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Comment by Beestie | Hacker News Reader

I applaud the intent but the devil dwells in the details. I keep up with the latest nutritional gurus in the US and UK and even staunch advocates of abstaining from Ultra Processed Food (UPF) self-admit to having a very hard time defining exactly what that means. In addition, there are not a wealth of studies to support the harm of UPF - its mostly, avoid till more is known and educated supposition. This frustrates attempt to be precise about what's in and what's out.

Secondly, why push the deadline out to 2032. Start banning the clear junk next week. Ok, maybe it takes a while to hammer out a definition that works but start with simple rules - ratio of dietary fiber to total carbs <= 5; at least one fresh veggie and one fresh fruit per meal (fresh = not the canned in syrup stuff). CA produces a significant portion of US produce so should be somewhat easy for them. Not so much for Minnesota but baby steps.

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Standard USDA school breakfast fare includes French toast sticks cooked in an oven in their individually wrapped plastic pouch.

When I was in high school ages ago we had burritos that were cooked in an oven in their plastic which would sometimes melt into the food. It’s disgusting.

omg, really, what is happening over there. Sounds like the wild west.

School cafeteria food is what is known as Institutional Foods, and it's the same mass produced, empty calorie food served to prisoners, soldiers, school childre, and other people who can't complain.

I firmly believe that post industrial dietary changes have much broader effects than we are aware of.

Some people say that the increased prevalence of trans people is due to societal acceptance, and nothing to do with pollution or pseudo-estrogens (found in plastics, and released even more with heat). Imagine the amount of BPA kids have been exposed to.

Which of course we cannot do studies on, because the subject is a taboo. As if studying what's causing something, invalidates the identity of people. The hyper individualistic west, eating itself from the inside out.

I’d tend to agree it’s worth studying. We really don’t understand this stuff. Unfortunately the political football aspect makes that hard.

The age of girls having their first periods is like 5% younger, while regular cycles are taking longer to start. I don’t have the data at my fingertips, but my understanding is that different cohorts have very different results with respect to this.

But there are no studies to confirm that 'French toast sticks cooked in an oven in their individually wrapped plastic pouch' are harmful!

You can't just ban things. Think of the plastic manufacturers. And the French toast manufacturers, if they are not different companies.

The eternal battle between “you can’t ban it until you’ve proven it’s harmful” and “you can’t allow it until you’ve proven it’s beneficial”.

... a battle which is invoked only when one or other side is in the interests of a corporate or governance entity.

I neglected to give a shout out to Jamie Oliver who might actually be responsible for the school food revolution in both the UK and the US

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/jamie-oliver-is-his-...

His crusade against mechanically separated chicken made me lose all respect for him. It's just chicken, you're literally just making better use of the animal. It's not magically less healthy because you used a machine to get at it.

eh too simple... it's a paste based on chicken, it's not JUST chicken. And the paste contains a lot of shit, honestly.

Yeah, but this is separated issue from the meat processing.

It's not, it's an ultra-processed food, because you can't just eat mechanically separated chicken, it has to be made into a paste, a goo, to become edible.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to say here. Paste like texture = ultra processed = bad?

To make the paste useful, various artificial additives are used so it sticks together, has a suitable texture and so on.

So, in food production you can't just "make a paste". A lot of chemical stuff begins to happen very quickly. Oxidation being a major one, with separation being another.

How do we mitigate these issues? We add things. We'll add emulsifying agents, de-clumping agents, things to retain moisture, other things to retain color(or just treat it with gasses, or dye it), etc etc.

While it's easy to say "they're just making a paste", in reality that is not what's actually being done.

That said, there are plenty of mechanically processed foods that are fine but fall under the "processed" headline because they're technically processed.

The devil is in the details though and people really need to get educated on basic food processing/preparation. I don't mean raw milk or grass-fed carnivore Idiocracy, but even a basic understanding of what a preservative is would be helpful.

But is it bad? If you had declare everything in a tomato, you get a long list.

A pepper seed is just a seed until you chew it

Maybe the most recent "revolution", but like with reading or math the politics of school lunches has a long history, with periodic (decadal?) waves of concern and subsequent systematic changes going back to the 1930s, when national school lunch programs were first instituted.

The underlying point of contention has always been money, not desire. Who doesn't want healthier kids? For the first 50 years or so the hurdle was the price of food, but since the 1990s the hurdle has been labor. California public schools today offer free breakfast and lunch to everybody, independent of ability to pay. The push for that change started circa 2010. But to make it work fiscally that appears to have accelerated the shift to centralized kitchens distributing prepared--and increasingly highly processed--meals to schools.

Before it was closed, my oldest son went to a parochial school that prepared hot lunches out of a tiny kitchen jammed into a corner, pricing them at cost. But it was only possible because of one very dedicated cook (who possibly may not have even been paid staff) assisted by rotating parent volunteers. When that school closed he moved to a new parochial school with a large, well-equipped (albeit old) kitchen. But the kitchen is unused. There's no budget to fund a reliable, affordable cafeteria program even with paid meals, so like most of the parochial schools in the city they contract a private company to deliver prepared "hot" meals, which are no better than the horrible prepared meals the public school district gives kids even though they're sold at "market" price. (The city has their own central kitchens, but the economic pressures result in the same product.)

If you were employed there was never a time in American history were food was expensive. When you consider the relative price increase needed to serve quality food to students cost becomes a bad joke. The reason is that nobody is America cares because there is no food culture there is food product and nationalization.

The idea that you can have a national lunch program, with 0 national dishes and no standard for preparation is only something that could come from D.C.

