The crusade against “ultra-processed food” (UPF) marches on. One of several books about the perils of UPF currently sits at the top of the Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller list and yet there is a suspicion, as I argued last week, that this health scare has been reverse engineered to justify the lifestyles of the orthorexic upper-middle class and legitimise snobbery towards those below them in the pecking order.

An article in The Observer at the weekend sought to alleviate these concerns. It argued that no one is safe from the perils of UPFs and that we mustn’t demonise consumers because they are merely the victims of “Big Food” and “society”. Its headline was: 

Too tired to cook. Too easy to open a packet. It’s not our fault we eat junk.

The assertion that we are all too tired to cook is not substantiated in the article, unless you include the further assertions that we have “busy-busy lives” and that everyone is “feeling the pressure of living in perma-crisis Britain”. Average working hours have been declining for decades so whatever it is that is keeping us busy-busy, it isn’t hard graft.

Do people eat more healthily at the weekend when they have more time on their hands? Do people do more cooking when they are out of work? I suspect not, but these are questions that could test the hypothesis. Since we are making assertions without evidence, let me offer an opposing hypothesis which is that the average person doesn’t want to spend time cooking when they could be watching box sets, scrolling through social media or drinking.

The author, Rebecca Seal, argues that “the primacy of work, long hours, low pay, hustle culture, structural inequalities, poverty and precarity” mean that we have no choice but to eat food out of a packet. The implication is that the food industry should be offering us fresh, unprocessed food in packets, although this seems a big ask from a technical point of view.

She goes on to list the very large number of products that qualify as “ultra-processed food” according to the neo-puritans. Many of us would describe them as simply “processed food”, or indeed just “food”.

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.

It is as if she has a window into my soul. It’s true. I buy many of these items all the time. Until recently, I didn’t think it was a problem. To be honest, I’m still not convinced it is a problem. The claim that they cause cancer comes from a rather sketchy preliminary study and the claim that they cause weight gain seems to be due to over-consumption rather than any inherent dangers in curry paste and “shop-bought hummus”.

In any case, I shouldn’t feel ashamed because I am not responsible for what I put in my grocery basket:

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.

She is talking here about making a meal from scratch. That, after all, is the only logical solution to the conundrum posed by the UPF threat.

I don’t really cook anything from scratch. The closest I get to making a meal from scratch is when I have a fry up and a Sunday roast, both of which involve UPFs (sausages, bacon, horseradish sauce, stock cubes, etc.). I might have a boiled egg from time to time but even that involves toast and therefore UPFs.

The reason I don’t cook meals from scratch is very simple: I don’t want to. It’s not because I’m tired or stressed. It isn’t because I’m lazy. It hasn’t got anything to do with advertising. It is for the same reason I don’t brew my own beer or cut my own hair. I have better things to do with my time and I wouldn’t do a good job of it if I tried. I am therefore eternally grateful to “Big Food” for making it possible for me to go through life without ever having to bake my own bread or make my own peanut butter.

How is society arranged to force UPFs down our throat? According to Seal, healthy food is simply inaccessible.

… as Henry Dimbleby notes in his new book, Ravenous, [the problem] is urban planning, which means more than three million people cannot access shops that sell fresh produce.

That is not what Dimbleby says and it is not the claim being made. The claim is that 3.3 million people cannot access shops selling fresh ingredients within 15 minutes by public transport. As I said in my review of his book, I’ll bet my bottom dollar that the vast majority of them live in the countryside and have a car. It has nothing to do with urban planning.

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.

If the solution isn’t about manufacturers changing the food, then what moral question are they supposed to answer? Are they expected to solve all the “social problems” that supposedly make people buy crisps and sliced bread? What are they anyway, these social problems that have got so much worse in the last fifty years that they explain the huge rise in obesity? It isn’t working hours or low pay. Incomes have doubled over that period in real terms, even at the bottom end of the distribution. The only thing that seems to correlate with the decline in home-cooking is greater female participation in the labour market, which The Observer presumably approves of.

How, exactly, should society be arranged to get us out of the “dystopian nightmare” of convenience foods? If “eat-less-exercise-more” is an ineffective approach to weight management, as she claims, what would be an effective way?

We make our food choices into a moral maze instead of saying: it’s food that is broken and needs to change. Not us.

So the food does need to change after all? In that case, let’s see the plan for mass-producing safe and palatable food without the use of preservatives, stabilisers and emulsifiers. While you’re at it, can you explain what is wrong with preservatives, stabilisers and emulsifiers in the first place? Because this is all starting to sound like a generic whine about modernity based on fatuous appeals to nature and, yes, snobbery.