Believe it or not, an insightful way to really “get” the value of ultra-local is to examine its extreme opposite: ultra-processed. Which these days is very on-point, because rising concerns about UPFs may well be moving us toward self-sufficiency gardens.
UPFs account for some 60% of the calories we consume and 75% of our overall diet, projected to reach 90% by 2028. They’ve become the poster-child, the beating heart of the industrial food system. Yet ultimately, they may turn out be a dead-end due to bad health outcomes. To see why, we’ll explore whether they’ve become locked into a chain of ultra co-dependencies, held together by externalizing their true costs. And if that’s the case, what to do about those outcomes.
But first, a brief definition. It was Carlos Monteiro, a professor of nutrition at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, who classified food into four groups based on the degree to which they’ve been processed:
1. Whole or slightly processed (e.g., whole fruits, vegetables, whole grains, meats, eggs, tea)
2. Processed culinary ingredients (e.g., cooking oil, salt, sugar, maple syrup)
3. Processed (made from some combination of groups 1 and 2 (e.g., canned beans or fish, salted nuts, sauerkraut, fresh artisanal cheeses and breads)
4. Ultra-processed (foods industrially formulated by extracting and manipulating components mostly from groups 2 and 3, and adding chemical ingredients, with few or no direct inputs from group 1 (e.g., hot dogs, soft drinks, cold breakfast cereals, ice cream, frozen TV dinners, fish and chicken “nuggets”, distilled alcoholic beverages)
This scheme doesn’t rate how healthy foods are. Nonetheless, UPFs have come under increasing attack of late as hundreds of studies have linked them to a wide range of the bad health outcomes now driving much of the UPF narrative.
Feeding into this story are the touchstones of UPFs: cheap, tasty, and convenient. That is, the ultra-processed versions of those illustrious three. Which are not by any means the only way food can be economical, delicious, and easy to produce and consume, as you will see in an upcoming post on ULFs (ultra-local foods).
Is UPF-style cheap possible without ultra-processing?
Consider the challenging landscape of food prices. To begin with, cheap food is deeply baked into US psyche. The cost of U.S. food is pretty much the lowest in world as a percent of income, which makes it a no-go—psychologically—for the industry to risk raising prices unless it’s forced to. The market would tolerate a little of that, but not much. Second, the complex cogs of the mechanical food chain are too deeply mired in co-dependency to reduce prices by tinkering with the system. Though that’s not for lack of trying. One attractive but futile idea is to adopt regenerative agriculture – a whole separate topic that will be explored in a later post).
Third, food inflation is already rising a good bit faster than the general rate of inflation. Fourth, climate change will hit industrial agriculture—and thus food prices—especially hard. In fact, it’s already starting to do that. Potato chips, that icon of UPFs, are 50% more expensive than they were a couple years ago because of warming weather in Idaho and Washington state—where most “chipper” potatoes are grown. Fifth, on average, UPFs cost about half as much as their minimally processed counterparts.1As if all that’s not enough, we have accelerating food recalls, bird flu rapidly spreading and becoming more contagious, and other market upheavals such as Trump’s tariffs and removals of many federal aids to agriculture. Farmers are alarmed.
All this means that the only way industry can hold food prices down, at least for now, is to keep churning out the UPF style of cheap. And that requires as much ultra-processing as possible.
Can UPF-style tasty be produced without ultra-processing?
It’s hard to see how, in as much as the UPF version of tasty is the direct result of industrial manipulation. Excessive salt, sugar, fat and calories (found in some level 2 processed foods) are factors, but not the key components that make UPFs so tasty. UPFs feature a unique and effective blend of adulterations that can be achieved only through physical treatments that complement gums, flavor and texture enhancers, stabilizers, preservatives, and other additives. Doubtful? Do a thought experiment: ask your tongue to imagine the tastiness of, say canned beans or any other Level 2 processed food compared to that of your favorite ice cream, French fries, fast-food pizza, bacon, ketchup, or most other such. If your tongue is anything like that of the average person, I’d bet it will report that the former is good but latter raises tasty to the level approaching irresistible. That result depends entirely on level 4 ultra-processing.
Is UPF-style convenient feasible without ultra-processing?
How could it be? The industry has prioritized little-to-pay, quick-to-buy, and ready-to-eat, widely and easily accessible in a smorgasbord of venues. Fast food outlets are almost everywhere, usually with drive-thru pickup. You can get hot dog takeouts at the local bodega while your gas tank is filling up. Handy, because 20% of all meals in the U.S. are now eaten in a car, driving to or from work. You can do all your grocery shopping under one roof at the supermarket. Shrink-wrapped, microwaveable frozen Pizza and TV dinners, entire aisles full of soft drinks or chips, puffs, pretzels, and flavored popcorns. And much more. It’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe we’re entitled to, any time we want it. Could it be achieved without ultra-processing? No way. Only UPFs can deliver that degree and style of convenience, because that’s precisely what they were designed to deliver. Foods produced at only the 1-3 levels of processing are not configured to match it, and thus cannot.
