All this nasty ultraprocessed food we’re eating:
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.
That’s simply insane ignorance. The history of working hours over the past century has been an increase in feamle paid working hours. A decrease in male paid working hours. A massive decrease in female unpaid working hours in the household (recall the charwoman in Keynes? Who is going to do nothing for ever and ever?) and a smaller decrease in male unpaid working hours in the household. The net of the four being a massive increase in leisure hours for both men and women.
We have more spare time today, not less.
Now, of course, we can go back to preparing all meals from scratch. That is going to mean someone – and it’ll be the woman most of the time – doesn’t have a job, a career, that fulfillment. They’re barefoot in the kitchen.
Somehow didn’t think The Observer was going to get all Andrew Tate on society.
Just the grossest, most horrendous, ignorance.
Normally I wouldn’t do this, but your typo of meals is unfortunate and humorous.
“For most of us, it’s almost impossible to make so-called “good” food choices”:
Big Mac medium Extra value meal = £5.39 x four = £21.56.
Tesco = whole large chicken @ £4.80 + 1 kg loose carrots @ 60p per kilo + 2.5kg All Rounder potatoes @ £1.25, 1kg Parsnips @ £1.24 per kg, 1 kg Broccoli @ £1.94 per kg, 1 kg Graden Peas £1.35, Gravy granules £0.94p, 2 litres Diet Coke £1.99 = £14.22.
(The only fly in the ointmemnt is that current energy prices mean it’ll likely cost you £20 to cook it all….).
“For most of us,
it’s almost impossiblewe’re just too fucking lazy to make so-called “good” food choices”:Marmite, bread and apples are cheap, healthy and delicious.
@Addolff
Preparing that lot for the table’d be about an hour’s work spread over a two hour period. (So depends how one deploys the opportunities of the other hour.)
My time’s worth a lot more than £7:34/hour.
The article mentions 59 types of obesity – so one for each gender.
Chuck some meat in the air-fryer and it’s done in a few minutes. Cook some high-fat beef mince at the weekend and eat it throughout the week with eggs. Minimal washing-up to do. It’s never been quicker or simpler – for everyone – to eat healthily.
This bit is interesting:
“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.”
I think she is trying to get away from the piss-poor definitions of “ultra-processed foods” that include stuff like tofu, tempeh, pate, and bread. These all undergo “proccesses”, and lots of them. Apparently now the danger lies in new foods. Stuff that was eaten by your great-great-great grandpa is apparently fine.
Which is why he lived for so long.
’Such foods are likely to be made by companies such as Unilever, PepsiCo or Nestlé.’
So..?
Don’t know about anyone else, but I find the BigMac Meal a quite wondrous thing. Since it contain good proportions of protein carbs & salad you could in fact live exclusively on them. And at the price, they’re about half what it costs for the equivalent in a proper restaurant without the faffing around. And hardly much more than putting the same together at home. I can never understand why people have such a down on McD’s, particularly when the alternative is order & hope in other unknown establishments
That’s based on experience in various European countries. The Brit capability of omitting both the fast & the food out of the fast-food concept & serving what’s left over might provoke different views.
Bloke in Spain,
“My time’s worth a lot more than £7:34/hour.”
Sure but for a lot of low-income parents, once you factor in tax, and that you can have leftovers for lunch etc, it probably is. Plus, can they substitute? Can they add an hour on and earn £10, or is it an 8 hour day and not cooking means watching more TV?
Digs receipt out…
potatoes 75p
cabbage 80p
cauliflower 100p
runner beans 139p
cooked chicken pieces 195p
£5.89
That will last me about four/five days. Veg into saucepan, couple of mint leaves from garden, gently boil until knife goes in, drain, plonk on plate, blib of butter, add cooked chicken, eat.
It seems only five minutes ago that the food hysterics were instructing us to swerve lightly processed food – butter – and eat ultra processed food – margarine.
Have any owned up to their 180 turn and apologised?
Of course it may be that most of them are too stupid even to notice the reversal. The rest are presumably too dishonest to care.
@BoM4 – agreed. Plus many people enjoy preparing family meals and consider it a valid use of their leisure time. I have no down on McDonalds but I’d rather cook and eat a roast chicken with the family.
McDonalds in the UK that is. It is much nicer than it is here and there’s more choice.
