While capitalism has been busy for centuries poisoning the air we breathe, the land we walk on and the waters we swim and fish in, it is only very recently that it properly turned its profit-seeking attention to colonising our physiology by ensuring we become addicted to a form of slurry that is hacking our taste-buds and significantly undermining our health.
Ultra-Processed People. Why do we all eat food that isn’t food …and why can’t we stop? by Chris van Tulleken, is a riveting account, with ‘bloody hell’ moments in each chapter, of how corporations have used the science of processing to produce commodities that are not food, but industrially produced edible substances that are not even a shadow of their former selves. It is, as one reviewer suggests, ‘incendiary,’ and a book full of golden nuggets of information.
First published in 2023, with a second edition following quickly in 2024, van Tulleken’s book details the rise of ultra-processed foods (UPF) from experiments in the early 20th century transforming coal into butter, to the rise of the addictive Pringles. Spoiler alert: there is a good reason people find it exceedingly difficult not to finish a tube of Pringles, a commodity shaped so it can sit on the curve of your tongue.
If ultra-processing was limited to some of the supermarket shelves, e.g., just the snack isle, then many might shrug their shoulders and move on to the next story. However, in Britain and the United States 60 per cent of the average diet is made up of UPF and the poorer you are the more likely you are to eat the stuff. Most low-income working-class families have diets made up of 80 per cent UPF.
Devastating health impacts
The more you eat the more devastating the health impacts can become, from the rise in the use of braces for children because of shrinking jaw sizes to the increase in unhealthy weight across the industrialised countries, to the growth in cancer rates, including breast cancer. If you have ever wondered how, as Channel 4’s annual “Stand Up to Cancer’ repeatedly states, one in two people will have cancer, then one part of the answer is cigarettes and alcohol, another may well be the UPF that are part of all of our diets; all three are addictive to one degree or another.
In June, this year The Guardian covered peer-reviewed research showing that the number of people under 50 being diagnosed with cancer in the UK has risen at the fastest rate in the population to 24 per cent in 20 years, with early onset incidence rates growing from 132.9 to 164.6 per 100,000 people in the last quarter of a century.
Noting a growing anxiety among health experts that a world-wide epidemic of cancer among young people may be emerging, the article reported, “A recent review of health registry records from 44 countries found the incidence of early onset cancers was rising rapidly for bowel and 13 other types, many of which affect the digestive system.” It does not take much imagination to join the dots.
A sledgehammer to person-blaming
While authoring a book that embodies the aphorism ‘you are what you eat’, van Tulleken takes a sledgehammer to the moralism and finger pointing of personal responsibility for this emerging health crisis with sequential chapters headed ‘Why it isn’t about sugar,’ “Or about exercise’, ‘Or about will power.’
Like the attempt by the energy companies to lay the blame at the individual for the climate emergency through the notion of the personal carbon footprint, many major ‘food’ corporations stand behind their product being healthy as a part of a ‘balanced diet’ and join campaigns and charities working for ‘healthy lifestyles.’
Tesco partners, in one way or another, with Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation. Jamie Oliver’s charity Bite Back 2030, which aims to support young people in challenging inappropriate food marketing, is happy to run shoulders with KFC UK. There are many other examples of this kind of collaboration matched by the similar examples of corporations funding think-tank reports that give undue emphasis to individual responsibility and notionally ‘conflict of interest free’ academic papers challenging van Tulleken’s argument, which on closer inspection turn out to be nothing of the sort.
Corporate blow-back
Following the 2023 publication of the Ultra-Processed People, the corporations spewing UPF onto our dinner tables brought all their communication assets to the table to undermine the book’s findings. These attempts are detailed in the second edition of the book published in 2024, including an offer of money to, as van Tulleken puts it, ‘buy my silence’.
No effort was spared to pick holes, question the data, and argue about the methodology of research reported in the book. The parallels with the response of the tobacco industry to the links made between smoking and lung cancer are striking.
However, a meta-review published in the British Medical Journal in early 2024, with no corporate sponsors, evaluated the best available research on the effect of UPF on health. Including 45 studies and around 10 million participants, it demonstrates clearly that UPF is linked to a substantially increased risk of at least 32 harmful health outcomes including all-cause mortality, cancer, diabetes, inflammatory bowel diseases and mental health problems.