America has plenty of regional cuisine that is likely cheaper to source locally, people just rarely take into account the fact that money spent close is much more likely to come back to you, 90%/10% is a good rule here. For every dollar you spend you get 90 cents back if the entire supply chain is local and 10 cents if it's completely external.

In 1930 about 1/4 of income was spent on food. In 1950 it dropped to 1/5. Today we're at less than 1/10. Sources: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2013/august/price-infla... https://cepr.net/publications/in-the-good-old-days-one-fourt... And the price of food was definitely a consideration in debates over school lunches in earlier years: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/exhibition/food-power-an...

Also, to suggest food has never been expensive in the United States seems quite a hyperbolic statement to make given the history of poverty in the 19th and early 20th centuries, at least up to the New Deal. You seem to be making a social (laziness) or political (greedy powers-that-be) point, but it's sort of irrelevant to people, including working class people.

It's wild how Americans can believe in a completely alternate view of what's going on because they have no idea of history.

We have it extremely good in 2025 despite what people feel is going on. Compared to even a couple decades ago we are very well off.

It's really not that hard. We have to look at the ingredients. If an ingredient has been chemically altered then that is a "processed" food IMO. The easiest thing for consumers is if you can't pronounce the ingredients, or don't know what they are, don't buy it.

[forgive capitals, I'm copying this from their websites]

Amy's Macaroni and Cheese: ORGANIC MACARONI (ORGANIC UNBLEACHED DURUM WHEAT FLOUR, ORGANIC WHOLE DURUM WHEAT FLOUR, FILTERED WATER), ORGANIC LOWFAT MILK, WHITE CHEDDAR CHEESE (PASTEURIZED MILK, CULTURE, SALT, ENZYMES [WITHOUT ANIMAL ENZYMES OR RENNET]), BUTTER (CREAM, SALT), ORGANIC SWEET RICE FLOUR, SEA SALT, ORGANIC ANNATTO (COLOR). CONTAINS WHEAT AND MILK.

Kraft Mac and Cheese: PASTA (ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR [WHEAT FLOUR, NIACIN, IRON (FERROUS SULFATE), THIAMIN MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID], WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR, GLYCEROL MONOSTEARATE), CHEESE SAUCE MIX (WHEY, CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, MILK, MILKFAT, PALM OIL, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, SALT, MILK PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, MALTODEXTRIN, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF CALCIUM CARBONATE, SODIUM TRIPHOSPHATE, MEDIUM CHAIN TRIGLYCERIDES, DRIED BUTTERMILK, CITRIC ACID, SODIUM PHOSPHATE, LACTIC ACID, CALCIUM PHOSPHATE, NONFAT DRY MILK, GUAR GUM, CHEESE CULTURE, WITH PAPRIKA, TURMERIC, AND ANNATTO ADDED FOR COLOR, SILICON DIOXIDE, ENZYMES, NATURAL FLAVOR, XANTHAN GUM), MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, MALTODEXTRIN, ACETYLATED MONOGLYCERIDES, SALT, MEDIUM CHAIN TRIGLYCERIDES.

For next time, to lowercase:

  tr A-Z a-z

And paste the text in.

There's a surprising amount of guidance on the UK government's website for school meal standards (follow the "standards for school food in England" link).

https://www.gov.uk/school-meals-food-standards

Minnesota might use more green vegetables and root vegetables than California, if they're buying locally.

European food quality is almost always better than America's. The best is probably the French.

Regarding food, it is a great stretch to call the UK European.

They are famous over here for their lack of cuisine and terrible fast food habits.

Yeah, but most of that is in practice nonsense.

How so ? I've lived in various EU countries, and spent extended periods of time in the UK. In practice I could not tolerate the food unless I paid exorbitant amounts. Both in grocery shopping, and eating out.

I'll accept many British people (including my mother) fail to season their food, and overcook things.

But, the quality of the raw food is comparable to elsewhere in Northern Europe, and low-processed foods like cheese, canned tomatoes, cream, milk and so on are European (i.e. no additives, no sweetener etc) rather than American.

I agree that we cannot compare Northern Europe to the Mediterranean, but take Copenhagen for example. Same (and even worse) logistics to get good produce, but you can find acceptable food both in grocery stores, and a quality restaurant culture for the average restaurant.

And it's not like the Danish had a cuisine traditionally, all they ate was pork and potatoes due to the geography.

The best description of food in the US was uttered in the documentary “Super Size Me” IIRC. A Frenchman describes it as American Shitfood.

I’ve used it ever since.

Europeans really do love to make shit up to feel superior to the US about.

The problem with treating food in a reductionist manner is partly the reason why we have so much UPF. Just looking at the ratio between carbs and fibre will just mean that the UPF manufacturers will shove in some more sawdust to increase the fibre content. It's like with the "low-fat" foods that just have more water content to reduce the fat percentage.

Ultimately, looking at isolated parts of food is limited by our knowledge of how those ingredients work together and affect our minds/bodies. It should be a lot simpler than that - limit processing to simple things like removing skin or seeds or cutting into smaller pieces. Pulverising things into a paste might be fine for making houmous, but we shouldn't be doing it so that food companies get a higher profit margin.

Even if there were no reliable studies, the precautionary principle would suggest to limit food that is highly processed and somehow of a novel form, very different from what was consumed in the past.

Anticipating a critical misreading, this does not mean that everything that was consumed in the past is automatically good.

> Secondly, why push the deadline out to 2032

It's politicians trying to signal they "did something" without dealing with the consequences or being measured if it's actually successful or not

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