[Marketing departments inject Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) with
stories ranging from the banal (a cereal box cartoon character) and
aspirational (health promises), to the manipulative such as ads
picturing fast food eating as the center of family life]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE RAW, THE COOKED AND THE HYDROLYSED  
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Fred Warren
July 12, 2023
The Dark Mountain Project
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_ Marketing departments inject Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) with
stories ranging from the banal (a cereal box cartoon character) and
aspirational (health promises), to the manipulative such as ads
picturing fast food eating as the center of family life _

This image honours the terrestrial order of Oligochaeta, its some
7,000 extant species, and their notable contribution to the creation
of topsoil, in which we grow our food. , Graeme Walker

 

The cultural ecology of ultra-processed food

_This month we are running a 'sister' series of posts, alongside our
latest issue Dark Kitchen which explores food culture in a time of
unravelling. We will be voyaging to different territories in place and
time, from cooking in a collaborative kitchen in Mexico, to foraging
in the forests of Japan to unearthing a post-Empire Anglo Saxon stew.
Today, Fred Warren tackles one of the most controversial aspects of
the modern industrial food complex, ultra-processed foods (UPFs). 
With artwork by Graeme Walker._

A couple of miles north of where I live lies a small town called
Beaminster. On the surface, there still exist some reminders of former
food ways – a butcher, a bakery, a fruit and veg shop. And yet
travel down from the town square and you are soon met with a series of
metal silos which speak of a more modern food system. These are part
of a Danisco factory, a subsidiary of International Flavors and
Fragrances (IFF). Part of the IFF’s portfolio is the production of
food additives, many with their own Philip K Dick-esque names:
VERSILK™, NOVAGARD®, NATAMAX®. The main additive produced at the
Danisco Beaminster facility appears to be NISAPLIN® which, according
to the IFF website, is used to ‘extend product quality throughout
the desired shelf-life in specialty bakery applications’. It is one
small antimicrobial which speaks of a whole food system dominated by
ultra-processed food, or UPF.

‘Ultra-processed’ is part of what’s known as the NOVA system of
food classification first developed by researcher Carlos A. Monterio
and his team in Brazil around 2009. Rather than understanding food
through macronutrients like fats, protein and carbohydrates, the NOVA
system categorises foods based on their level of processing. This
system distinguishes between ‘minimally processed’ foods (frozen
peas), ‘processed culinary ingredients’ (butter), ‘processed
foods’ (some breads and cheeses) and those foods which are
‘ultra-processed’. As Monteiro et al write in the journal Public
Health Nutrition, ultra-processed foods are created by ‘the
fractioning of whole foods into substances’ and contain ingredients
rarely used in the kitchen, such as ‘high-fructose corn syrup,
hydrogenated or interesterified oils, and hydrolysed proteins’, and
additives such as ‘flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers […] and
glazing agents.’ Once confined largely to treats and snacks, it is
now estimated that UPF makes up more than half of the dietary energy
consumed in the US, UK, and Canada, and an ever-increasing amount in
middle-income countries.

The damage that widespread consumption of UPF causes to human and
environmental bodies has been receiving increasing media coverage
recently (particularly in the UK from scientist Dr Chris van Tulleken)
along with calls that people should reduce their consumption. However,
as the French theorist Roland Barthes recognised, food is more than
just nutrition; it is ‘a system of communication, a body of images,
a protocol of usages, situations, and behaviour’.

So, what are UPFs communicating? What situations, behaviours and
social worlds do they cater to? If the anthropologist Levi Strauss
proposed in The Culinary Triangle (1966) that ‘boiling’ was a more
cultural way of cooking than ‘roasting’ because boiling uses a
pot, what would he make of a company using IFF’s GRINDSTED®
POWERFRESH® blend of emulsifiers and enzymes to help improve product
softness?

Perpetual Life

One core value of UPF is its perdurability, its sheer reluctance to
break down. This gives these products their long shelf lives and in
turn enables their geographic expansion to all corners of the globe.
Beyond these practicalities, however, we can also see how these
products are appealing to a culture intensely anxious about organic
processes of death and decay, where images of perpetual youth
proliferate and reminders of mortality are kept out of sight. We see
this in our obsession with evergreen lawns; our aversion to deadwood
and carcasses in the countryside; the expanding anti-aging industry
and, at the far fringes, the immortalists and anti-death activists who
campaign for a world where bodily breakdown is consigned to history.

Moreover, whether it’s an old jar of hotdogs or a re-discovered
chocolate Easter egg that still looks surprisingly tempting, UPFs
provide us with a reassuring, stabilised product where organic change
has been effectively mastered. Of course, such lively appearances
often require lots of deathly intervention to maintain – whether
it’s the relentless mowing and spraying of lawns, or the cocktail of
preservatives, antimicrobials, and stabilisers found in many UPFs.
While the food industry might claim that this kind of processing
increases food safety, such claims elide the devastating long term
health effects increasingly associated with UPF diets. As public
health professor Nicholas Freudenberg notes in At What Cost (2021), a
2019 report from The Lancet found that suboptimal diets are now the
leading cause of premature deaths worldwide (11 million in 2017) and
that more than half of these deaths were due to ‘too much sodium
(i.e., salt) and too little unprocessed whole grains and too few
fruits and vegetables’. Freudenberg further shows that this is a
typical profile of UPFs which often are made from heavily processed
soy or grains, contain high amounts of salt, and rarely contain
unprocessed fruit or vegetables.

