Ultra-Processed Fun
A Diet Coke with lemon, please...
Back to school today for the LAST TIME EVER. As always, winter break went by too quickly and I can’t believe I only have one more semester. On Saturday my family celebrated my brother’s 20th birthday.
This letter is about ultra-processed consumption. The first ADHOC categories of the year are AMC A-List, Diet Coke, Hot Cheetos, Online Shopping, and Couch Time.
A: AMC A-List
I should have a membership at AMC. For $25 a month, you can watch 3 movies every week, which is equal to the price of a single ticket. The only reason I don’t have one is because I spend most of the year in New Haven, whose movie theater tragically closed without warning, and the closest one is a 10 minute drive away (and a Cinemark).
If TikTok is junk food, movies are my favorite way to eat vegetables. I’m trying to retrain my attention span to focus on one thing for two hours. In January, I saw Babygirl and A Complete Unknown in theaters. On my laptop, I also watched He’s Just Not That Into You, The Florida Project, and La Chimera.
wrote in one of her letters that life is so short that books are the only way to experience more than once. If that’s true, movies are a very close second.D: Diet Coke
Sitting across from me at a diner booth, my friend said that drinking a Diet Coke is just as bad as smoking a cigarette, and that if he’s with someone who orders one at a restaurant, it’s a cause for concern. My jaw dropped.
I remember walking by offices in middle school where there were boxes of Diet Coke stockpiled in the corner. As a kid, I couldn’t understand why so many adults were addicted to it, or why my favorite singer was its spokesperson. If soda was bad for you—why was it everywhere?
Somewhere in the process of becoming an adult, I fell prey to the claws of Diet Coke. It’s crispy, sweet, refreshing, gently caffeinated. But as much as I love a DC with ice and lemon and a plastic straw (I know, sorry, paper straws are the worst), I do feel a tinge of guilt whenever I order one at a restaurant or fill my mega-sized cup with that brown static stream at the movie theater. I have no idea what is in Diet Coke, but it is definitely bad for me. The teachers at school probably knew that too. Still, after a two-decade decline in sales over concern for its adverse health effects, soda is back. Which is interesting to think about, considering…
H: Hot Cheetos
The New York Times Well desk put out a week-long series on ultra-processed foods for the new year. I never find the column that useful (it poses questions that I can’t imagine anyone actually cares about (are avocados really that good for you?) and regularly offers extremely trivial advice (sleep more for better health!) The column challenges readers to become more aware of the ultra-processed foods they’re buying and skew their consumption toward less processed alternatives.
Yesterday morning, I opened the physical copy of the New Yorker magazine that gets sent to my parents and read Dhruv Khullar’s article “Why is the American Diet so Deadly?” He talks to a lot of experts who have done a lot of different experiments, and notes a recent shift from talking about nutrients (villainizing sugar and fat as isolated ingredients) to general diets (singing praises to the Mediterranean diet, which is mostly fish and vegetables).
The newest hypothesis underlying the American obesity crisis is that ultra-processed foods make up the majority of our diets and are detrimental to our health (UPFs make up 60% of adult consumption in the US). Ultra-processed foods are formed by breaking down whole foods and chemically modifying them to be highly palatable—often by maximizing fat, sugar, and sodium content.
But the article itself is littered with anecdotes about eating processed food: doctors eating chicken tenders and fries after telling their patients to eat quinoa and kale, children preferring Kraft mac and cheese over the homemade version. Khuller himself references eating a granola bar and notes its ingredients in a parenthetical (expeller-pressed canola oil, soy lecithin, soluble tapioca fibre). They’re written in a cheeky, yes-I’m-also-human tone. It’s easy to laugh when a nutritionist or a doctor or a writer at the New Yorker talks about eating a bag of Hot Cheetos, but that lightheartedness becomes judgment or concern when that person is fat, or doesn’t have access to information or whole foods. It’s a bit condescending. You shouldn’t eat processed foods because you’ll die of heart disease, but I’ll be just fine.
I’d argue that many readers of the Times and the New Yorker are highly-educated, wealthy, white, and already pretty careful about what they eat. I wonder how much of the 5 day challenge exists to allow participants to pat themselves on the back. Maybe I’ll write about the privilege component missing in this discourse soon.
O: Online Shopping
If I’m going to keep this metaphor going, I would say that the closest thing to eating unprocessed foods is going to a thrift store and sorting through the bins where only 2% of the items are things you would actually wear.
Group 2 includes the stores that curate a selection for you and mark up the prices by 300%. The pair of Levi’s costs you $30 instead of $10 because you’re doing less work.
Group 3 includes the shops on Orchard Street in Manhattan that curate a designer selection for you and mark up the prices by an ungodly percentage. It’s like Erewhon. Processed, packaged, but still luxurious enough to convince yourself that it’s good for you.
Group 4, or the most processed form of shopping, is online, which strips away the tactile experience and presents endless options to you all at once. It’s easier to spend money, which is bad for your financial health, and I crashed out yesterday because one of the shoes I ordered never arrived and the other was two sizes too big.
C: Couch Time
I did not understand the full potential of couches until the past year. A couch is like a bed. I can be fully horizontal. I can read, watch movies, sit and talk to people, nap. Unlike a bed, there is adequate back support. Sitting on the couch all afternoon feels less like rotting than laying on my bed with my cheek squished onto my pillow. That’s all.
See you next week!
This is the article I have been waiting for. You nailed it: the privilege aspect that’s always lurking in the tone of, to loosely quote you, “it’s bad for you people but I’ll be just fine!” The weight loss injectables have further complicated this: only a very small percentage of non-wealthy people can afford to stay on these drugs, therefore there’s a “new thin” in the air that’s only accessible to privileged, wealthy people. Please keep up the excellent writing! And yes couches ROCK!
you can rip my Hot Cheetos bag out of my dead hands