What a fantastic article. And hurray for the Spock-McCoy dialectic as a way of navigating the world. I vaguely recall some of the chat about replicator food not being a patch on the real thing being presented as knowing and performative. The humans (Sisko Jnr and Snr?) sheepishly acknowledged that as humans and descendants of a chef to boot, they were duty bound to find replicator food a pale imitation. Which resonates with how we’re supposed to feel about foods packed with colourants and preservatives. As to where it all came from, I guess it was a kind of scientific magic. JK Rowling described cooking in Harry Potter in a similarly apocryphal way, with Molly Weasley conjuring vast quantities of delicious and hearty food out of a few odds and ends. There was that thing about it being a notable
exemption to Gamp’s Law of transfiguration. You can summon it, multiply it, transform it, but ultimately you can’t get something out of nothing. Similarly in DS9 the plates and leftovers go back into the replicator at the end of meal to be recycled into something else. Back to UPFs, food manufacture involves a sleight of hand, and maybe there’s something unpalatable about being shown how it’s done, especially if that involves things we don’t normally think of as ingredients. Also, thanks for assuaging my ongoing guilt as the parent of a “picky eater” about our early use of Ella’s pouches. I’m gratified to learn that other kids are capable of sucking down pouches and then graduating to plates of identifiable food items. Enjoy Japan!
Thanks Miranda! And you’re absolutely right about the replicator critics – they were mostly thought of as just being snobbish, weren’t they? But also they might have had a point, because part of the problem with replicators/UPFs is the devaluing of the labor and creativity that goes into making food from scratch. I recently read this post about AI by Inigo Laguda and thought it had some really interesting parallels to food https://open.substack.com/pub/yoursinigo/p/nothing-is-new Just like AI ‘art,’ cheap UPFs maintain a food environment where sustenance can be expected with minimal effort and expenditure… which is kind of great if you’re time-poor and/or just plain poor, but not if the results are nutritional deficiencies and diet-related disease. It seems to me that the problem isn’t so much UPFs in and of themselves, but a form of capitalism that creates a demand for them because it allows no time or money to cook properly. This is why we need UBI, or failing that, actual replicators! Or both!
I read that article off of your repost! It was really excellent. And yes, the relationship to human labour and time is the problem on all fronts. A sound engineer friend once rented a cheap studio space in Brixton from an Italian - inevitably - who selected studio mates on the basis that they had to agree to make their lunch in the shared kitchen every day from scratch and eat it alongside everyone else. The more you think about it, the more it seems to make sense as a way of rewiring a number of social problems.
Great read Tim. The discourse has moved along a lot since the book came out. Part of the problem with UPFs is its link to environmental degradation, social inequity and inequitable health outcomes. UPFs are cheaper and aggressively marketed. Some of it is unavoidable given the lives we lead but much of it is HFSS and form the majority of our diets. Bit of a UPF geek here soz
Right, and I share all of those concerns. So why not address them, individually, instead of trying to bundle them together within one catch-all category? The working definition is so baroque and so sweeping that for me it becomes meaningless. Besides, if we are concerned with ethical problems like these, beyond nutritional value, we have to look at all foods, no matter their level of processing. Even Nova category 1 foods can be produced and sold in ways that cause environmental damage or exploit workers. I just think we’re better off appraising foods individually rather than dividing them into broad categories like this.
What I liked about CVT’s book was that he shifts blame for the widespread bad health outcomes that UPF brings from individuals to food systems. So much discourse around diet becomes moral: what you “should” or “shouldn’t” eat (and how you have failed if you do eat the “bad” food) and he removes all sense of individual blame. Part of the definition of UPFs isn’t just to do with what is or isn’t extruded but their profit-maximising formulation and aggressive marketing.
I am also a dork and think often of the Spock-Kirk-Bones dynamic (and the food replicators) so very much enjoyed the framing of your take.
Same, I appreciate that he is careful about where he directs his outrage, and I agree with his targets fosure. My main issue remains with the limitations of the catefory itself – I’d might even be fully on board with it if it was just called something else, like non-nutritive hyper-marketed industrial foodstuffs (NNHMIF). Is that too long??
Very interesting post and I ought to also get around the reading the book, having been put off for similar reasons. I agree with a lot of what you've covered here, including that the definition of UPFs isn't yet clear enough and tends to tar with the same brush many different levels of food processing. Excellent food for thought, Tim!
