Processed food always being bad is an oversimplification. Try having eating a raw potato sometime and you'll see what I mean (seriously don't they are toxic). Cooking is a basic form of processing to make the foods nutrition actually processable or processable more efficiently. The 'processing' most associated with the term are optimized for taste and shelf life often at the expense of nutrition or too much of a good thing. For instance protein - it is held up as a holy grail 'good nutrient' but it turns out that going too high is bad for the kidneys and thus general health. That isn't unique to processed foods either - Steve Job's fruit based diet put Ashton Kutcher in the hospital with pancreatic issues when he tried it for getting into character!

Past failures at making something more healthy have failed to measure an additional variable - say margarine being better before a sufficient understanding of transfats and back when they thought all cholesterol was the same.

> I don't see why that situation is improved because the food being processed is from a vegan source.

my favorite example of this is the plastic package of organic vegan marshmallows i saw at Whole Foods once

> my favorite example of this is the plastic package of organic vegan marshmallows i saw at Whole Foods once

Is this funny because of all the non-vegan marshmallows that come in non-plastic packaging, making the vegan ones worse for the environment? Any change has to be weighed against the actual alternatives.

the alternative i was thinking of was non-processed food.

but, ok, good point point about the packaging. almost every fruit and vegetable from a supermarket's produce section ends up in a plastic bag.

I think we have to evaluate each processed food on its own merits rather than just saying there’s a negative correlation.