Ultra-Processed Me

As usual, Star Trek shows us the way

The most important character dynamic in the original Star Trek is the triangulation of Captain Kirk, Spock, and, Dr. McCoy.

My brother and I used to play this game all the time when I was a kid. DeForest Kelley might not have had Shatner’s leading man looks, but even so, this illustration seems pretty mean.

Spock, with his logical Vulcan mind, represents dispassionate reason. McCoy – irascible, indignant, outspoken – represents emotion. Kirk is meant to reconcile the two, often finding a compromise or a workaround that can satisfy both impulses.

It’s a vision of masculinity, and humanity, that I can get behind. We should pay attention to our gut feelings, to what our hearts tell us. We shouldn’t deny our emotional intuition because it often contains a certain undeniable truth. But that truth is often selfish or misguided, and can cause problems of its own. So we have to listen to Spock, too, even though he’s annoying.

Every time we eat, we have our own Spock and McCoy in our heads. To mix this metaphor with another 20th century TV trope, McCoy is the cartoon devil on our shoulder. Just eat the damn cookies, Jim – the heart (or the stomach) wants what it wants. Spock is the angel: Those cookies are ultra-processed and deliver no nutrients, minerals, or vitamins of value while containing an excess of refined sugar, saturated fat, carbohydrates, and additives carrying unknown health risks. Then McCoy makes some sarcastic, dismissive comment, and Kirk has to make a decision. (He doesn’t always make the right one.)

Why am I thinking about Star Trek? Well, I think about Star Trek a lot, because I’m a dork. But lately I've been interrogating my own emotional reaction to the discourse on ultra-processed foods, which has always provoked in me a broad spectrum of frustration, ranging from eye-rolling disdain to full-on ranting. Let me say up front: this is a personal problem. Most people I know – perfectly reasonable, intelligent people – read about UPFs, accept that they are bad, move on and adjust their behaviors accordingly. In the words of Taylor Swift: it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me. Every time I saw the cover of Dr. Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People, I became enraged – so I decided I’d better confront that anger and actually read it.

I must say, Van Tulleken is a fair and engaging writer who makes a lot of compelling arguments. I started out hate-reading the book but now I find myself really enjoying it, especially because Van Tulleken frequently anticipates and addresses my own skepticism. I’m only a couple of chapters in, so I can’t provide a full review, and I don’t have the time, inclination, or expertise for that anyway.¹ But one thing that’s interesting is that Van Tulleken calls upon his own inner McCoy which is very different from my own. He’s repulsed by ultra-processed foods, even fearful of them, in a way that I simply can’t relate to. (But maybe I will by the end of the book.) For example, Van Tulleken writes that xanthan gum is “revoltingly, a bacterial exudate: slime that bacteria produce that allow them to cling to surfaces. Think of xanthan gum when you next scrape the accumulated gunk from the filter of your dishwasher.”² A few pages later, Van Tulleken discusses the prospect of using chicken fat as a low-cost additive to industrially-made ice cream, which he calls a “disgusting thought.”³

Clearly, Van Tulleken and I are simply not speaking the same emotional language when it comes to food. I’ve eaten enough nattō and harvested enough kombucha scobies to not be at all put off by the idea of consuming microbial slimes. I’ve cooked with xanthan gum, a lot. And chicken fat ice cream just sounds like something Heston Blumenthal or David Chang might have put on a menu twenty years ago. This shit simply doesn’t weird me out the way it’s supposed to.

In fact, I have the opposite problem: there are a lot of ultra-processed foods that I adore, and I wish they were benign, even if they probably aren’t. I just wrote six blog posts about burgers, for Christ’s sake. In the past I’ve written articles celebrating such popular UPFs as Kinnie and MSG. Van Tulleken’s inner McCoy would be nauseated by the plasticky, ultra-processed goo that is American cheese, whereas it would have my inner McCoy licking his chops and saying, “Make mine a double, Jim.”

