are mostly driven by processed meats as opposed to plant-based foods (soy and palm oil being notable exceptions, which are both associated with tropical deforestation and loss of biodiversity). Whereas plant-based UPF land-use makes up around 1-7% of diet-related plant use - a relatively small contribution.
But if the metric we’re interested in is biodiversity loss, the commodities that are associated with the highest extinction rate of species per kg were lamb, followed by cocoa, vegetable oil, coffee, and nuts - the latter four of which are common ingredients in UPFs and drinks. However, grains have the lowest extinction rate of species /kg and are also used in UPFs like cereals, bread, cookies, and so on.
Eutrophication is the result of over-use of nitrogen and phosphorus-based fertilisers in agriculture. The influx of nutrients in waterways causes disruption to the delicate balance of ecosystems and can cause issues like algae blooms that in turn raise the pH of water and can harm plant and animal life.
Interestingly, a Swedish study from 2017 found that European consumption of pre-prepared meals was among the lowest contributors to eutrophication in a representative study of 17 commonly consumed foods in Europe. Animal products, such as milk, butter and meats, had higher eutrophication potentials.
Then again, if we look at greenhouse gases (GHGs), we see that UPFs make up a high proportion of dietary GHGs when compared to other groups of foods. In a series of Australian studies from 2016-17, they found that UPFs contributed between 27-35% of GHG emissions. Within that however, the biggest contributors to dietary GHGs were ‘processed meats’ or ‘processed meat, burgers, tacos, pizza’. When meats were excluded from the analysis, as they were in a European study, the percentage contribution to GHGs decreased to 7-18% off dietary GHG emissions.
But the fact that animal-based foods contribute more to GHGs and other metrics of environmental destruction is hardly a news-flash, nor am I here to tell you what to eat or judge you for your food choices. I’m not into food shaming, and this is a systems issue, not an individual one.
Last thing on the environmental stuff; we can also look at food waste - food loss and waste is higher among minimally processed foods, likely because of the use of preservatives that help extend shelf-life of UPFs. And let’s be real, most environmentalists would advocate for less food waste. Over on
- Hannah Ritchie detailed how her microwave ready-meal lunch and avocados shipped from Mexico are the most environmentally friendly option for her - someone who pores over these data for a living. As she explains, many assume that eating locally is essential to a low-carbon diet, but transport only makes up around 6% of carbon emissions in the food system, and most of that is made up of national, rather than international transport.That’s not to say there aren’t other reasons we might want to be more connected to our local food system. Having relationships with the land, the people who grow our food, the seasons, understanding local plants, learning animal husbandry and being closer to nature may all be really important values to you. These are not captured in the data. And while, personally, I think a relationship with food, animals, and the land is a human right, I understand that, in late-stage capitalism, this is an enormous privilege.
captured this tension perfectly in a recent interview about raising backyard chickens.‘I want to talk about a fundamental tension in the world of backyard chickens — but also just hobby farming in general. I find that there’s a real eagerness to highlight the difference between people who raise chickens (or any sort of livestock), plant vegetable gardens, farm honey, or other types of subsistence or near-subsistence farming because they have to (e.g., if they didn’t do this, their family wouldn’t have to eat) and those who farm and raise animals as a “diversion,” or as their way of feeling better about “eating local” amidst the continued expansion of industrial poultry practices.
And while I think there are crucial differences between the way people approach and conceive of both (starting but not ending with the fact that the former saves money and the latter often loses money)....I also think a strict separation loses some of the complexity of why people do, well, anything.’
(Although this isn’t specifically related to UPF, I think it’s an interesting chart nonetheless).
Big Food and industrial agriculture, may, in some ways, be more sustainable and efficient than a fragmented, hyper-local food system. But, critically, sustainability in and of itself, says nothing about how just or equitable a food system is. Most, if not all, of the gains in efficiency and reduced carbon emissions come at a cost. Producing food for profit means that somewhere in the system there is exploitation and domination. Of land. Of animals. Of people.