Can foods be ultra-processed without externalizing costs?
No, mainly because UPFs are so cheap, but also because they’re ultra-tasty and ultra-convenient. The only way the industry can afford to produce those features is to externalize two thirds of the cost of making and delivering them. But given the now weekly bad press, how long can that hold? Thus far, the industry seems to realize that it has no choice but to continue to externalize costs. So what to do? One potential solution is to shift to the next generation of UPFs—lab-produced food goo such as synthetic fat derivatives, fermented bacteria, cultured meats, and Chlorella algae. The hope is cast them as healthier than the present version while maintaining the cheap, tasty, and convenient appeal.
Good luck with that. All of the goos face daunting hurdles of public acceptance as well as massive development and infrastructure build-up from scratch—adding even more costs to externalize. For sure, you won’t see them on grocery store shelves anytime soon. Yes, “Impossible” meats are sometimes cited as quick next-generation success stories. However, they, too are ultra-processed and thus face the same challenges as their brethren.
Is it possible to re-formulate UPFs to be genuinely healthy?
Not when the bad health outcomes are due to dismantling whole food integrity. As mentioned earlier, bad health outcomes of UPFs are not due mainly to salt, sugar, fat, and calories, even though those factors in excess are indeed unhealthy. Rather, the source of such outcomes is the industrial practice of tearing whole foods apart, manipulating them with heat, pressure, extrusion, or atomization, adding new and/or “fortified” ingredients, and then putting the re-jiggered pieces back together. Nor would next-generation food goos ride to the rescue; they would be even more deeply processed.
But PepsiCo is betting I’m wrong. It has announced that in addition to reducing salt, sugar, and unhealthy fats in some of its snack foods, it will start replacing toxic dyes and flavors with natural substitutes to make the snacks healthier2. In other words, the unhealthiness is due to toxic ingredients. Getting rid of artificial additives is a good idea, but the latest evidence tells us that the problem is mainly due to the extreme processing. PepsiCo is also betting they can reduce or replace ingredients without sacrificing at least some of the tastiness, visual appeal, and low cost that define UPFs. I’m betting they can’t, and more importantly, that UPFs can’t be rendered healthy with such superficial manipulation.
So the chain of ultras can’t be avoided or fixed, UPFs generate unhealthy outcomes at the current rate of national consumption, and they can’t be re-formulated to be healthy. That leaves the industry only one option to save them: convincing the public that those bad health outcomes are not really all that bad.
Disappearing Bad
Processed is processed, period.
From the descriptions and examples described in the NOVA categories, it can seem like there’s no clear distinction between processed and ultra-processed. Industrial interests pounce on this perception with claims that since (according to them) there’s no unequivocal difference between the two, there’s little or none at all. Hence, no problem with UPFs. And some journalists and dieticians are only too happy to agree. Never mind that Michael Pollan has made the distinction clear and simple: “Processed food you could make at home. An ultra-processed food is one that contains ingredients no normal person has at home and requires equipment you could only find in a factory.”1
Yet that depiction may not be all that easy to apply in the grocery store just by reading labels. So in an effort to improve on the NOVA model, a new scoring system, FPro3, features a table classifying hundreds of foods according to the degree to which they’ve been processed. Unfortunately, it’s based on nutrient content rather than degree of industrial manipulation. As we’ve seen, mechanical and chemical adulteration, rather than content alone, is the principal source of bad health outcomes. Nevertheless, FPro could be a helpful next step in the ongoing debate about what’s relatively safe to eat and what isn’t.
Appropriating natural
Another approach is to imply that okay, it’s a UPF but it can still be natural; all we have to do is convince the customer. Think UPF ads featuring bucolic cows grazing in a lush green meadow under blue skies. Cascades of freshly-diced veggies or fruits gaily tossed into the air. Inspiring claims of nourishing nature’s this or that, brimming with naturally-crafted wholesomeness. It’s another time-tested strategy. But highly misleading.
The clearly healthy UPF meal
A third approach is to create examples of a supposedly healthy meal by throwing together a few debatably typical UPF items into what’s portrayed as a normal breakfast, lunch, or supper: “See, UPFs aren’t so bad after all. In fact, they’re perfectly fine.” The problem with this claim is that the great majority of UPFs cannot fit into such a fantasy meal.
