Ultra-Processed Love

why learning to cook will save your life

Happy Father’s Day weekend everybody! As an early thank you, I wanted to announce the winners of the paid subscriber gift boxes. These boxes are filled with some on my favorite foods and kitchen accessories. No ads or sponsored content, just stuff I love, made or purchased by me. So congrats to winners:

TheAmyExperience

,

Patrick Mueller

,

Florence MacGregor

,

Carrie Odgers Lax

,

Alicia Montoya

. Look out for an email from me so I can get your best mailing address. Want to be on the list for the next round of gift boxes? You’ve got to be a paid subscriber.

Ok, back to our scheduled programming. Drop❤️ if you love free shit though.

📸 Brave New Meal

I’m always surprised by how many people claim they don’t know how to cook. The last decade of my life has been full of people whispering all their culinary shortcomings to me- at parties, with neighbors, and in line at CVS. It’s constant. When small talk inevitably turns toward what we do for a living, there are people whose eyes go wide when I tell them I cook. I know what’s next. Suddenly, they start confessing their sins: they can’t cook, they burn everything, they don’t have time, they wish they could be different, they’re trying to be better. I used to reassure them that everything was fine and it was all going to be okay in the end. It felt like the kindest option, but I don’t want to offer absolution anymore. It’s not ok. I want you to fucking cook. Our food system is rigged against us. When we don’t know how to make meals from simple ingredients- not other products- we are setting ourselves up to be exploited. Learning to cook for yourself is a fundamental human experience and critical if you want to avoid all the dangers of ultra-processed foods. Let’s love ourselves and ditch brand loyalty. Cocoa Puffs will never love you back.

We can’t let corporations continue to prepare our meals. Aside from the lack of love in them, they’re barely food. Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are industrial products made from substances that have been extracted from food or other manufactured ingredients. Those ingredients are combined to make something that is edible, even craveable, but it in no way maintains the integrity or nutritional content of the original foods. They’re faux foods, a placeholder for something we used to cook for ourselves or snack foods clearly invented by the devil. UPFs are everything from chicken nuggets, commercially produced bread that never goes stale, many frozen dinners, basically the whole chip aisle, and of course, fake meat. I think part of the backlash toward veganism right now is actually just a misplaced backlash to UPFs. Luckily for us, I don’t like to cook with fake meat and my haterade is homemade. 

Americans, vegan or not, eat a ton of UPFs. Not because we’re stupid or lazy but because they dominate our food supply. Ultra-processed foods currently make up nearly 60% of what a typical adult eats and 70% of what kids eat. Forbes estimates that UPFs make up at least  $485 billion of the $1 trillion U.S. grocery industry, about 50 cents of every dollar spent at checkout. That’s insane considering most of these UPFs have been around for less than 50 years. What we think we’re saving at the checkstand shows up later in our healthcare costs. The frequent consumption of ultra-processed foods has been linked to 32 different adverse health outcomes from cancer to cognitive decline. They’re literally killing us and considering how horrific our healthcare system is, we can’t afford to keep eating like this. You’ve got to learn how to boil some beans, steam rice, and saute a couple veggies. I can help. 

You might assume that UPFs couldn’t get much worse but then David Chavern, CEO and president of the Consumer Brands Association, decided to open his mouth. Chavern wrote an op-ed last fall defending UPFs and it’s as bad as you imagine. Chavern thinks that if you really loved your family, you’d stop wasting your time in the kitchen. “Feeding our families has evolved as we increasingly need to do more with less time. Processing gives us that time back that we can use to create new memories.” See? They’re doing it for us. If nothing else convinces you how important cooking is, let it be this CEO telling you to not bother with it. We don’t have memories anymore David. The Takis took them.

Cooking needs to be reframed. We have to stop thinking about preparing food as wasted time. It’s a necessity like drinking water and breathing air. We can’t give that time away. It belongs to us and cooking real food is time well spent. We can make memories in the kitchen- I do it all the time- and eating real food is investing in our ability to recall those memories later in life. We’re worth the investment. If this decade of listening to hundreds of people confess their food anxieties has taught me anything, it’s that most people want a better relationship with food and want to cook. I know that food, even UPF, is expensive as hell right now but that means we’ve got to be creative, not desperate. Beans and rice remain affordable. They don’t have to be fucking boring, you’ve just got to cook them yourself. I can help. I have a boatload of ideas. You can do so much with a handful of veggies and some windowsill herbs. I’ve made a whole career on it. The more you cook, the easier it all gets. I have tons of free recipes for you here, on my website, and even more if you become a paid subscriber. But it’s more than that. We’ve got to love ourselves enough to demand better. Real food isn’t a luxury, it’s a requirement. The powers that be better recognize that before we burn this whole place down. We’ll say the UPFs made us do it.

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Thanks so much for spending your Saturday with me. Have you noticed that ultra-processed foods are getting harder and harder to avoid when you grocery shop? Has the rising cost of groceries made you purchase items you would have normally avoided? Let’s chat about all of it in the comments!

xoxo,

Michelle