“Don’t know about anyone else, but I find the BigMac Meal a quite wondrous thing. Since it contain good proportions of protein carbs & salad you could in fact live exclusively on them. And at the price, they’re about half what it costs for the equivalent in a proper restaurant without the faffing around. And hardly much more than putting the same together at home. I can never understand why people have such a down on McD’s, particularly when the alternative is order & hope in other unknown establishments”
The down on McD’s is almost entirely about status. Like if I wanted to intrinsically criticise it, I don’t like thin chips much and there are better burgers (like Schwartz Bros in Bath). But most of the criticism is really about non-intrinsic things. Like it’s American, big business, not organic, sells meat, is not obscure, has plastic seating.
I almost never eat out at an average place. It’s McDonalds or it’s somewhere like Le Manoir. McDonalds is fuel. Le Manoir is cooking I can’t do.
I realised that going out to places like Pizza Express or a pub for Sunday lunch are just a huge amount of money. You start doing a comparison there, and it’s not £8/hour, it’s £50-75/hr. You’re paying £25 each for roast beef, and a whole joint with leftovers would be £30. Then there’s deserts and drinks at triple the price with 2 minutes of effort. And I don’t think it’s a rip off. I get why these places cost what they do, and they’re open about it. But I hear people talking about the cost of living crisis, but everyone’s still eating out like they were.
Lidl does 4 * 200g steaks for £7.99, delicious if lightly cooked a smattering of olive oil (cook below the smoke point) and seasoned to taste.
Throw in some steamed veggies, salt and a nob of butter and it’s easy peasy. Takes 30 minutes tops, most of which is steaming the veggies, which I do on a timer while I do other things.
21 Day Matured, British Beef Steaks
What about slow cooking? Takes very little time to prepare, just chuck everything into the bowl. Power used costs almost nothing, uses cheap meat cuts (which often taste better) and gets them vey tender. You can have it working for the whole day or overnight while you’re working or sleeping.
I know the general population are epsilon semi-morons, but expect better of someone writing for the Guardian.
Now, of course, we can go back to preparing all meals from scratch. That is going to mean someone – and it’ll be the woman most of the time…Now, of course, we can go back to preparing all meals from scratch. That is going to mean someone – and it’ll be the woman most of the time…
Too many women are obsessed with their physical appearance and view food as the enemy. I suspect many young men choose to do the cooking in their household or they would never eat a decent meal.
Ultra processed food is just the latest euphemism for “stuff I don’t approve of”.
Or looking it the contortions you could say that they view UPFs are like pornography, they know them when they see them.
It’s not the “processing” so much as the additives (flavouring, colouring and preservatives) that are involved.
I’m often reminded of the burger and fries still “Fresh looking” after 10 years. I mean what kind of Frankenfood is that? More importantly why would anybody eat something like that?
McDonald’s burger and fries still ‘fresh’ after 10 years
This assumes you have energy left after work (+commute) and that cooking is a skill you have. Cleaning up/shopping/planning takes almost as long as cooking!
So it’s much easier to buy the commercial muck if you have work 8-10 hours plus 2 hours of commuting.
As for eating making fat, well yes, but diets don’t work over time (and often make things much worse) and the constant shame&nag sermon is far more annoying to witness than having to look at land whales having a bad time with their body.
From what I have observed, the amount and quality of the food eaten is only tangentially related to obesity anyway, so the current ‘wisdom’ here doesn’t actually solve the problem, it just causes a lot of unhappiness all-round.
What good quality, timely food does is keep your system running smoothly. Ready meals will keep you going, just not as well, and over time this adds up, and more often than not, you just get ill instead of fat.
bis, “My time’s worth a lot more than £7:34/hour”.
Many would like to be as rich as you (not knocking, merely stating that you are in a position many others are not so fortunate to be in).
My ex does some beautiful hand crafted decorative items. Takes her a few hours each. I asked why she doesn’t sell them – she replied “people only want to pay pennies”.
To me, if it takes her two hours and she sells it for £5 profit, it’s £5 she would not have. Back in the day this sort of thing was called ‘Pin Money’.
MC – I love cooking, but as you say, I buy the stuff I can’t do meself.
BonM4 @ 11.38 = The legend that was Magnus Pyke – “There is no such thing as bad food, only bad diet”.
