Tag Archives: IndustrialFood

The industrialization of food is not new. What is new is the speed and extent food technology development. It’s dominated the US market place since the 1980s and those of us who still cook on a daily basis need to make peace. See Page “View from My Kitchen Window” posted above for my approach.

🔴Classic Cream Wafers • Tastes good to me.


What tastes good to me is not necessarily what most of my fellow Americans like. And I usually avoid #UPF because I prefer the taste of freshly prepared. But I’m okay with  the taste of these crispy wafers with chocolate cream filling. How to explain that anomaly will require some investigation.

The product is clearly and unequivocally ultra-processed. How do I know? Because I counted the number of ingredients and looked for markers. The list reads as follows:  wheat flour, coconut oil, glucose syrup, whey powder (milk), sugar, cocoa processed with alkali, soy flour, chocolate (sugar, chocolate liquor), nonfat dry milk, hazelnuts, leavening (sodium hydrogen carbonate, disodium diphosphate), salt, soy lecithin, barley malt extract, peanut butter, spices, almonds, natural vanilla pods. Yikes!

So why does it taste okay to me? To answer that question I had to take a look at nutrients.

The saturated fat value is more than 20% DV (Daily Value) and is therefore considered high. Saturated fat comes from these two ingredients – the cocoa and the coconut oil. As long as it’s doesn’t upset my stomach, I’m okay with high fat.

As for added sugar, the value is 10% DV and is considered moderate. Personally I don’t find the DV for added sugar useful. My preferred reference point is percent composition by weight. The label tells me there are  5 grams in one serving and a serving weights 32 grams. With those two numbers I can calculate the percent composition by weight. The sugar metric for this product is 16 grams per 100 grams. That means the product is 16% added sugar by weight. Oreo thins, a classic American favorite, has a sugar metric of 41%. In other words, the wafers that taste good to me have a lot less added sugar than an Oreo Thin.

Anomaly solved. I like these wafers in spite of their #UPF status because they don’t upset my gut and they’re not too sweet.

Finally for those of you who relate better to food apps than to words, check out the GoCoCo score. The score for this product is 1/10.

🟡 Mexican Black Beans • Convenience & Salt

Chefs love salt and so do home cooks like me. Never too much salt. But always Just enough so the meals and main dishes we put on the table taste good.

I like convenience and these Mexican Black Beans work for me. You’ll find a couple of pouches in my pantry so when I need to I can put a meal together quickly. Like the shrimp tacos I make using frozen shrimp. Or a meal of rice and black beans and some leftover chicken. 

The ingredient list reads like what I use for scratch cooking. The degree of processing is just different. Powdered onion and garlic instead of intact aromatics. Seed oil instead of olive oil. Since the product is industrially formulated with 5 or more ingredients, technically it would be classified as ultra-processed. But clean labeled convenience products made with intact ingredients are always acceptable in my kitchen.

I grew up eating Mexican street food and have always liked the taste of beans. Dietitians and food labelers get all hung up in the discussion of VEGGIES vs PROTEIN food groups. Why do they get so hung up? Because one food can’t be present in two groups. As for me, I don’t have that problem. I say beans or pulses can fit in both groups. Then I sit down and enjoy my dinner.

These Mexican black beans have a moderate amount of salt. How do you know if the amount is moderate? Check the label. A low amount of sodium would be 10% DV. A high amount would be 20%. These Mexican bean are right in the middle at 14%. And that’s just the right amount to taste good to me.

The food police folks will argue the product has too much salt. And that’s technically accurate.  To market a food product as “healthy”, the DV should be <10%. As I’ve learned however in my exploration of the disconnect between what the experts tell us to eat & the real food I actually, most of the convenience products that can be labeled “healthy” don’t taste good to me.

Finally for those of you who relate better to numbers than to words, my favorite food app  GoCoCo scores the product 10/10.

🔴 Twinkies – Don’t sweat the small stuff!

I bought a package of Twinkies and snapped this picture prior to the JM Smuckers acquisition in 2023. But comparing the ingredients list back then with what I read on the manufacturer’s website today, the ingredients list is basically the same with a few minor changes.

The brand has had its ups and downs since it was founded in 1930. But the brand is alive and well today. And thriving. That means lots of somebodies out there are buying, eating, and enjoying these iconic snack cakes.

I often refer to the Twinkie as the poster child for UPF.