The Minority World dominating and exploiting the Majority World.
This applies across the board, not just to UPF. Milk, eggs, meat, fish, grain, vegetables, fruit, may be ‘unprocessed’, but that does not mean they are ethically produced. Afterall, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
Even in the UK, where there is the assumption that farm workers, those who pick fruits and vegetables in the summer and early autumn months, enjoy the same protections as someone working at, say, Aldi or Asda. Farm workers are often temporary migrant workers from Eastern European countries. They are considered disposable to the companies who bring them over for their cheap labour. A recent investigation from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that ‘workers are often housed in unsafe and unsanitary conditions and with fewer protections than ordinary tenants – all allowed by loopholes in the rules’. Indeed ‘British Farms Run on Exploitation’. And all over the world, the impacts of climate change are showing up in the bodies of farmworkers.
Here in the UK, the Government’s 2020-21 National Food Strategy for England has been criticised for failing to highlight the issues of exploitation, deregulation, debt and abuse facing migrant farmworkers.
The review, of course, was written by Henry Dimblebey. The same guy who has a book out slamming UPF, who is also the co-founder of Leon restaurants - the ‘natural’ fast-food chain, that talks a big game about sustainability and fair-trade coffee, but any mention of farmworker’s rights is conspicuously absent.
Dimbleby recently stepped down from his position as lead non-executive director of the Department of Food and Rural Affairs because he was PO’d that the government weren’t taking on his recommendations. Womp. He doesn’t say what his recommendations are (you’ve got to get his book for that, duh!) but he claims they would, among other things, improve productivity - just highlighting how, to people like Dimblebey, the working-class are commodities to be extracted for resources - in this case, labour. Any effort to improve their working and living conditions would undermine the bottom line. Unless of course, you subscribe to Henry’s philosophy that to improve people’s lives they just need to eat better food.
As I’ve been thinking about all this UPF stuff, one question that I keep coming back to is who gets to reimagine the food system? Because the people writing that story are not migrant farmworkers, or indigenous communities who have been displaced by tropical deforestation, or Black folks forced into food apartheid.
Nope. We’re looking to academics, elite food writers and journalists. So let’s pretend for a second that is a good idea - how are they reimagining how we eat?
‘When elites in food drive conversations about food system reform, the highly privileged prospect of “farm-to-table” meals is romanticised without drawing a similar level of attention to structural barriers in the dominant food system,’
says
- author of where she writes about navigating the food system (she’s finishing up her degree in Society and Food Studies).‘Complementing farm-to-table ideals, the slow food movement preaches that Americans don’t spend nearly enough time on preparing food. Yet the only solution this movement presents is to spend more leisure time on preparing food and “vote with your fork,” as if it were that simple to carve out more time in the day and make decisions based on knowledge of a complex system. The movement moralises the act of consumption, even for those who do not have the privilege of prioritising “morals” when it comes to the responsibility of feeding and/or eating.’
Anisha is hitting on something that’s not just confined to the bougie world of Bay Area/The Cotswolds (depending on your locale) food writing. This framing has infiltrated academia too.
The following is a paragraph from a paper entitled ‘The UN Decade of Nutrition, the NOVA food classification and the trouble with ultra-processing’ published in the journal Public Health Nutrition in 2017 penned by Carlos Montiero (and colleagues). Montiero, if you’ll recall, is the Science Guy who came up with the NOVA classification system for ranking foods. I find this paragraph to be extremely telling, because, although it stops short of forcibly chaining women to the kitchen, it exposes so much of the regressive assumptions and wholesome, home-made, fantasies that drive the UPF conversation.
