When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway
for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food…and Why Can’t We Stop? It seemed to be prominently displayed in every bookstore I visited, and, as you might imagine, I visited a lot of bookstores.
Unable to ignore it, I eventually took a closer look and learned more about the central villain of van Tulleken’s treatise: ultra-processed food, a term coined in 2009 as part of a new food classification system, and inspired by Michael Pollan’s concept of “edible food-like substances.”
Ultra-processed foods, at their most damaging extreme, are made by
breaking down core stock ingredients such as corn or soy into their
basic organic building blocks, then recombining these elements into
hyper-palatable combinations, rich in salt, sugar, and fat, soaked with
unpronounceable chemical emulsifiers and preservatives.
As Chris van Tulleken points out, the problem with ultra-processed
foods is that they’re engineered to hijack our desire mechanisms, making
them literally irresistible. The result is that we consume way more
calories than we need in arguably the least healthy form possible. Give
me a bag of Doritos (a classic ultra-processed food) and I’ll have a
hard time stopping until it’s empty. I’m much less likely to similarly
gorge myself on, say, a salad or baked chicken.
I was thinking about this book recently as Scott Young and I were prepared to re-open our course, Life of Focus,
for new registrations next week. One of the three month-long modules of
this course focuses on implementing ideas from my book Digital Minimalism to help you regain control of your attention from the insistent attraction of screens.
It occurred to me that in this concept of ultra-processed food we can
find a useful analogy for understanding both our struggles to
disconnect, and for how we might succeed in this aspiration going
forward.
—
To elaborate this claim, I want to be more specific in analogizing
food to media content. To start, we can connect passive text-based
media, such as books and articles, to minimally processed whole foods.
Linguistic encoding was the first information-bearing media our species
developed; something we’ve been working with for over 5,000 years.
This timeframe, of course, is too short for evolutionary forces to
apply, but it’s plenty long for us to have culturally adapted to this
format. As with whole foods, consuming writing tends to make us feel
better, and we rarely hear concerns about reading too much.
We can next compare twentieth-century electronic mass media — that is, radio and television — to moderately-processed food
like white bread, dry pasta, and canned soups. As with processed foods,
we weren’t prepared for the arrival of new mass media forms that where
much easier to consume and much more superficially palatable.
As a result, for the first time in our species’s interaction with
media, over-consumption became a problem. (In the 1960s, the average
household television viewing jumped past
five hours per day.) Many social critics and educators began to rightly
lament this sudden intrusion of electronic media into our cultural
landscape (see, for example, this and this and this).
Many of the new media forms built on the consumer internet that
subsequently emerged in the late 1990s can be similarly classified as
moderately-processed. These include podcasts, newsletters, and blog
posts. As with television and radio, the content itself can be valuable,
but often times it’s not, and the ease of its delivery requires
vigilance to protect against over-consumption.
This then brings us back to ultra-processed foods,
which as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, began to
increasingly dominate our diets with their lab-optimized
hyper-palatability. The clear analogy here is to digital information
offered through the social media platforms that vaulted into cultural
supremacy in the 2010s.
As described, ultra-processed foods are created by first breaking
down cheap stock foods into their basic elements, and then recombining
these ingredients into something unnatural but irresistible. Something
similar happens with social media content. Whereas the stock ingredients
for ultra-processed food are found in vast fields of cheap corn and
soy, social media content draws on vast databases of user-generated
information — posts, reactions, videos, quips, and memes. Recommendation
algorithms then sift through this monumental collection of
proto-content to find new, hard to resist combinations that will appeal
to users.
A feedback loop soon develops in which the producers of this stock
content (that is, those posting to social media) adapt to what seems to
better please the platforms, simplifying and purifying their output to
more efficiently feed the algorithms’ goal of hijacking the human desire
mechanisms.
In this way, the users of social media platforms simulate something
like the food scientist’s ability to break down corn and reconstitute it
into a hyper-palatable edible food-like substances. What is a TikTok
dance mash up if not a digital Dorito?
—
This analogy between food and media is useful because it helps us
better understand responses to the latter. In the context of nutrition,
we’re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for
health reasons. In making this choice, we do not worry about being
labelled “anti-food,” or accused of a quixotic attempt to reject
“inevitable progress” in food technology.
On the contrary, we can see ultra-processed good as its own thing — a
bid for food companies to increase market share and profitability. We
recognize it might be hard to avoid these products, as they’re easy and
taste so good, but we’ll likely receive nothing but encouragement in our
attempts to clean up our diets.
This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content
delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for
less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or
radical, or somehow reactionary. It’s just a move toward a
self-evidently more healthy relationship with information....
