49 pages • 1 hour read
Chris van TullekenUltra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “But I Already Paid for This!”
Part 4, Chapter 15 Summary: “Dysregulatory Bodies”
Van Tulleken examines the system for regulating new additives to food. He looks at corn oil, a new (2017) oil derived from the corn mash used to produce ethanol for biofuel, which the company Corn Oil ONE wanted to use for human food. In terms of the regulatory process in the US, Corn Oil ONE had three options. First, it could apply for a full review of the product by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal food additive regulator, and have corn oil formally listed as an approved food additive. Although not requiring the same level of scrutiny as for a new drug, “it would mean submitting a large volume of data to the FDA” and “might take several years” (226).
However, companies can also apply to have the new additive considered as GRAS, “generally recognized as safe” (228). To be considered for this second category, firms have to send the FDA some data. This was what was done with corn oil. While the FDA can request further data and inspect sites, van Tulleken points out that the FDA has neither the resources nor the personnel to meaningfully do this. They have only 100 employees and a $1 billion budget to supervise a multi-billion-dollar industry and regulation of over 10,000 chemicals.
Lastly, firms can opt for “self-determination” when it comes to a new additive (229). With this, “you can simply decide whether you think your product is safe and put it in food” (229). This rule has been in place since 1997, in part to deal with a backlog of GRAS applications.
Overall, these rules mean that the food industry and new proposed additives are woefully underregulated, with the burden of proof regarding new substance’s safety falling on civil society groups. Since 2000, there have been over 786 new food additives added to the food supply but only 10 applications for FDA approval in the same time period. This has meant that 98.7% of new additives are “self-determined.”
Part 4, Chapter 16 Summary: “UPF Destroys Traditional Diets”
Van Tulleken explores how UPF displaces traditional diets, especially in developing and emerging economies. He uses the example of Nestle in the Amazon basin in Brazil. In 2010, Nestle used a floating supermarket to travel down the Amazon, selling UPF products to towns and villages along the river. The cheapness of Nestle products along with their novelty and sweetness allowed them to undercut and displace the local cuisine based on whole foods from the Amazon rainforest. Within a short time, UPF products in general, and those of Nestle in particular, had become the dominant part of the local diet.
Citing the town of Fruteira Pomar, van Tulleken explains how prior to Nestle’s barge, there had been no UPF in the local shops or supermarket. As he says, “[T]he tiniest shops in town now stock Nestle produce, along with other UPF from other manufacturers from floor to ceiling” (249). Thanks to the boat, customers now demand UPF.
Van Tulleken also argues that where UPF does not displace local cuisine entirely, it absorbs local cuisine and then recreates UPF versions of it. This process can be seen, for example, in the case of fried chicken, which was originally a staple of Black culture in the Southern states of the US. It has now been coopted and sold back to minority groups in UPF form as KFC. This replacement or cooption of traditional diets with UPF has had disastrous consequences for low- and middle-income countries. For example, in Mali between 1980 and 2015, obesity rates increased by 550%, corresponding to the introduction of UPF into the diet. This has also coincided with large rises in heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. These increases are especially destructive and life-threatening because they occur in countries without the health care infrastructure needed for treatment of these diseases.
Part 4, Chapter 17 Summary: “The True Cost of Pringles”
Van Tulleken looks at the additional costs of UPF beyond its effect on individual health and the related destruction of traditional diets in emerging economies. One of the least conspicuous of these costs is the money governments spend to fight litigation from UPF companies so that they can avoid paying tax, as well as the UPF tax avoidance itself if the company is successful. As van Tulleken says, even if you do not eat UPF, “you seem to pay for them twice: you pay the subsidy when they are untaxed and you pay for the lawyer” of the government to fight UPF cases (254).
The second major external cost is environmental damage, especially in terms of contribution to global warming. The mechanical processing required for UPF uses large amounts of fossil fuels relative to the production of non-UPF. UPF also involves the clearing of rainforests to allow for mass production of soy, a base for UPF, undermining the carbon-reducing potential of the rainforest. Thirdly, UPF promotes antibiotic resistance in human populations. Significant amounts of antibiotics are used to produce UPF meat to compensate for poor animal welfare on UPF-supplying farms. Such excess antibiotic use promotes the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which then infect humans via insects, rain, and wind. Finally, UPF production has led to a massive amount of plastic pollution from UPF bottles and packaging.
Part 4 Analysis
As van Tulleken says, if you look at the websites of UPF companies, you might believe that these “are not food companies at all but rather charities committed to improving the environment” (268). Yet he argues that, beyond the rhetoric and public relations gestures, the UPF industry is catastrophically bad for the environment. Firstly, “processing itself is very energy intensive” and involves “many stages of heating, grinding and chopping and recombining” (264). This requires huge quantities of fossil fuels being burned. Such burning would be unnecessary if people simply ate whole foods rather than sending those same foods through a complex system of processing and modification. That is not even considering the energy needed for capital. UPF factories require industrial machinery, mining operations, the building of machinery, and energy-intensive supply chains before factories are even functional.
Then there are the supply chains themselves. As van Tulleken notes, “Many UPF products contain ingredients from four or five continents,” and many of these “will be shipped more than once” (265). A given UPF may contain palm oil from Indonesia, soy from Brazil, wheat from the US, and flavorings from Germany. These different ingredients need to then be shipped and combined through multiple stages of processing and packaging, often in different countries. This is before being shipped again to markets in different parts of the world. This process is highly energy intensive relative to producing and consuming whole foods in a local area. Finally, there is the question of whether we even need many of the products that emerge at the end of this process. As van Tulleken says, “None of the UPF snacks and discretionary products are necessary for the human diet” (259). UPF cookies, fizzy drinks, and desserts, for example, are not just unhealthy but have zero nutritional content. This means that UPF involves vast energy spent on many products with no other function than making money.
Unlike traditional food production, the industry of UPF, and the companies comprising it, require continual growth to maintain profits and returns on investment. As such, the UPF industry aggressively tries to expand into new markets. As the chief of Nestle stated in 2016, “[A]t a time when […] growth is more subdued in established economies […] a strong emerging market posture is going to be a winning position” (236). As markets in Western nations become saturated, UPF companies seek to expand by insinuating their way into and replacing food cultures in lower-income countries. The consequences of this are not just significant health costs for those populations. It also requires more energy consumption to power greater production. At the same time, UPF companies deal with the saturation of Western markets by getting more out of their existing customers. They do this both by getting those customers to eat more of their current products and by encouraging them to eat new ones. This means more new and unnecessary products to create value. It even means energy wasted in creating markets and products to remedy the very health effects created by UPF in the first place.
For these reasons, as van Tulleken says, “[T]he current food system is not sustainable for the next few decades—let alone the next few millennia” (256). Even if all other fossil-fuel emissions were now stopped, those from the global food system, to which UPF is the main contributor, will take the world beyond the 1.5-centigrade fatal rise in temperature by 2100. Due to the logic of the UPF industry, this is only going to get worse.
However, van Tulleken suggests that there is another way. He says that “we could at least imagine a system arranged around agro-ecological farming and the consumption of a diverse range of fresh and minimally processed whole foods” (265). Such a system, by producing locally and in tandem with traditional food cultures, would not just be healthier for our bodies but would also allow for food production to become sustainable once again. This would have a major impact on the efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change, but this vision may not be politically possible. As raised in Part 5, the question is whether UPF companies can be changed or restrained to allow this different model of food production to become a reality.