‘Social life in and out of the home is weakened by ultra-processed products. Because they are convenient, being formulated as ready-to-consume snacks and drinks and ready-to-heat items, they displace dishes and meals made at home. The shared experiences of acquiring, preparing, cooking and enjoying food together, part of our evolution as humans, with all the knowledge this brings of the nature, meaning and value of food, become increasingly lost. Meal tables and all that goes with them are used less often, or even not at all. The kitchen becomes less used and the dining room, a special place for people who live in the same place to come together and share in one another’s lives, may disappear. Instead, people at home get into the habit of eating alone, at different times, inattentively, often when doing something else. Children and young people eat while using their computer or playing video games. Out of the house, ultra-processed products are consumed anywhere, any time, while working, walking or driving, or when using cell phones. These are generally isolated situations, concealed by advertisements and other marketing suggesting that ultra-processed products enhance social interaction’
Let’s set aside the fact that many of the foods that Carlos believes threaten the sanctity of the family meal, are the exact same ones that allow families with young kids to come together in those pre-bedtime witching hours, with minimal tantrums: fish-fingers and chicken nuggets, jarred pasta sauces or pesto, potato waffles or a bowl of ice-cream.
‘The image of the American family gathered at a wooden table affirms the exclusionary nature of “farm-to-table”,’
, from who we met earlier, reflects. She continues:‘There is no denying that there is beauty in picking vegetables from the garden, preparing a home-cooked meal, and gathering around the table with loved ones to enjoy it. It’s just a problem when this leisurely lifestyle is only available to a select few, yet promoted to everybody. And the people and restaurants at the forefront of these movements are usually white and eat foods that perpetuate Eurocentric ideas of nutrition.’
Carlos? BRAH? You think UPFs are responsible for eroding our ways of relating to and knowing our cultural food ways? Not, say, capitalism, imperialism or colonialism? Systems of oppression that forcibly removed Black and brown folks from their ancestral land? Stripped them of their humanity, exploiting their labour so that white people could hoard wealth and power?
You believe that UPFs preceded an economic system that values productivity, self-interest, and private property, rather than being a predictable response to violent systems that force us to sell our labour for upwards of eight hours a day? When we have little-to-no agency over our time. When our bodies have been reduced to machines, colonised by performance reviews and productivity hacks. When our communities and communal ways of caring for one another - through distributing the labour of growing, preparing, and cooking food - have been decimated, what choice do we have but to turn to ultra-processed foods as a means of survival?
What fucking choice do we have.
If we are disabled.
If we are neurodivergent.
If we are chronically ill.
If we are poor.
If we are unhoused, living in unstable or unsuitable housing.
If we are un- or underemployed.
If we are mothers - especially single mothers.
If we are minoritised.
If we are migrants, refugees, or seeking asylum.
If we depend on a social safety net that drags us down instead of pull us out.
If we are isolated from community. Burnt out. Alone.
If our ‘family table’ is not the Norman Rockwell painting you imagine, but a place of conflict, violence, and abuse.
Or any of the thousands of other reasons we rely on ultra-processed foods to give us any kind of chance of survival under the slow violence of social inequality.
If in this reimagined food system where we cannot access convenience and ready-made foods, who do we expect to do the labour of growing plants, tending to animals, baking bread, soaking beans, chopping, blending, frying, roasting, grilling? Who will take the time to plan meals and snacks and take on the labour of learning skills, finding recipes, figuring out how to safely store fresh foods and making sure there is always something to eat because we can’t just grab something from the snack drawer.
And what about food in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, nurseries, and prisons? Are we going to increase the budgets to allow for the extra time, skill, and people required to provide minimally processed foods in these institutions? And what is the opportunity cost if we do? Even longer hospital waiting times? Even lower nursery ratios? Even less support and resources for teachers? Once again, if we keep pretending like this is a personal nutrition or wellness journey, we stop short of asking these really difficult questions.
If we continue to let people with enormous power and privilege (often white men) reimagine our food system, the work will fall to women. It always falls to women. Particularly mothers. And if you are a woman with enough privilege, power, and resources, the work will be passed to minoritised women.
Food work, whether it’s in the field or in our kitchens, is fundamentally care work. Like all care work, food work, whether it’s physical, mental, or emotional is deeply undervalued. Our very survival depends on food work, but it is rendered invisible, considered beneath us.