The ingredients are all refined, compounded, or fragmented. The list includes sugar, enriched wheat flour, oils, salt, baking soda, and multiple cosmetic additives like high fructose corn syrup, dextrose, modified food starch,  soy lecithin, cellulose gum, xanthan gum, artificial & natural flavors, yellow 5, red 40.

There’s no real food in an Twinkie. Even if the FDA allows food labelers to count the refined enriched bleached wheat flour as a grain, it’s not my idea of what a real food should be.

The marketing copy sells indulgence – taming your sweet tooth with creamy, flakey, cakey “goodness”. So where does the “goodness” come from? That is an easy question to answer. The product has way too much sugar, fat, even salt. Sales 101 is and always has been – sell what you have. And all the Twinkie has to offer is sugar plus fat “goodness”.

I used the same picture I took in 2023 because I didn’t want to buy a second box. I ate a couple of Twinkies after snapping the pic and my gut got confused. And a little upset. My gut just isn’t used to dealing with the kind of indulgence Twinkies is selling. Was it the cocktail of cosmetic additive? The fragments or compounds? Or perhaps the preservatives required to keep the Twinkies soft and safe to eat after spending months on the shelf? Or was it the intense sweetness? We just don’t know yet …

VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

My fellow Americans are becoming increasingly concerned about #UPF. Guaranteed, we’ll all be learning a lot more about ultra-processed over the next couple of years. But good evidence takes time and money. And waiting for good evidence can take a years.

When 70% of the choices on the supermarket shelf are considered UPF, we could starve to death if we wait to make a decision until all the evidence comes in.

So that’s why I’ve put together my own strategy to help navigate the supermarket.

RULE – There’s no consensus yet on what is and is not #UPF but if something you eat upsets your gut, pay attention. And stop 🛑 eating it.

RULE – Don’t sweat the small stuff. There are big offenders like Twinkies and little offenders like industrially formulated whole grain bread. So for now focus on the big offenders.

🟡Actual Veggies Burger. Quickly assembled. Tastes good.


Veggie burgers were born during the 1980s. The rational was simple – concentrate or extract the protein component of a plant instead of using muscle meat. Next enhance using texture modifiers, colors, flavors to form a flattened, rounded patty that resembled a ground beef paddy. These original veggie burgers were clearly ultra-processed. 

An alternative method was to use an intact food like black beans or mushrooms. Since I am partial to the intact food approach, I have always favored for black bean version. So when I found a new black bean burger “chef crafted with caramelized onion”, I decided to give Actual Veggies Black Bean Burger a try.

Like every other veggie burger in the freezer unit of an American supermarket, Actual Veggies meet the criteria for an UPF – an industrially formulated mass produced food product with considerably more than 5 ingredients.

There are good reasons to be cautious with UPF. A decade of research, most of which has been done outside the US, has established significant correlation between percentage of ultra processed food products in the dietary pattern and negative health outcomes. On the other hand, avoiding UPF means systematically avoiding convenience products and about 70% of the food currently sold in our supermarkets.

Not an easy decision especially if you’re a working mom or dad and depend on convenience to feed the family. Even tough for folks like me who prefer the taste of freshly prepared but welcome a break from the daily grind of scratch cooking. So the question then becomes, where do we draw the line between acceptable convenience and frivolous indulgence.

The best place to start thinking about making a decision is to start with an ingredient list.

The Actual Veggies burger list reads as follows: Black Bean, Carrot, Parsnip, Oat, Yellow Onion, Red Onion, Red Pepper, Chickpea Flour, Lemon, Spice Blend (Ovata Seed, Kosher Salt, Garlic Powder, Paprika, Chili Powder, Cumin, Black Pepper).

There are no added colors, no added artificial or natural flavors, and no texture modifying agents like xanthan gum or lecithin or methylcellulose. On visual inspection, I can see the black beans are intact and I can see small flecks of red pepper. The rest of those vegetables however have lost their individuality and become part of the puréed mass that holds the burger together.

I do see one “unfamiliar” ingredients I don’t keep in my kitchen cabinet – ovata seed. In fact I’d never heard of ovata seed until I read the ingredient list. Here’s what came back from a Google search. Plantago ovata is a common medicinal plant widely cultivated in tropical regions of the world. The outer seed coat of P. ovata, obtained by cleaning the seeds, contains soluble and insoluble fibre in a ratio of 7:3, making products containing P. ovata husk an ideal source of health-beneficial fibre.

