How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods

Even something as simple as Yogurt is usually insanely sweet / sugary compared to European variants. Ingredients that are banned in Europe are regularly found in products, and something as simple as bread has a ton of preservatives (as the article shows).

And I'm vegetarian, I assume for people who eat meat there's the additional concern of antibiotics resistance due to the antibiotics given to livestock.

With grocery prices going up, what little progress has been made might get reversed, unfortunately. Making America healthy again means making non-ultraprocessed groceries available to everyone & cheaper, and ensuring that working families have time to cook. Pressuring Coke to create a new product with sugar is not going to move the needle.

The concern isn't eating meat from an animal treated with antibiotics infecting you with resistant bacteria.

The concern is treating animals with antibiotics puts evolutionary pressure towards breeding resistant bacteria that spill into the ecosystem and eventually get back to us. But not through meat consumption, it effects everyone regardless of diet.

People assume ultra processed came about due to demand side factors but it’s actually more about supply side supply chain management and the scale in size of the US. By processing the food into more constructed ingredients they always enter a state where they’re easy to package and distribute across vast distances in that state. They can then be combined into food that is palatable through additives. Indeed the process disrupts the natural structure and content of the food - but that was necessary to feed everyone at a reasonable price a variety of foods grown across a vast distance at a reasonable price.

Obviously this led to demand because the food was more complete and varied than was generally available at the fresh grocer. Convenience was a side effect as well that was well capitalized.

These arguments actually hold until pretty recently. Even in my lifetime grocery stores growing up were pretty stark affairs with a few expensive fresh products that you splurged on for a special dinner like thanksgiving. Daily food was basically processed rations with a fancy box. It’s only in my adulthood, and the lifetime of the millennials, that there was really much optionality as supply chains globally and fresh food distribution with widely available refrigerated trucking with ethylene gas storage proliferated, free trade opened, etc.

Before all this, in my parents generation, the other option for ultra processed foods was malnutrition and wide spread rickets. It was when we tried to draft for WWII and the majority of rural young men were so malnourished as to be unfit for war that things really changed.

To sit today and compare the options of fresh food available and wonder how we got here ignores the reality of how we got here. But we are here so indeed, eat fresh and be happy we have free trade!