As we’ve been musing for some time now the whole idea of Ultraprocessed Foods, UPFs, seems very odd. However, we think we now grasp what’s going on:

But UPFs are a different beast – they are the products of industrial processing methods that we cannot replicate in a domestic situation. They include pretty much all carbonated drinks, ice-cream, biscuits, margarines, pastries, cakes, breakfast cereals, stock cubes, infant formulas and mass-produced packaged breads.

That’s Rousseau. There was some past moment of rural idyll when human life was perfect. We have erred by having that Big Bad Capitalism and factories and mass production and abandoning our Polanyi-sque web of mutual interdependence and gone for the impersonality of Smithian market exchange.

Tsk, should have remained under that tree awaiting the acorns to bounce on the bounce.

That’s all it is and as that’s all it is we can pay it no mind. Except, of course, to insist that those infected with the delusion have no power over us.

We might also suggest a little solution too. If Big Bad Capitalism were to produce, in those factories and for that impersonal market exchange, a little kit that could, if used, perform those industrial processes in the home then UPF would vanish back into the aether from which it should never have emerged. It doesn’t have to perform such processes well, or efficiently, or economically. Just the fact that they can be done in the home kitchen kills the UPF idea stone dead.

If, that is, simply telling the wowsers to go boil their heads doesn’t work.