The ultra-processed food debate
In 2020, a three-metre-high statue of a Turkey Twizzler was unveiled outside Great Witchingham Hall in Norfolk, engraved with just two words: “THEY’RE BACK!” For those with long enough memories, this resurrection of the pig tail-shaped fried meat might have seemed designed to haunt one man alone. In 2005, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver waged war on Turkey Twizzlers via Jamie’s School Dinners, his campaign to reform the diets of British schoolchildren, and for a while, it seemed that Jamie had won. Now, they were back on shelves, though it was unlikely they would be warmly received. Things had changed, and Twizzlers would have to be defended within the context of a nutritional landscape dominated by warnings of ‘ultra-processed food’, a phrase barely conceived of back in 2005, but increasingly ubiquitous today. Weren’t these breadcrumbed spirals a relic of times gone by, of ignorance and noughties additive abandon?
The world of Jamie’s School Dinners might seem a distant dream, but there are lessons still to be learnt. If you switch on the TV in Britain, it’s likely you’ll soon see Dr Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People, a bestselling account of how ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have taken over our lives. For some, he is a revolutionary. For others, the smiling face of the nanny state, beamed into your living room to chastise you for eating white bread.
Though Van Tulleken himself has been careful to emphasise choice, the class dimensions of a processed food crackdown are not difficult to discern. A straightforward equation between beige foodstuffs and socio-economic status only serves to flatten the actual diversity of Britain’s working class. Still, it is undeniable that contemporary food processing appeals most to those time and resource poor, seeking pleasure and convenience where they can. Ridley Scott’s iconic 1970s adverts, which imagine Hovis bread as a staple of flat-capped, nostalgic, working-class dream life, now seem a touch ironic. Pre-sliced white bread is said to be one of the worst UPF offenders, and nothing (we are told) to be proud of.
“Food, in England, is rarely about food,” penned the writer and critic Huw Lemmey in 2021 for Vittles magazine. The same goes for the symbolic Turkey Twizzler – always more meaningful in relation to questions of class, identity and mass entertainment than anything particularly scientific. The era of Jamie’s School Dinners may have energised a new interest in mass nutrition, but it also marked a new role for it, now the fodder for mass entertainment. The problem for the anti-UPF cause is how to overcome outdated, condescending stereotypes, but this is extremely difficult when questions of health are perceived not as belonging to education, generous policy making or collaborative intervention, but simply the raw ingredients for high viewing figures. A greater literacy is needed, not only of the relevant science, but of the politics of nutrition on screen. A depressing history might survey Kay Mellor’s Fat Friends, a drama about working-class lives ruled by subscription-model slimming clubs, the wild cruelty of Fat Families’ Steve Miller and endless, exploitative documentary programmes, most often focusing on low-income families. You are what you eat, so said TV personality Gillian McKeith, but only if your circumstances dictate it. Meanwhile, self-ordained domestic goddess Nigella Lawson was shown to gorge herself on the contents of her pantry after dark every night, in an oddly sexualised, firmly middle-class, and therefore utterly permissible form of indulgence.
The likes of Lawson, or more accurately how we frame her, matter to these debates. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall wrote that popular culture was a site where “the struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged”. What if television had brought us not the crude neoliberal sensationalism of individual worth based on individual consumption, but a mode through which we might all be better educated about the choices we make, and who dictates the terms on which we make them? Even Jamie Oliver himself, no stranger to an exploitative frame, and described by journalist Owen Hatherley as an “immense construction of grotesque neo-Victorian snobbery”, has spoken in recent years of his frustration with structural barriers. So-called nutrition programming is often funded by, or otherwise complicit in the dominance of, billionaire corporations that make profit from poor health. So long as such hypocrisies continue, televised health interventions will never be more than cruel, vacuous spectacles.
UPFs present an obvious danger. Yet more pressing are the underlying crises of choice that surround them. They thrive in the context of a globalised food chain, in which the motive is almost always financial gain at the expense of meaningful choice. The real alternative is to start thinking hard about structural change, and the forms through which these issues are presented. If we are to tackle the ultra-processed issue in Britain, we must prioritise affording agency to those that most lack it. But we must also actively resist the positioning of this issue as merely the latest episode in a punitive saga, broadcast for laughs.
CGI and imagery Optical Arts
This article is taken from Port issue 35. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