UPFs can be part of a healthy diet
Except that they’re designed to be far more than just “part” of a “healthy” diet. The reality (can’t emphasize it enough) is that 75% of our diet is already UPFs and is expected to rise to 90% by 2028. Yet I’ve seen the modest-consumption-of-UPFs-is-healthy claim more than once. This tack appeals to the seemingly logical argument that an occasional few potato chips, dip, and a Pepsi is harmless. Right, until you slide down that slippery slope of tasty, cheap, and convenient. All of which, all too often, and all too successfully, entices you to far more than occasional consumption.
Full disclosure, I enjoy an occasional UPF myself. However, the many years I spent teaching environmental science and sustainability—and extensively studying food systems and their effects—keep me from over-indulging. Even then, I would never claim that a small dish of ice cream (though not the kind that holds together when it starts melting due to gooey, sticky emulsifiers) is an integral part of a healthy diet.
UPFs can be nutritious.
This claim was addressed in the discussion above about potentially healthy UPFs. In short, no they can’t be, for the reasons given.
Goodbye, level 4 UPFs. Hello, level 5 (?)
Another option is to double down on UPFs by replacing them with what we might call level 5 processed foods; these are the food goos, also described above.
One of them, lab-cultured meat, has generated intense opposition from the meat industry. So much so that it has muscled some state legislatures into introducing bills that prohibit even research on it. Basically, meat interests are terrified because of how quickly the Impossible Burger got a solid foothold in the fast-food market (with more such impossibles on they way).
Equally alarming to Big Ag is that some of these second-generation UPFs are being marketed as a “farm-free” way to feed a still-ballooning global population. They would also gain environmental plaudits by vanquishing ag-related greenhouse gas emissions, water and energy use, and pollution. Even though that won’t happen overnight, lab-grown meats could turn out to be more of a headache than a boon for the industrial food system.
By the way, I once, at a Burger King, tried an Impossible Burger myself. I knew that it consisted of black bean and potato protein, GMO soy and yeast, vegetable oils and other additives, including vitamins, and was high in saturated fats and sodium. So I was curious to see how it compared to a real hamburger (which I hadn’t had in a good while). I omitted everything but the bun and a little mustard and ketchup—no French fries or drinks—to get the most objective experience possible. It did taste a lot like beef, but the odd thing was that after I’d finished it, I felt like I hadn’t really had anything to eat; there was this strange sensation of hollowness, even though I could detect that there was something in my stomach. The only real source of satisfaction was the lonely, lingering aftertaste of mustard and ketchup—full-fledged UPF nostalgia. A friend of mine said he’d had more or less the same experience.
How could you be so heartless?
I’ve even seen an appeal to guilt: claiming that those who disparage UPFs are being cruel to low-income people, who (accurately enough) depend on UPFs because they’re so cheap. As if it wasn’t the big chain supermarkets who drove out neighborhood access to small local grocery stores—with affordable whole foods—in the first place. Those little stores, of course, were replaced by convenience stores with junk food. Still not satisfied, the industry encourages UPF sales in every way it can. For instance, by inducing vendors to prominently feature specials on “Big Gulp” soft drinks and the like to coincide with the release dates of food stamps.
Big Food, Big Problem
To get back to the original point, because the industrial system has put most of its eggs into the bulging UPF basket, how much of rejection can it weather if the public doesn’t fall for the deny, delay, and mislead strategies to disappear the doubts? What if, instead of the projected year-on-year increase of 7%, we see a 3% annual drop? Can the industry absorb that and still be profitable? If not (and I don’t see how it could), at what point does it not only stop digging itself deeper into its self-inflicted hole, but start pulling out of it? And given the degree to which it’s locked into its chain of ultras, as described above, how would it even do that? And what will that cost it? These are the big questions in my mind, because even a relatively small disenchantment with UPFs would rock Big Food to its core. At the same time, it would help pave the way for ULFs. Stay tuned.
1Williams, Z. 2024. The man who warned us about UPFs: Michael Pollan on his 25-year fight with the food industry. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/jun/06/the-man-who-warned-us-about-upfs-michael-pollan-on-his-25-year-fight-with-the-food-industry#:~:text=%E2%80%9CHe%20labelled%20and%20defined%20ultra,only%20find%20in%20a%20factory.%E2%80%9D
2Whitelocks, S. 2025. America's largest food company makes major recipe change to appease RFK Jr that'll change taste of snacks. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14659771/food-giant-recipe-change-rfk-jr-dyes-additives.html
3Youmshahekian, L. 2025. Which foods are the most ultraprocessed? New system ranks them. SCI AM. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/which-foods-are-the-most-ultraprocessed-new-system-ranks-them/