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The opposition of the raw and the cooked, to borrow from the title of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s most cited though not best-read book, seems basic to our ideas of nature and culture. A raw prawn is part of the sea; broiled, it becomes part of our art. But for Lévi-Strauss the real work was done by the third leg of his “culinary triangle”: the rotting. Spoilage, after all, is a natural tendency of food and the most urgent reason we transform nature into culture—we’re desperately trying to keep what we’re about to eat from going bad.
The line between the raw and the cooked is, to be sure, nebulous; a plate of sushi is both raw and cooked, “made,” in the cultural sense, by a knife and seaweed. Sushi is the dream of pure sensation, but herring is the normal state of life. The more consequential point is that cooked meat decays more slowly than raw; pickling and curing postpone the unpalatable end even longer. We save the world from rotting by rolling it in salt, smoking it in maple fires, preserving it in brine. Nature is always going bad, and the most immediate form of “good” that humans know is keeping that from happening. Sisyphus’ famous boulder, rolled uphill and crashing down again, is better represented in our daily lives by the nova we eat on Sunday morning’s bagel—salmon saved from spoiling by smoke and salt—with the knowledge that lox, too, has a sell-by date. Its own bagel-shaped boulder ultimately rolls back down.
The raw, the cooked, and the rotten: it sounds like a Sergio Leone movie. The odd thing is that, in the realm of culinary culture, the processed and the pickled are now in a kind of gunfight: we vilify the processed, heroize the pickled. Nothing is more fashionable than sauerkraut. (Fifteen pages of a new bible of gastronomy, derived from the ultra-chic Paris restaurant Septime, are devoted to things bathed in acid and marinated at length in jars, without a cream sauce in sight.) Yet what makes something processed rather than preserved turns out to be as difficult to define as the more abstract-seeming difference between the cultural and the natural, and between the two lie the usual snares of usage—the sort of snare that can hoist the unwary into the trees, as in “Predator,” which is, come to think of it, also a tale of the raw and the cooked, though with humans as the natural objects rather than as the cultural subjects.
In the new book “Ultra-Processed People” (Norton), the British doctor and medical journalist Chris van Tulleken bravely turns himself into a guinea pig to explore the ins and outs of ultra-processed food (U.P.F.)—basically, food made up of substances that you would never find at home. He has in mind all those cereals and snacks and ice creams we see on supermarket shelves with lists of ingredients as long as the Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad. We learn that a U.K. snack known as the Turkey Twizzler is “a paste of turkey protein, modified carbohydrates (pea starch, rice and grain flours, maize starch, dextrose), industrial oils (coconut and rapeseed) and emulsifiers” that’s combined with acidity regulators, flavorings, and antioxidants before being fashioned into a helix. (A helpful scientist calls it “an industrially produced edible product.”) Van Tulleken “wanted this food,” he reports of his U.P.F. diet. “But at the same time, I was no longer enjoying it. Meals took on a uniformity: everything seemed similar, regardless of whether it was sweet or savoury. I was never hungry. But I was also never satisfied.” He gained weight, and so did his family: “It was impossible to stop the kids from eating my Coco Pops, slices of pizza, oven chips, lasagne, chocolate.” Sacrificing his health for science’s sake, he drinks a can of Diet Coke every morning for breakfast “and gradually began craving Diet Coke with every meal and between meals.” He devours McDonald’s and KFC and countless lesser treats of British make, to find out what happens to a normal body when overexposed to the stuff.
The book isn’t just a chronicle of his diet-induced damage; page after exhausting page is given over to the foundations of nutritional science—beginning with bacteria and slime munching on rocks—along with thickets of pieties so dense that they seem ultra-processed themselves. (We are told to say of someone not that he “is obese” but, rather, that he “has obesity.”) The grim tale eventually takes van Tulleken on a long flight to backcountry Brazil, where he discovers that the Nestlé Corporation has brought its snacks, by boat, to Indigenous peoples, with the predictable effect of making Amazonian kids prefer junk food to the ancient and healthy staples of roots and berries. “I have not found any evidence that there were children with diet-related diabetes in these parts of Brazil until enterprises like the Nestlé boat,” he writes. We are being purposefully addicted, and on a planetary scale, he concludes. Ultra-processed foodstuffs will alter our children’s brains and enslave them to a global capitalist economy.
Van Tulleken slowly sickens from his food, and the reader sickens with him. It’s true that his warnings about insidious mind control are dubiously reminiscent of earlier warnings about the smartphone, the boob tube, the horror comic, and the dime novel. Still, his account of what happens to our food during its trip to our gut, and the connection that bad food has to the epidemics of obesity and diabetes—“underlying comorbidities” of the type that turned COVID from a cold to a killer—is persuasive and scary.
