Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods Is Completely Unrealistic

Lot of finger pointing at the author in this thread. I googled her and found this article from nine months earlier (I think), complaining that her husband does jack shit around the house: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/fair-play-...

Seems like the more boring but more real story here is that this mom is really struggling to hold her career together and give her kids the care she clearly wishes she could because her husband is being lazy. To the haters in the thread: I think this article can be read as "avoiding UPFs is completely unrealistic for authors trying to establish themselves while functionally raising a baby and a toddler by themselves". Which, even as a perpetual proponent of the anti-UPF book "Ultra-Processed People," I kind of understand.

I get a lot of pride and satisfaction from being an involved dad. I do almost all of the cleaning, a fair amount of cooking, and probably 2/3 of the missing-work-because-no-childcare (and I try to put in a good amount of solo weekend time, to let my spouse catch up on work). A valuable life lesson I learned in Boy Scouts: if you're not doing about twice as much work as you think is fair, you're probably not doing enough.

Avoiding ultra-processed food is completely realistic.

It's a question of priorities. If she really wanted to avoid them she would take the time to do so, even if that means working less.

What's unrealistic is expecting everyone to have the drive to do what's necessary to avoid ultra-processed food.

Tangentially, kids will always want to eat what everyone else is eating. If you start feeding them home cooked Golden fish or whatever, people at school are going to judge them, your kids will feel excluded because they won't be eating the same things as everyone else, and they'll end up resenting you somewhat.

For me the challenge here is really how to give your kids healthy food while also not excluding them from the normal kid experience, which, for better or worse, is going to include consuming ultra-processed until the day we have proper regulations.

Caring for and feeding a person other than yourself, every single day for multiple meals, for multiple years, is not a one-off simple-solution task. Efficiency is key, and sadly those UPF don't need preparation, spoil or need refrigeration or cooking, and above all are engineered to taste great. Top marks for food technology!

I have a diet entirely free of ultra-processed foods.

Not only have I done this for almost a decade, given how high food prices are now, I'm surprised normal people can even afford the Standard American Diet (SAD). Cheapest and highest nutrition food is just buying normal everyday boring raw meat and raw vegs, put some spices on it, tada, food.

In Trump's America, dumping the silly garbage brands is the best thing you can do.

Avoiding it altogether? Sure, that may be unrealistic. Minimizing it to a large degree? Definitely doable (we do it with 2 school age kids, or at least we think we do). But! it has to be a priority, and it takes time and money (we're not wealthy but we prioritize it in our spending and cut back on other things).

For the US probably. All others do have different goals though

Is this a submarine article for food corps or what? Yes, it's hard work to make food by hand, but for fucks sake, our ancestors did it for generations, without any modern appliances or temperature controlled ovens. This article was so long, I don't even know the point was. Is she trying to say that UPF is not so bad? That you should just give in? At the end of the day it just comes down to priorities. There is almost nothing more important than what goes into a child's developing body. Maybe skip some of the after school activities and cook with them instead.