Reading Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People is a disturbing experience. What starts out as a non-fiction book about diet ends up as a work of cosmic horror – with some impressive touches of body horror.
I had a similar feeling from Jay Owen’s book Dust. In cosmic horror, “the characters become aware of the true scale of the universe, its hidden natures, and wrestle with the meaning of that.” In van Tulleken’s book we see how industrial preparation of food has taken over our diets, leading to horrific outcomes. The system produces massive harms but nobody is able or willing to stop it.
Chris van Tulleken (hereafter CvT) tells the story well, starting with an ice-cream that will not melt. Checking the ingredients, he sees that what he has given to his daughter is not a combination of eggs, cream and sugar; rather it’s something designed in a laboratory to produce particular sensations. Many of the ingredients are things you wouldn’t find in a kitchen cupboard.
He portrays food production as a sort of evolutionary race, with the companies trying to out-compete each other in the marketplace. The drive to reduce costs produces appalling decisions that cost lives. Several times, the comparison is made to smoking, where paid scientists obfuscated the research for their own financial benefit.
One of the most striking discussions is around Pringles – a food that markets itself on addictiveness. CvT writes about the engineering of the shape, how the flavourings work, all designed to be as appealing as possible and to undercut the body’s responses to feeling full.
CvT is an effective writer. He quotes Donald Trump’s 2012 tweet that “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.” as he discusses how sweeteners prime the body for sugar that will not come, and may provoke cravings. He’s also clear about the effects of different food preparation – a whole apple turns out to be significantly healthier than a smoothie made of just apples and water.
The book lays down clear evidence that ultra-processed food is harmful. Sometimes CvT overeggs his cake in his desire to press his case, cherry picking the most dramatic research. This is fair enough – he sees a certain type of scientific rigour as a tool used to defend these foods, similar to the scientific defence of smoking.
CvT uses any means he can to provoke revulsion I don’t find the idea of eating bacterial foams disgusting in particular – it’s less disgusting than eating the flesh of another creature – but there’s a fantastic image when CvT talks about how fizzy drinks leach nutrients from the bones: “Drink enough and you may end up peeing out your own skeleton”. It’s a great horror image. The one that made me shudder most was around the acidity of fizzy drinks and how, if you brush your teeth after one, “you are literally brushing away a slurry of tooth enamel”.
Like in a lot of cosmic horror, there are links to the Nazis. CvT shows how they were pioneers with processed food, with one scientist making edible fats from paraffin by-products – it caused damage to the body, but the U-boat sailors who ate it were unlikely to live long enough to see problems from it.
The cosmic horror comes from how these foods have such massive effects but nobody is responsible. Terrible things happen through a diffusion of responsibility. The book talks about Nestle’s decisions around baby formula, and how it’s now working to disrupt established food distribution among remote Amazonian communities. Scientists end up paid to say things that are misleading. It’s a situation that nobody would have chosen, but that cannot be resisted.
The Tories have pushed against food regulation on the basis that it’s an aspect of the nanny state. For a long time, I thought I was at fault for some of the poor food decisions I was making. But, since cutting back on processed food, my appetite is much more manageable. The short-term impulsive decisions around unhealthy food are gone. UPFs hack the body’s responses. Is it right to put the blame on people’s decisions when these decisions are being undercut?
The most remarkable thing about this book is that it does produce behaviour change. CvT makes explicit comparison to Allen Carr’s book on smoking. He’s never dogmatic or hectoring, yet by the end, I’d also lost my desire to eat chemicals and emulsifiers. I’ve changed my diet since reading this book (I’m in a position to do this when a lot of people aren’t). Long term, I’ll have to see if this is a permanent change, but I’m already impressed how effective it was. Cutting down on UPF has removed much of my desire for it.