At the same time, pondering his pages suggests a more complicated taxonomy than the one he offers. What, truly, is and is not processed? Some of the foods on his dangerous diet—like lasagna and chocolate—have been part of many people’s diets long before the U.P.F. industry arose, and his lasagna, though supermarket-bought rather than homemade, isn’t what we usually mean by junk food. A long discussion concerns whether Heinz baked beans, a staple of the British working-class diet, counts as U.P.F. (They make an appearance in the great 1967 album “The Who Sell Out, ” both on the cover and as a song title.) He finally gives the beans a dispensation, more, one feels, on the ground of class than of kind. Clearly, demarcating U.P.F. from its neighbors has some of the inscrutable qualities of any dietary religion, not unlike debates about what is and is not kosher, and though one is a product of industrial civilization and the other handed down by G-d, both enterprises share a slightly mystical insistence on purity.
Here, as so often in reformist food literature, it is not always easy to separate prudence from puritanism. Van Tulleken introduces in one chapter the concept of “sensory lies”—the result of flavorings added to something otherwise insipid. But it would be hard to say why the centuries-old staple of curried rice isn’t an offender. For that matter, the vegetables and fruits we harvest are, as van Tulleken knows, hardly the deliverances of nature. The work of cultivation and breeding has produced apples in the supermarket that are, to some of us, unduly sweet; we seek out the now hard-to-find, tart, low-sugar heirloom Winesap, and regard the Honeycrisp as a sensory lie of another kind, a poisoned apple. There’s also the irony that the high-end “molecular gastronomy” pioneered by the Adrià brothers at the famous Spanish restaurant El Bulli involved the deployment of commercial techniques for the ends of culinary creativity. Modernist cuisine, lovingly detailed by Nathan Myhrvold in five volumes, is, as one dour wit has said, “just ultra-processed food for rich people.”
That hazy ideal of purity has long lingered like a halo above the discourse about food additives. The estimable Michael Pollan, for instance, tells us that “Great-Grandmother never cooked with guar gum, carrageenan, mono- and diglycerides, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, modified food starch, soy lecithin and any number of other ingredients found in processed food.” But why is guar gum, extracted from one seed, any more artificial than cornstarch, extracted from another (originally by means of a method patented in the eighteen-fifties by a British industrialist)? Some version of carrageenan, which comes from the seaweed Irish moss, has been used in cooking for centuries; Great-Grandmother certainly used the lecithin from egg yolks, if not from soy oil, to emulsify her sauces. Vegetable protein can get hydrolyzed when proteins are exposed to acids, which is why hydrolyzed vegetable proteins are a regular product of fermentation and pickling. Technical names can make the familiar seem alien. We’d be put off if something were described as a concoction of luteolin, hydroxytyrosol, apigenin, oleic acid, and oleocanthal—but they’re all natural components of your extra-virgin olive oil.
“Wow! I guess Robert finally got a date.”
Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap
Urged to eat only food our great-grandmother would recognize as food, we may forget, too, that she would have prized white pastry flour (chemically bleached flour has been available since 1906) and oleomargarine and the hydrogenated oils, like Crisco, that became common soon after 1900. And are the people who follow their nineteenth-century forebears and dine on hominy (from alkali-treated corn), pork belly, and lard-saturated greens—or, for that matter, fat-streaked and highly saline pastrami—making a healthy choice? The history of humanity is the history of processing foodstuffs—by fire, by smoke, by pounding and pulverizing—and it can be hard to find a boundary between those ever more hallowed traditional kitchen practices and the modern ones that we are asked to condemn.
The questions that van Tulleken raises about “addiction” are more profound—exactly because the question of addiction seems to spread so readily from the food on our plates to the phones in our hands and our children’s. Van Tulleken is preoccupied by the issue of whether ultra-processed food retrains our brains, and he finds that when we consume U.P.F. new patterns are indeed grooved into our neuronal circuits, producing ever sharper hungers. Yet, unless we believe in ineffable phantoms of thought, every emotion and compulsion must be registered somewhere in our brains. This is as true of my taste for Sondheim as of my taste for sugar. I am, certainly, a sugar addict; I have a hard time drinking my morning coffee without a cube or two. But I am also a print addict of a kind, and will panic if I don’t have a book to read on a long plane flight. Presumably, both addictions show up as some pattern of activated neurons; one seems unhealthy and one positive only because of how they affect the world outside myself, not because of how they light up inside me.
Besides, dietary addictions of this kind long preceded the introduction of ultra-processed food. The Scottish poet and aphorist Don Paterson has a hair-raising chapter in his marvellous new memoir, “Toy Fights,” about sugar addiction in the Scottish family and town where he grew up—just as intense as the kind of food addiction van Tulleken ascribes to contemporary techniques, though the processing here is the ancient one of sugarcane refinement. Such addictions of food or drink, if properly called so, hardly seem an artifact of our era. William Hogarth’s nightmarish “Gin Lane”—capturing a curse of the English working classes—was an image from the Enlightenment.
So one can wonder how helpful it is to characterize our penchant for junk food as an addiction. Everything we like can be cast as an addiction in some sense, but Edward St. Aubyn’s unforgettable portrait of addiction in his Patrick Melrose novels is not of substances we like but of substances we hate and can’t resist anyway. An element of horror in the compulsion seems necessary to the concept of addiction. Heroin, St. Aubyn writes of his unfortunate hero, “landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.” Nobody feels that way about Cocoa Puffs.
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