M&S now has 26 products in their ‘Only…ingredients’ range, including 'only 3 ingredients' beef burgers and 'only 3 ingredients' oat drink. As dietician Maeve Hanan puts it in this Instagram reel, the supermarket influencers are truly winning here (you know the ones who grab things off the supermarket shelves and read out the list of ingredients in disgust). And fear sells, to those with enough money anyway. M&S's plant milk and cereals in this range are non-fortified, just one point to prove fewer ingredients doesn’t necessarily equal healthier. All it serves to do is widen the gap between those who can afford to select ‘healthier’ options, and those who have no choice but to rely on UPFs to feed their families.
This opinion piece on the Irish hot school meals programme and accompanying discourse really hits the nail on the head. This state-funded initiative only really expanded significantly in 2021, providing free hot lunches to primary pupils in Ireland, but has been recently criticised for not meeting basic nutritional standards under national guidelines. Schools have subsequently been opting out of the programme over concerns about food quality or recyclable packaging. O'Sullivan doesn't dismiss the need to care about food quality or sustainable practices, but she does ask a crucial question of those proffering 'healthier' alternatives, one which often gets missed in these discussions: will children actually eat this? "There is something uncomfortable about watching people who have never been hungry pick apart the quality of the food meant for children who are", O'Sullivan writes, which says it all really. The way the rich like to scrutinise and problem-solve the food of the poor. The way the health- and nutrition-informed like to hold up school meals as the answer to systemic issues of ill-health or nutritional inadequacy. The way these arguments create more barriers to feeding children, not less.
Another scaremongering headline crafted from a lack-lustre review about the addictive and life-threatening properties of UPFs. The researchers behind this paper, From Tobacco to Ultraprocessed Food: How Industry Engineering Fuels the Epidemic of Preventable Disease, appear to be drawing parallels between the way the tobacco industry produced and marketed cigarettes and the way the food industry produces and sells UPFs, using similar strategies to "increase product appeal, evade regulation, and shape public perception, including adding sensory additives, accelerating reward delivery, expanding contextual access and employing health-washing claims." "Cigarettes and UPFs are not simply natural products but highly engineered delivery systems designed specifically to maximize biological and psychological reinforcement and habitual overuse", they write. UPFs should be viewed through an addiction science lens, as well as a nutrition and public health lens, apparently. We're all for pushing for a shift from individual responsibility to food industry accountability, but surely we've been there done that with the whole food addiction thing? And lets not forget the vague classification of UPFs which would mean this paper is suggesting we're all addicted to rice crispies.