But it’s not just my McCoy that isn't on board with the demonization of UPFs. Spock’s got questions, too. The Nova definition⁴ seems highly illogical to the Vulcan part of my brain. It’s very long, but I think it does have to be read in full to be understood, without cherry-picking the bits that do or don’t make sense to me. The definition is frequently revised and updated; this is the latest version, via Wikipedia:

Industrially manufactured food products made up of several ingredients (formulations) including sugar, oils, fats and salt (generally in combination and in higher amounts than in processed foods) and food substances of no or rare culinary use (such as high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, modified starches and protein isolates). [Minimally processed foods] are absent or represent a small proportion of the ingredients in the formulation. Processes enabling the manufacture of ultra-processed foods include industrial techniques such as extrusion, moulding and pre-frying; application of additives including those whose function is to make the final product palatable or hyperpalatable such as flavours, colourants, non-sugar sweeteners and emulsifiers; and sophisticated packaging, usually with synthetic materials. Processes and ingredients here are designed to create highly profitable (low-cost ingredients, long shelf-life, emphatic branding), convenient (ready-to-(h)eat or to drink), tasteful alternatives to all other Nova food groups and to freshly prepared dishes and meals. Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.

Allow me a couple examples of where this definition has me flummoxed. Clearly, when they say extrusion and moulding are processes “enabling the manufacture” of UPFs, they’re not talking about the same thing as when I make cupcakes in a cupcake tin (moulding) and pipe frosting onto them from a piping bag (extrusion). Right…? I mean, who knows? I think we can intuitively say that no, that’s not what they mean, and there must be something more harmful about these processes when they’re done at an industrial scale, with industrial force. But the Nova system doesn’t quite make this distinction, except with the opening catch-all descriptor “industrially manufactured” (which prompts questions of its own).

The same goes for the idea that UPFs are “operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use” (emphasis mine). “No culinary use” is a really odd phrase to apply to any kind of ingredient, because surely if it’s being used in food, it has some kind of culinary use. From reading previous iterations of the Nova system, I interpret this to mean ingredients not commonly found in home kitchens, but even that’s extremely vague and variable. And the mere “presence” of these additives makes something UPF? Really? Back to my hypothetical cupcakes: if I were to make cupcakes from un-fortified heritage flour, whole eggs, unrefined sugar, and real dairy milk and butter (let’s say it’s unpasteurized milk and home-churned butter to fully commit to the tradwife bit), they would be, I guess, an ordinary “Group 3” processed food. But if I added, say, a “colourant” to make the frosting pink, and a “foaming agent” (like baking powder?) to the batter to make it rise… it would be a UPF?⁵

You may be thinking I’m just being obtuse. It’s obvious what they mean by all of these things, even if it’s not entirely clear or consistent. They’re talking about food that’s nutritionally void, industrially made, potentially dangerous, and engineered for overconsumption. But if we have to apply our own intuition to make sense of all of this, then what good is it as a definition? How is it any more functional or useful than socioculturally established common-sense ideas about what or how we should eat? We used to just call this junk food.⁶ Ottolenghi gets it: he recently wrote an article that I loved about how diets are shaped by “the realm of human interaction, of conviviality, culture and the daily activities that define us as humans,” which I think pretty much nails it. And I agree with his comment on UPFs: “the definition of ultra-processed foods, a category that’s much discussed right now, isn’t clearly agreed on yet, but we all know them when we see them.”

Scott Pilgrim, discovering UPFs (via Pinterest).

The Nova system and the discourse around it annoys me because it seems unnecessary, confusing, and broad, but also because it obscures some intriguing ideas and important points.⁷ For example: what are some of the specific dangers of specific food additives that we don’t know about? I only recently found out that we shouldn’t let kids drink slushies because they contain glycerol, which is potentially toxic. Van Tulleken does get into some of these particulars later in his book, and another interesting point he raises is that vital nutrients are more effective and beneficial when we get them from whole foods rather than from supplements.⁸ And the most compelling of the critiques that Van Tulleken hints at in his opening chapters have to do with the contexts and systems that surround the foods, rather than the foods themselves: how they’re packaged, priced, and marketed, how they damage the environment and disproportionately harm poor people. All of this is genuinely fascinating, and for the record: in no way do I deny that our food systems need to be re-evaluated and changed. As much as I love cheap cheeseburgers, in an ideal world they would be made in a way that doesn’t kill me or other people or the planet.⁹

But isn’t it dishonest, or at least unhelpful, to write off supermarket whole-grain bread as an ultra-processed food because it’s made in a factory and contains an anti-mold agent or an emulsifier? Is baby food really more dangerous if it comes in a pouch?¹⁰ Should these foods be lumped into a category that also contains Twinkies and Pepsi Max? Inner Spock and inner McCoy both say no, they shouldn’t. And when McCoy and Spock are on the same page, well, there’s not much question over what Kirk is going to do. Kirk’s gonna keep eating his Hovis Seed Sensations. But Kirk is nothing if not open-minded, so he’s going to keep reading Ultra-Processed People, too.

