We live in a toxic food environment, and Big Food has extremely clever marketers and food scientists. That all of us eat a lot of Big Food’s produce means those people are very good at their jobs. It doesn’t mean we have failed if we eat what the industry makes.
In the UK, about 50% of the average adult’s diet, and 65% of a child’s, is ultra-processed. As Dr Chris Van Tulleken’s latest book, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food… and Why Can’t We Stop?, points out, that means much of what we eat includes newly invented substances that humans haven’t eaten before and we know very little about how they interact with us, or each other.
Such foods are likely to be made by companies such as Unilever, PepsiCo or Nestlé. The UK food industry spends £1.14bn a year on advertising and, as the ex-Big Food marketer Dan Parker has pointed out, it uses manipulative tactics such as associating foods such as chocolate with positive things like relaxation (KitKats, Maltesers) or emotional openness (Cadbury’s “Give A Doubt”), while normalising over-consumption with ads showing one – always small – person eating a family-size bar (think Audrey Hepburn in the Galaxy advert).
Criticising ultra-processed foods (UPFs) is not necessarily the same as shaming those who eat them. But we do shame and blame people who eat UPFs, including, often, ourselves, and that should stop. (We also have a nasty habit of demonising foods that are important to specific cultures, such as fried chicken.) Shame is never motivating and what we eat is not a cipher for morality. Although almost all of us eat a lot of UPFs, we tend to think of it as a problem that mainly affects people who live in poverty. It is absolutely not constructive to vilify the diets of people already living in highly stressful situations. But it’s also a mistake to assume this doesn’t affect “us”, whatever your socioeconomic position might be.
UPFs hide in plain sight. Definitions vary, but they mainly come in a packet and are made with preservatives, stabilisers, emulsifiers, colours or flavour enhancers. They include everyday items such as shop-bought hummus, stuffed pasta, hot sauce, curry paste, ready meals, some jams, most peanut butters, most breads, vegan meat alternatives, almost all cereals, most cured meats, burgers and sausages, soft drinks, sweetened or low-fat yoghurts, many free-from products, dairy replacements, and almost all the ice-creams, desserts, crisps, crackers and biscuits in the supermarket. If your trolley doesn’t contain a fair chunk of that list, then there are few possibilities: you have superhuman levels of willpower; you are very wealthy and/or have your own from-scratch cook; you are lying.
Many UPFs are cheap, but those that are not often come branded with a health halo, as with plant-based meat alternatives, cereal bars or protein powders. In reality, consumption of UPFs of all types is associated with an increased risk of all sorts of health issues, including various cancers and weight gain.
UPFs are very convenient, and are carefully marketed as a way to make our busy-busy lives easier. Those who criticise UPFs are therefore often seen as having a go at people who already feel harried by the way we’ve arranged society.
But the problem isn’t with us. The problem is structural. Arranging society so that people don’t feel they have enough time or money to make themselves a meal is a dystopian nightmare. Selling us cheap food that might harm us, but is framed as being helpful or healthy, is a dystopian nightmare. And, as Henry Dimbleby notes in his new book, Ravenous, so is urban planning, which means more than three million people cannot access shops that sell fresh produce.
Our hysterical fear of fatness has led us to individualise responsibility for what we eat, while also failing to take account of the highly nuanced relationship between body size and health. Even though 59 types of obesity have been identified, the UK’s (noticeably unsuccessful) approach to weight management is still variations on the theme of eat-less-exercise-more, plus the new and wildly hyped semaglutide weight-loss drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy (originally created to treat diabetes), about which outlets from the Economist to New York magazine have gushed (often containing a throwaway line about gastric side effects and the associated risk of pancreatitis and possibly cancer).
These are trying to solve the wrong problem: we should not be living in a food environment in which a sizeable number of people need (or want) to be drugged in order to cope with it.
The popularity of UPFs is symptomatic of something much bigger, and not just that Big Food is great at marketing and making irresistible, energy-dense foods. It’s about the primacy of work, long hours, low pay, hustle culture, structural inequalities, poverty and precarity. For most of us, it’s almost impossible to make so-called “good” food choices.
This is particularly the case if you are stressed, exhausted or labouring under any kind of scarcity or insecurity, all of which have been shown in many studies to affect not just our food choices but also how our bodies metabolise food. And who isn’t feeling the pressure of living in perma-crisis Britain, to some extent?
Solving the problem isn’t about manufacturers changing formulations (although that might help). It’s much harder than that. Our problems with food are just symptoms of other social problems, which is why it’s ridiculous to pretend any of us, individually, can solve them. If there is a moral question to be answered, it’s by those who make UPFs, not those who eat them.
Every time we make an individual body – ours, or someone else’s – the site for a conversation about “good” and “bad” food choices, weight or shape, we look at the problem upside down. We make our food choices into a moral maze instead of saying: it’s food that is broken and needs to change. Not us.
