On Processing, Pt. 1
We've really lost the plot on processed food
this is part one of a two-part deep dive into processed foods. I have a lot to say, you know this. next time, the future of food processing. for now, how did we get here?
Processed this, ultra-processed that; the word, or hyphenate phrase, is tacked onto anything deemed “not good enough1” for us to be putting into the temple that is our body. Eye rolllllll. Processed food has become so tangled up in whatever the internet has defined as this week’s “bad for you” food that it doesn’t really mean anything anymore.
What if I told you it never meant anything at all?
The concept of processing food isn’t a new term—it’s practically ancient2. No, actually. Processing, at its core definition3, involves a thing (the thing being a food item or ingredient) being put through a motion or action. So, salting a fish, drying pasta, or blending herbs is all a version of processing. Heck, even sifting out sea salt from water and air drying it is still a process.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way—and it certainly, definitely won’t come back again4—when did the first modern processed food appear? The pioneer contemporary food product, if you will.
Around the late 1800s, pre-prepared, packaged foods emerged on the public market5. A ton of factors play into why these foods started—some of the blame can be good ol’ capitalism, or as I like to call it, society’s rule 346 (if you think of a product missing from the market you have to make it). Won’t someone think of the shareholders and their manufactured value!!
A few of these early products include: Wonder Bread (1921), KoolAid (1927), and Wheaties (1924). Libby's sought a patent for canned corned beef in 1875. Knorr produced a German pea soup (Erbswurst) which was akin to a dried tablet product in 1889. More like a slice, add water, and heat sausage-cased thing7. All of these products still exist in some form today.
The latter of those is where we get into foods produced en masse for soldiers8 and large-scale war (aka, violent-flavored capitalism). Brown bread in a can, available since Civil War times9, is a processed food. It took a process to prepare and package it for people to eat.
Foods needed to travel, have a longer shelf life, and feed larger populations than ever before. The country was spreading out, and soldiers were heading overseas—the Second World War really ramped up the need for mass manufacturing on all fronts10.
From there, domino effect. Because more men than ever were away, women were stepping up in the workplace, resulting in a need for quicker, sometimes pre-made meals for dinner time because there was more demand on them than ever. Real data wasn’t recorded until 1967, but dual income households began to rise after WWII11. For many families, there was no longer a dedicated homemaker, so the need for kitchen shortcuts continued to stay in demand. (Women ruin everything12, etc.)
Beyond that, as the mechanisms to mass produce ready-to-eat, or mostly prepared foods already existed, it made sense that companies capitalized on possibilities to keep manufacturing.
As more interventions existed between consumer’s food and their table, another p-word came into play: preservatives. The processed food and preservatives conversation goes hand in hand, and sometimes the lines are blurred. Preservatives factor heavily into wellness claims when it comes to talking about foods with additives.
But, there’s no concrete defining terms or regulations around what a processed food is or can be. In 1983—almost 100 years after processed foods were widely introduced into the American consumer landscape—some of the first laws13 were proposed. There were eight federal, and 17 state laws that were floated in that time until 202214.
In 2009, we got the NOVA system15 from the University of São Paulo, which uses a gradient scale to classify levels of processing in food. There are four levels of classification: unprocessed/minimal, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods, ultra-processed foods.
Level 1 is pretty straightforward: foods that come to us in their whole forms: an ear of corn, shelled eggs, seeds, beans, whole fish, etc. I do find it interesting that cuts of meat falls into this first category, as cutting, grinding, being washed with a solution, and other processing happens to some meats.
Level 2 is where things get muddy. This level is defined by foods cooked in kitchens using ingredients in Level 1. So, oils, salts, vinegars, butters, and some other fats. They’re “not meant to be consumed on their own16.” Vinegar here feels like an outlier, as it’s usually fermented, and beer and wine fall into Level 3, not Level 2. Also, some oils require a fair amount of processing. Again, I’m not saying processing as a bad or dangerous action, but when a food has to go through numerous steps to be that food, but is still considered relatively untouched, I have questions. A potato chip is either Level 3 or Level 4 depending on the source, but slicing a potato and frying it is fewer steps than picking olives, pressing the olives, de-seeding the mash, grinding the mash, processing to remove impurities, and bottling.