An author unable to process what he has uncovered
It is when it comes to what is to be done about UPF that van Tulleken fails to deliver. He is not alone in this. George Monbiot’s recent book, Regenesis is an excoriating attack on the global capitalist agricultural system. Yet in a 234-page book Monbiot mentions the world ‘capital’ once and capitalism never, while suggesting that we require a new movement that, amongst other things, breaks the global corporation’s grip on the food chain. ‘The corporation,’ like ‘the one per cent’ is the get out clause for a left reformist politics which steps back from confronting capitalism as a social system.
Van Tulleken is not a dyed in the wool, or even confused, reformist. He is a worked-out scientist and rationalist who views the world through empirical medical glasses. He can see clearly that the health crisis produced by UPF is not about social deficits in the working class or an inability to choose the best food arguing, “So much of what we are is determined by the structure of the world around us.” He is careful not to moralise about those on low incomes, or those who have an unhealthy weight, for their health outcomes, citing a Food Foundation report that estimates that in order to avoid UPF the bottom half of the British population would have to spend a third of their income on food and the bottom tenth almost three-quarters.
His rationalist and almost throwaway answer to this problem is to solve what is described as the ‘wicked problem’ of poverty. “The arguments for ending poverty are overwhelming and it should be a priority for even the most hawkish, right leaning nationalist’ because “it is way more cost-effective to do so than to spend money fixing the lives it shatters.” I
The present hawkish, right-wing and butcher’s apron waving Labour Government, which refuses to end the two-child benefit cap and has decimated the winter fuel allowance may have disabused him of the simplicity of this solution in the present political economy.
Money which begets money
However, free of blaming individuals and having solved the ‘wicked problem’ of poverty, van Tulleken begins to tangle with the system he is confronting:
“It was while researching this book that I started to understand these corporations as organisms in an ecosystem powered by money”, and “(h)ere is the inexorable logic of all industrial food: to reduce the time workers require for a meal.” He interviews Eddie Rixon, and other participants in the bowels of the industry who describe an arms race between companies with relentless pressure to drive down costs and the relentless pursuit of profit through the value chain and getting startlingly close to the Money-Commodity-Money circuit of Marx’s Capital. Van Tulleken writes, “There is an illusion of a food supply but it is primarily a flow of money”, or as Marx wrote in Chapter 4 of Capital, ‘money which begets money’.
Having taken one step forward, van Tulleken then takes more than two steps back by displaying a naivety about the class society we live in. He invents a moralism for those who oppose the corporations by arguing, “Railing against ‘evil’ food companies starts to feel less sane when you are seeing things from the perspective of Eddie…” and by implication the others who experience from the inside the unstoppable pursuit of profit.
The general message is one I agree with – morality is not the point – socialists have always opposed moralism and would not recognise the concept of the ‘evil corporation’ and see it as a distraction from the core issue. The industry and its insiders cannot help themselves – the corporations must make a profit and the insiders must pay their bills and, like street-level drug dealers, would be quickly replaced if they didn’t, because the profit motive is king. I also agree with his conclusion: “Any moral critique of … Coca Cola misunderstands the obligations of the company: this is what they must do [make a profit] until they are required by law to do something different.” The question is, required by whom or what?
A socialist government would take the profit system out of one of the key fundamentals of life and food production would be organised and distributed by the workers who deliver the industry, in collaboration with the consumers in general. This transformation would end the domination of UPF, and if that approach of workers and consumers planning distribution was generalised to all key sectors of the economy, housing, heating, transport, food, education, and other life essentials, the ‘wicked problem’ of poverty would be resolved too.
Instead, his solutions are to regulate the industry “in a way that increases choice and freedom” and people need to “be enabled to choose healthy and affordable food if they wish.” To achieve this, he argues two main things need to be done.
First, “Put warning labels on harmful food” and second, “Industry linked scientists should be rigorously excluded from the policy space and public debate.” He finally declares: “Once we have achieved these first two aims, most other things should follow easily.” (my italics). Thus, hey presto, the problem of UPF is solved.
In the concluding section of Ultra Processed People, van Tulleken, despite his investigation into and clear-sighted analysis of the corporate commodification of food and the drivers of this commodification, is unable to identify capitalism as the system at the centre of the process. Instead, he reveals himself as the champion of regulated capitalist markets, the good corporation, and free market choice for the public, in fact, the perfect liberal, who, like all liberals, is unable to see capitalism for the class society it is.
- By using the term ‘wicked problem’ van Tulleken is employing a term recently revived by myriad think-tanks and policy wonks. It was first used in management science theory in the 1960s referring to ‘a problem’ that cannot be fixed as there is no single solution. “Wicked” in this context, means resistance to resolution rooted in complexity, rather than evil.[↩]