Time savings are significant – I didn’t have to make my own black bean burger or bake my own brioche bun or mix up a batch of home made mayonnaise.

There’s a taste test to follow of course, but in terms of degree of processing, Actual Veggies burger gets a yellow dot. 🟡

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Always important to remember that people eat food not ingredients. That means the burger needs to be all dressed up before I take my first bite or run the numbers. Besides the Actual Veggies, I used an artisan brioche bun from a local Northeast regional baker, some olive oil for frying. I also added a couple slices of tomato, some mayo, and lettuce.

I’m happy to report that my Actual Veggies burger passed my taste test.

The calories clocked in around 400 / 450. Nutrient analysis reflects 11 grams protein (plant based protein for the sustainable crowd), 8 grams dietary fiber, and a serving of vegetables (Actual Veggies, lettuce, tomato).

The sodium does look high and there’s not enough potassium to balance the potassium:sodium ratio. The sodium comes from ultra-processed foods (my brioche bun, the mayo, the Actual Veggie). But honestly, if I had done it all from scratch, the sodium would have roughly comparable.

The CDRR for sodium is 2300mg per day independent of age, gender, or lifestyle. The Advisory Committee DGA2025 meeting #6 this year made a sobering assessment regarding sodium reduction in US dietary patterns. Sodium exceeds 2300mg even when criteria are applied to identify lower nutrient density foods. My reading of that assessment is Americans are going to have to adjust to a No Added Salt dietary pattern to comply with the CDRR. And I’m not sure setting such an austere goal is helpful. Or even attainable without enlisting the food police.

🔴 Cute. Clean. Tasty. Ready to eat.

Consider the corn chips pictured above. No doubt about it, they’re tasty. Even more remarkable, the taste of whole corn is the predominant flavor. That’s the taste of my favorite corn tortillas which are made using a tradition processing method for corn – Nixtamalization. That’s when dried kernels of mature corn are cooked and steeped in an alkaline solution, usually water and calcium hydroxide. The processing makes it easier to grind the corn kernels and results in a characteristic taste. The label makes no mention of nixtamalization, but I do recognize a hint of that familiar flavor.

The ingredient list is simple and reads: organic whole ground corn, organic sunflower and/or organic safflower oil, sea salt, lime oil.

Although the FDA has yet to publish a final rule for using the word “healthy” on food product labels, it’s likely the product would be able to use the word because these corn chips meet the qualifications for another FDA nutrient guideline. As a general guide – 5% DV or less per serving is considered low for the three nutrients of concern – sodium, saturated fat, added sugars. And these corn chips check all three of those boxes.

The product also offers multiple certifications for added reassurance. Late July is a manufacturer with an impressive marketing approach. The chips are certified USDA organic, nonGMO, gluten-free, vegan, kosher, and whole grain. The product is designed to honor all lifestyles and make everybody feel comfortable. It’s a brilliant approach. If everyone at the party can feel comfortable with the same snack food despite allergies or lifestyle preferences, you only need to buy one brand of tortilla chip.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Personally I have a couple of problems labeling chips of any kind “healthy” based solely on a nutrient profile.

First, I like to scrutinize a product by looking through the NOVA lens. Potato chips and tortilla chips both fall into the NOVA Group 4 bucket. Most tortilla chips are made using an extruder. Extrusion is a process that uses heat and pressure to force food which has been reduced to a slurry or semi-solid state through a specifically designed opening to achieve a desired shape. These chips have a more delicate texture. Perhaps they were rolled into very thin sheets then precut into the familiar triangle shape? They also have a more nuanced taste – as noted above a whisper of niximalized whole corn. Still UPF but suggestive of a kinder gently degree of processing. The ingredient list for the product pictured above contains no “cosmetic” additives. Those are the additives that add flavor, color, sweetness, smoothness thus enhancing taste, appearance, or texture. As a result, the label is remarkably clean.

Second there’s a compositional issue. Folks eat food not nutrients.  Chips are served with dips. What dip will end up on the chip? Then there’s the issue of what foods are being displaced because the eater grazed on chips and dips before sitting down to a plate of food.

What makes more sense to my simplistic mind would be to say these tortilla chips are cute, clean, and very, very tasty. But yes, they are ultra-processed, so don’t spoil your dinner by eating too many, especially if what follows is a freshly prepared meals made with minimally processed ingredients like vegetables and meat or fish.