Perpetual Present

It’s a paradox that foods which persist as long as UPFs also market
themselves as being quick and easy. Unlike other traditionally
preserved foods – unpasteurised cheese, wine, vegetable ferments
like kimchi – there is no sense of time in UPFs. Instead, they
appear uncannily pre-formed, while their smooth, hyperpalatable
textures soon melt away, leaving little trace of their existence.

The food industry exalts these qualities, saying that this kind of
food is what busy, working people need, and in a way they’re right:
these foods are perfectly calibrated to what theorist Lauren Berlant
has described as ‘capitalized time’s shortened circuit […] where
making a life involves getting through the day, the week, and the
month’. In his 2019 book Hired journalist James Bloodworth recalls
his time working at an Amazon warehouse where each morning before his
shift he’d begin with ‘a hideous ready meal’, before then
returning home at midnight and collapsing onto the bed ‘with a bag
of McDonald’s and a beer’. As he later reflected, ‘regularity of
dietary habit is simply incompatible with irregularity of work and
income’. UPF has arguably enabled the growth of these kinds of
pathological working lives which would not be possible without them
– an administrator can continue answering emails while eating a
supermarket sandwich; a delivery driver can consume a pre-packaged
pasty and energy drink while travelling to another address.

A focus on satisfying the immediate needs of busy, productive workers
is convenient for makers of UPFs too as it helps keep the often
unglamorous origins of foods away from consumers’ minds. As Monteiro
et al note, UPFs ‘are often obtained from a few high-yield plant
foods (corn, wheat, soya, cane or beet) and from puréeing or grinding
animal carcasses, usually from intensive livestock farming’. That
the production of this raw material relies heavily on industrial,
monocultural farms often associated with deforestation and soil
depletion hardly improves this image. To counteract this, marketing
departments try to inject UPFs with new stories and meanings ranging
from the banal (a cereal box cartoon character) and aspirational
(health promises), to the manipulative, as seen in the UK McDonald’s
adverts which position the fast-food chain at the emotional centre of
family life. Such new narratives are doubtless not as convincing as
marketers might like to believe, but they provide enough of a gloss to
help obscure the provenance of products for the brief time it takes to
eat them.

Perpetual Pleasure

Nonetheless, faux-naïve adverts showing families bonding over
encounters with fast food can be seen as having some truth in them.
For those of us with palates accustomed to them, UPFs remain a site of
reliable pleasure. However, as with the question of ‘convenience’,
it is worth interrogating why lives might demand this kind of pleasure
in the first place. As Lauren Berlant notes, it is only through such
‘counterabsorption in episodic refreshment, for example, in sex, or
spacing out, or food’ that individuals ‘get by’ under late
capitalism. It’s a sentiment echoed by Bloodworth, who recalled:
‘The sheer misery of the work [at the Amazon warehouse] left you
craving cigarettes and alcohol and everything else that offered the
promise of any kind of emotional kick’.

The more structurally vulnerable and precarious people’s lives are,
the more such episodes are relied on and Berlant reports how, for
economically threatened families, food can become ‘one of the few
stress relievers and one of the few sites of clear continuity between
children and parents.’ When living on unstable, constantly
threatened ground, it’s ultimately the quick, the dependable, the
stabilised pleasures that are turned to.

Of course, the pleasures afforded by UPF are never the imaginary of
complete satisfaction promised by marketers; rather, these foods are
often characterised by a low satiety and, as anyone who’s grazed
through a large bag of crisps knows, one can eat large quantities
without being aware of what’s happening. This temporary floating, or
‘self-abeyance’, provides enough of a respite to go on – to get
through the next hour, day – but often leaves one with a strange
hollowness (and often a bit of a headache).

Ending Perpetuity

In a statement last year to the BBC’s ‘The Food Programme’, the
Food and Drink Federation Chief Scientific Officer Kate Halliwell
said: ‘We do not believe it’s helpful to classify foods according
to their level of processing but think it increases confusion as it
does not relate to advice on how to achieve a healthy diet.’

Her statement shows an unusual defensiveness about an industry whose
sales are increasing every year. Indeed, processed food manufacturers
have shown themselves to be highly competent at re-formulating
products to soothe consumers’ concerns – whether it’s through
low fat products, palm oil-free products, or the rise in vegan
alternatives. And yet, it does seem that the rising concerns about UPF
– and particularly now that nations like Brazil and France have
begun to include the term in dietary guidance – represent more of an
existential threat to the industry, whose raison d’être, after all,
is adding value through processing.

Contrary to Halliwell’s claims, there is emerging evidence that many
people do have a reasonably good lay understanding of what
ultra-processed foods are and the risks they pose to health. That so
many of us continue to eat them is not evidence of a lack of
understanding or self-control; rather, it would seem that we’re
enmeshed in a culture in which UPF is completely baked in. While
increased awareness and new guidelines are welcome, it seems that only
by challenging this wider cultural ecology – one of time-poor
individuals, disconnected from natural processes, for whom food has
been emptied of all meaning except as a fuel for or a ballast against
the world of work – will sustained change come about.

Fred Warren [[link removed]]

is a writer and filmmaker based in West Dorset. He’s a co-founder of
the arts collective Chasing Cow Productions and edits the group’s
magazine Matter Out of Place. In 2020, he directed Chasing Cow’s
award-winning dark folk comedy _Brink by Brink_.

 

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