Famously, Captain Kirk “won” the un-winnable Kobayashi Maru test at Starfleet Academy by furtively reprogramming the simulator. But of course, that’s not winning; that’s cheating. That’s opting out. And frankly, that’s what this whole thing makes me want to do. I don’t even want to hear it, because I’ve heard it all before: when I was a kid, it was fat and cholesterol. Then it was carbs, then it was calories, then sugar, and now UPFs. What will they think of next?

At the core of the Star Trek worldview is good old-fashioned 1960s utopian thinking: an idea that we can achieve not only peace and prosperity across the globe, but across the universe. In Star Trek, food security is a given; homes and starships are outfitted with replicators that produce tasty, nutritionally complete food and drink on demand. But as far as I’m aware, the show offers nothing as to how this has been achieved. On The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, characters occasionally complain about the flavor of replicated food – so I guess it’s not perfect – but what about its practical and ethical considerations? Where does the food actually come from? What are its hidden costs?

Maybe the future of food is just too complicated (or too boring) for Star Trek to deal with properly, so replicators were a tidy way for screenwriters to avoid the problem entirely, like Kirk rejigging the Kobayashi Maru. Meanwhile, in the real world, we don’t have that option. But to figure it all out, there’s bound to be a lot of bickering between Spock and McCoy – and annoyingly, we’ll have to listen to both of them.

Kirk out.

1. Besides, Dr. Laura Thomas already did it, and she’s far more qualified. You can read it here, and her whole body of work is very much worth the subscription fee. I especially liked this piece on feeding neurodivergent kids.

2. Van Tulleken 22.

3. Van Tulleken 29.

4. The Nova classification is the widely-used (but not always accepted) standard for food categorization, developed by researchers at the University of São Paolo.

5. There’s another key point I want to address: “hyperpalatability.” This is an interesting concept, but there are real problems with it as a criteria for categorising food. First of all, not everybody finds the same things palatable; I’ve had loads of UPFs, scientifically calibrated for maximum flavour, which I find frankly disgusting even though I’m culturally primed to enjoy them. Recently this included some abrasively astringent barbecue sauce from Popeye’s and some truly foul marshmallows from M&S that tasted inexplicably like seaweed. And besides, surely the whole problem with hyperpalatability isn’t that things taste too good, but that it leads to eating too much – the Pringles Effect. But let me tell you from experience, friends: you can overeat anything, not just UPFs. I’ve done this with pork belly, pasta, sushi, and just last week, homemade wholemeal almond cookies. Not to mention fries – which are not necessarily UPFs!

6. Van Tulleken brings this up as well – but he doesn’t compellingly parse the actual difference between junk food and what we now call UPFs. Maybe he does later in the book.

7. I think I’d be a lot more on board with how UPFs are talked about if it was expressed as an inverse. Instead of “don’t eat UPFs,” personally I’d be more amenable to “eat mostly whole foods.”

8. Van Tulleken 45.

9. McCoy is not to be trusted. As Rebecca Thimmesch put it, “you don’t have to ride out for the Coca-Cola Company just because RFK Jr. says it’s bad!”

10. I have very mixed feelings about this article by Bee Wilson. On the one hand, I agree that marketing something which contains no actual vegetables as “veggie straws” is reprehensible, and honestly ought to be illegal. And I agree that one of the great ongoing food scandals of our time is misleading health claims and labelling. But as the father of two humans who used to love Ella’s pouches, it’s hard for me to be moved by alarmist statements like: “a baby who sucks from a pouch can neither smell nor see what they are eating, so it does not teach them to recognise or enjoy real whole fruits and vegetables. Sucking smooth, sweet puree direct from a pouch is also a recipe for tooth decay.” Despite all of those pouches, nowadays my kids’ favorite meal is what we call a “snack plate”: a selection of not-that-processed foods such as fresh fruit, carrot sticks, nut butter, ham, and usually something ultra-processed like crackers or Pom Bears, for balance.