What a fantastic article. And hurray for the Spock-McCoy dialectic as a way of navigating the world. I vaguely recall some of the chat about replicator food not being a patch on the real thing being presented as knowing and performative. The humans (Sisko Jnr and Snr?) sheepishly acknowledged that as humans and descendants of a chef to boot, they were duty bound to find replicator food a pale imitation. Which resonates with how we’re supposed to feel about foods packed with colourants and preservatives. As to where it all came from, I guess it was a kind of scientific magic. JK Rowling described cooking in Harry Potter in a similarly apocryphal way, with Molly Weasley conjuring vast quantities of delicious and hearty food out of a few odds and ends. There was that thing about it being a notable
exemption to Gamp’s Law of transfiguration. You can summon it, multiply it, transform it, but ultimately you can’t get something out of nothing. Similarly in DS9 the plates and leftovers go back into the replicator at the end of meal to be recycled into something else. Back to UPFs, food manufacture involves a sleight of hand, and maybe there’s something unpalatable about being shown how it’s done, especially if that involves things we don’t normally think of as ingredients. Also, thanks for assuaging my ongoing guilt as the parent of a “picky eater” about our early use of Ella’s pouches. I’m gratified to learn that other kids are capable of sucking down pouches and then graduating to plates of identifiable food items. Enjoy Japan!
Thanks Miranda! And you’re absolutely right about the replicator critics – they were mostly thought of as just being snobbish, weren’t they? But also they might have had a point, because part of the problem with replicators/UPFs is the devaluing of the labor and creativity that goes into making food from scratch. I recently read this post about AI by Inigo Laguda and thought it had some really interesting parallels to food https://open.substack.com/pub/yoursinigo/p/nothing-is-new Just like AI ‘art,’ cheap UPFs maintain a food environment where sustenance can be expected with minimal effort and expenditure… which is kind of great if you’re time-poor and/or just plain poor, but not if the results are nutritional deficiencies and diet-related disease. It seems to me that the problem isn’t so much UPFs in and of themselves, but a form of capitalism that creates a demand for them because it allows no time or money to cook properly. This is why we need UBI, or failing that, actual replicators! Or both!
I read that article off of your repost! It was really excellent. And yes, the relationship to human labour and time is the problem on all fronts. A sound engineer friend once rented a cheap studio space in Brixton from an Italian - inevitably - who selected studio mates on the basis that they had to agree to make their lunch in the shared kitchen every day from scratch and eat it alongside everyone else. The more you think about it, the more it seems to make sense as a way of rewiring a number of social problems.
Great read Tim. The discourse has moved along a lot since the book came out. Part of the problem with UPFs is its link to environmental degradation, social inequity and inequitable health outcomes. UPFs are cheaper and aggressively marketed. Some of it is unavoidable given the lives we lead but much of it is HFSS and form the majority of our diets. Bit of a UPF geek here soz
Right, and I share all of those concerns. So why not address them, individually, instead of trying to bundle them together within one catch-all category? The working definition is so baroque and so sweeping that for me it becomes meaningless. Besides, if we are concerned with ethical problems like these, beyond nutritional value, we have to look at all foods, no matter their level of processing. Even Nova category 1 foods can be produced and sold in ways that cause environmental damage or exploit workers. I just think we’re better off appraising foods individually rather than dividing them into broad categories like this.
What I liked about CVT’s book was that he shifts blame for the widespread bad health outcomes that UPF brings from individuals to food systems. So much discourse around diet becomes moral: what you “should” or “shouldn’t” eat (and how you have failed if you do eat the “bad” food) and he removes all sense of individual blame. Part of the definition of UPFs isn’t just to do with what is or isn’t extruded but their profit-maximising formulation and aggressive marketing.
I am also a dork and think often of the Spock-Kirk-Bones dynamic (and the food replicators) so very much enjoyed the framing of your take.
Same, I appreciate that he is careful about where he directs his outrage, and I agree with his targets fosure. My main issue remains with the limitations of the catefory itself – I’d might even be fully on board with it if it was just called something else, like non-nutritive hyper-marketed industrial foodstuffs (NNHMIF). Is that too long??
Very interesting post and I ought to also get around the reading the book, having been put off for similar reasons. I agree with a lot of what you've covered here, including that the definition of UPFs isn't yet clear enough and tends to tar with the same brush many different levels of food processing. Excellent food for thought, Tim!