Level 3 is, weirdly, still a combination of Level 1 and Level 2, but the definition shifts from culinary ingredients in kitchens to prepared food products. The gateway being homemade versus made for you in a supply chain where you are not the direct recipient. However, a meal at a restaurant is considered Level 2, but a taco from Taco Bell, which also has a kitchen that makes your food, is considered Level 3. Do you see how easy it is to get absolutely lost in the sauce?
Level 4 is where our ultra-processed baddies live (non-derogatory). NOVA classifies these as the ones officials are concerned about. They’re modified foods with industrial formulations, or foods made from extracted food substances (protein isolates, modified potato starch, and corn syrup being a few), or foods with lab-made additives. (Gentle reminder here that synthetic doesn’t always mean bad, and natural compounds in the wild can hurt us, too.) Convenience and long shelf life play a part in this classification, too. They constitute “little to no real food.” But what is “real food?”
Initial guidelines around nomenclature in the United States were proposed last year. That’s right folks, we had 43-ish years of undefined ultra-processed foods, and a century of processed foods without much guidance or intervention. So, you can see how we’ve gotten here. Here being this tangled wellness mumbo jumbo web.
Per the Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) website (who refer to ultra-processed foods as UPFs): “On July 24, 2025, the FDA and USDA issued a Request for Information to gather information and data from the public on a range of topics related to UPFs, including what factors and criteria should be included in a uniform definition of UPFs17.” The website still boasts a banner saying they’ve extended their fact finding until October 23 (assuming of 2025), so no movement since last fall. Of course they’re struggling, this phrase has gone broadly unchecked for almost half a century. TBH I feel like any ship has sailed on truly getting a hold on this terminology and public opinion.
Here’s where the NOVA classifications lose me: Level 4 foods, according to these groupings, have “long lists of unidentifiable ingredients.” Ah, yes, the old ‘if I can’t pronounce it, it’s evil’ shtick. Sounds like a skills issue, dude. Additionally, they oversell that UPFs are responsible for most health issues in modern society.
There’s a lot of talk of Americans being purposely hooked and baited into getting addicted to processed food, infantilizing people who well and good can make their own food choices on a daily basis. This argument is often used to attack lower-income communities as well.
Junk food has long been sold as a derogatory term. It’s a term that was quietly folded in the UPFs terminology, and used to go after people on SNAP benefits18. That’s like, one of the big talking points of politicians trying to cut food stamp benefits all the time—that people are buying chips and soda and that they somehow don’t know any better. It’s classist; punching down. Used to make snap benefits seems null and void. Yet, SNAP benefit holders have never been able to buy pre-prepared meals with their vouchers, which is technically on a lower NOVA scale than buying a canned soup product.
What everyone leaves out is cost. Having your food straight from the source and untouched is a damn luxury. Industry has taken over our lives in the name of simplification, but all they’ve done is create an overly-complicated system where heavy machinery was never meant to touch. Everywhere in our food system, there is a cost. You want fresh, from the farm vegetables? They’re expensive. If they’re cheap, they’re probably cutting corners like unsafe working conditions and low pay for farm laborers. If you want those vegetables pre-cut for you, you’re paying in processing.
How do we move forward in a society that’s literally built around the processing of food?
I want to be very clear here, these are not my words.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/time-line-the-amazing-multimillion-year-history-of-processed-food/
processed is defined in the miriam-webster dictionary as… no I kid but imagine?! I love long form writing.
MUAHAHAHAHAA do you know me??
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210608-what-were-the-first-processed-foods
https://www.mreinfo.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1344
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/briefing/how-ultraprocessed-food-took-over-america.html
https://www.tastingtable.com/1935839/what-is-canned-bread-and-how-new-englanders-eat-it/
https://www.britannica.com/technology/mass-production
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5068828/
https://www.thewrap.com/new-york-times-op-ed-did-women-ruin-the-workplace-reactions/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/16/well/eat/ultraprocessed-food-junk-history.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10787032/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10261019/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nova-scale
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/07/25/2025-14089/ultra-processed-foods-request-for-information
https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/waivers/foodrestriction