“The down on McD’s is almost entirely about status. ”
Correct. The dislike of McDonalds, Tesco, Starbucks, Wetherspoons et al by the chattering classes is pure class hatred thinly disguised as a critique of quality. The reason such places are derided is thats where the masses go to spend their money, and the Guardian reader class want to make it quite plain they don’t associate with the sub-human masses. Waitrose is a supermarket just like all the others, yet it never gets the hatred the others do. If Tesco open a store in a town they get called every name under the sun, how its destroying small shops etc etc, yet when Waitrose open one somewhere the very same people are delighted, because now they don’t have to drive so far to signal their virtue.
Jim,
I don’t get it. I shop at a mix of Waitrose, Tesco and Aldi. Waitrose does have some nicer stuff (and you pay for it), Aldi is a lot cheaper. But all the customers and staff are pleasant and polite.
I find there’s a fairly even spread of bellends or mean people across the classes. All you get hanging out with the upper classes is people more tapped into the upper class fashions, so you fit in with the upper classes, but that’s really just a waste of resources.
Simplest answer is RAB’s one.
Shop at Lidl, but carry it home in Waitrose bags.
The Guardian have run away from explaining how the number of people of healthy weight seems to be an all time high (healthy being BMI 22-32 afaik) with life expectancy while perhaps not advancing is not declining either.
Guardian policies such as CI 33-100 (Communism Index from exchange controls, price controls, state controlled water to state controlled food to state controlled everything) have an unparalleled record in reducing life expectancy.
“life expectancy while perhaps not advancing is not declining either.”
I think we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see more of the consequences of governments’ pandemic policies before we can be sure of that either way. There’s still a fair rate of excess deaths in many countries, including England & Wales. Few are attributed to Covid so the bulk are presumably governmental – vaccines, lockdowns, abandonment of NHS patients, imposed anxiety and stress, and so on.
My money is on increased death rates for years to come. We’ll see.
Afterthought: obvs miscarriages don’t count in the death figures. Do stillbirths?
@dearieme there was a Radio 4 More Or Less programme on the declining number of still births and rising number of early natal deaths a few years ago.
New technology allows you to better detect heartbeats in newborns who die soon after birth. Declaring that an early natal death means that a birth cert gets issued, the mother gets 8 weeks child benefit and maternity leave entitlements. It’s a compassionate thing to do but it’s moved the life expectancy figures by a tiny amount compared to previous tech which meant declaring a still-birth which didn’t affect life expectancy
It’s progress’s fault.
Much of the world would kill for extra calories. We in the first world live in fear of them.
So, we ought to ship all of those energy-dense UPF’s out to the third world peoples, who would all think they’d died and gone to heaven, and we can consume their bugs and weeds and “anything that moves.”
Bongo & Dearie: Something I’ve been pondering for a while. Miscarriage is often the body’s way of terminating a non-viable preganancy, better to stop using resources and try again. So, with all the effort put into reducing miscarriages, that’s surely increasing the likelyhood of bringing to term a non-viable pregnancy.
Yes – but yeeeees. You’re right, but I think – THINK! – that the miscarriage rate is greater than the reject the failures by a high enough margin that it doesn’t work out that way.
It’s entirely true that the Downs Syndrome rise in older mothers is about non-rejection of what might be the last use of the womb more than degradation in egg quality.
I am unpersuaded that’s true across all miscarriages.
“The down on McD’s is almost entirely about status. ”
Now here’s a thing. On my travels, I’ve used a lot McD’s out in rural France. Go to one on a Friday or Saturday evening or Sunday lunchtime, one sees the local middle class youth turning up there with their girlfiends in their shiny hatchbacks wearing their spotless Nike trainers & “I(heart) NY t-shirts. They eschewed the brasserie in the town for the edge of an industrial park & the status of dining at MickeyD’s.
John Galt
I’d disagree.
The reason the ‘ultra-processed’ stuff is evil is that it’s made by big, successful – often American – companies.
Marxists hate commercial success.
Julia M
See above 🙂
Anyone who thinks that ultra processed foods are a recent phenomenon needs to see what native California tribes needed to go through to process acorns for food.
And don’t get me started on grits…
Aren’t all these plant-replace-meats foods ultraprocessed? These are supposed to be the future though increasingly they look as if they’ll be in the past.
We would all have saved a lot of time (which could have been used up in the kitchen perhaps), if the post had just said,’Some moron writing in the Guardian/Observer said…’.
@ bis
The BigMac may be a wondrous thing to people without tastebuds, but not to me.