‘…society values work in terms of how much we produce, and how efficiently we can do it. It tells us that our output is worth. Caregiving, conversely, is inefficient. But it pays dividends. If we were to think about work in terms of our humanity - making people feel dignified, valued, and whole - then caregiving is the most important work we can do with our time on earth.’
Writes
in Essential Labor. She continues:‘Love and care, like social change, are slow and follow circuitous paths - they take days not hours, years not months. The work may seem inefficient, but love doesn’t play by the same rules as the economy. The economy could stand to bend to the will of decency and care. What if we built a system that lets us actually care for the people who care for us?’
I do not know what a just and equitable food system looks like - I’m sharing some resources below that I think can help us get closer to the answer
- but I know in my bones that it begins and ends with care. Care for the people, care for the animals, and care for the land.ICYMI last week: The Truth About Ultra Processed Foods - Part 2
Kitchen joy, making the table a safe space, and trusting kids bodies
Food Preoccupation, Felt-Safety and Feeding Kids in the Care System
This definition is borrowed from A Growing Culture who cite Bangladeshi photojournalist and activist Shahidul Alam as coining the terms.
Minority World refers to a small group of rich countries (including the United States, Australia, Russia, and the United Kingdom) that impose their will on the Majority of the World’s people, even though they are, in fact, the minority. Their interests do not represent that of the world’s people. Their culture is not the world’s culture.
Majority World highlights that the people belonging to impoverished countries make up the majority of the world’s population. Alam explains that the term defines this community based on what it has and what it is, rather than what it lacks and what it isn’t. He adds that its usage is actively hopeful that ‘in time, the majority world will reaffirm its place in a world where the earth will again belong to the people who walk on it.’
These are not perfect terms as they discuss in the piece linked here, but I think they more accurately reflect the role that power, privilege, exploitation and domination have played in shaping inequity in the climate crisis.
I couldn’t quite fit it in here but I wanted to share this from
from who had this to say about how we can reform the food system, without further vilifying foods that people depend on.‘I think recognising the problems with the individual responsibility narrative is a great place to start. People working on food system reform must recognise that so much energy and resources are devoted to changing the individual and moralising individual actions, but it’s the system that is in shambles and needs attention. Rather than focusing on the ways individuals can shop better, vote with their fork, and reduce emissions and improve their health through their plate, reform efforts should emphasise how people can get involved in their community’s food system food policy council, etc., if they have the time and/or want to be involved in reform.
‘The farm-to-table/slow food movement that has been at the forefront of food system reform has historically been led by white, upper-class individuals. By diversifying leadership in food justice organisations, food media, food policy councils, etc., maybe leaders will be able to better understand or represent the needs of their communities.
‘Even though the food justice movement prides itself on its intersectional approach to food system reform, disability rights are not acknowledged enough in mission statements of food justice organisations. In fact, even pockets of the food justice movement have demonised diet-related diseases and classified them as abnormal, emphasising the need to fix and cure the “abnormal” individual rather than reform the food system. Part of the solution here may be to better train doctors and other healthcare professionals to communicate with people with disabilities and people facing food insecurity. In general, maybe focusing on what we can add to our plates rather than remove. For example, instead of concentrating our efforts to attacking the widespread availability of UPFs, we could focusing on increasing access to fresh produce, legumes, whole grains, etc. and educating people from early on (i.e. cooking classes in schools) on how to prepare these foods in a way that excites them. It’s complicated because we know that some convenience and packaged foods do play a role in driving disease, but the convenience aspect is also important in modern-day culture where not everyone can afford other food or has time to prepare food.’
Further reading and resources
- by is a really thought-provoking read examining what the future of food looks like when we centre the people it impacts most
- with
- shares updates about the food system through a curious vegan lens
This is just brilliant Laura. I would like the whole world to read it (or at the very least, privileged, powerful white men)
Feel like we need a book club-like discussion on this series! Too much to say in a comment. Thanks for all your labor putting this together.