I am trying to use my common sense here. To create it, you must apply mechanical processing to grind wheat. Chemical processing for the yeast to reacting to the sugars. thermal processing to cook the bread. There is evaporation of the liquid in the bread.
This seems like a lot of processes required to create this.
Otherwise the raw materials are the same:
> Flour, water, yeast, salt, fat, and, where used, minor ingredients common to many bread-making techniques such as Vitamin C, emulsifiers and enzymes are mechanically mixed for about three minutes.
In what way does this represent "processed" food in any material sense?
If anything, this sounds like a perfect example of the kind of fear mongering associated with the "processed food" label...
Edit: I misread, sorry
You've misread the Wikipedia page.
What you're describing is Dauglish's process that preceded CBP. Here's the key bit from the introduction:
> In 1862 a radically new and much cheaper industrial-scale process was developed by John Dauglish, using water with dissolved carbon dioxide instead of yeast, with no need for an eight-hour fermentation. Dauglish's method, used by the Aerated Bread Company that he set up, dominated commercial bread baking for a century until the Chorleywood process was developed.
Notice that last part of the sentence.
CBP, as described in the Wikipedia article, "is achieved through the addition of Vitamin C, fat, yeast, and intense mechanical working by high-speed mixers".
In particular, no CO2 is used with CBP. Bread is proofed by "[placing the dough] in a baking tin and [moving it] to the humidity- and temperature-controlled proofing chamber, where it sits for about 45–50 minutes", with the process aided through the use of dough conditioners like ascorbic acid.
Even traditional bread is certainly highly processed, undergoing mechanical (milling), biochemical (fermentation), and thermal (baking) processing. It doesn't quite meet the definition of ultra-processed though as all these technologies are readily available to unsophisticated producers.
I think ultra-processed is some sort of proxy for hyperpalatable here.
What gave you that idea?
Bleached flour and various additives (such as ascorbic acid) are routinely used in home kitchens:
https://thebreadguide.com/using-ascorbic-acid-when-baking/
What, exactly, do you think goes into making a loaf of mass-produced bread?
If you buy bread made from bleached white flour, sugar (in pretty much any white bread you buy from the supermarket), bread conditioners, preservatives, etc, it's probably considered ultraprocessed. It can also sit in your pantry for weeks.
Ultra-processed bread would probably be made to have a longer shelf life and likely have more additives and preservatives.
How do I do that? Are we averaging the opinions of other people, or taking the opinion of the average person? By what metric?
That depends on what you mean by bread. The sourdough loaf that I make out of flour straight from the grinder is a far cry from cheap white bread.
Again, there's no unambiguous definition here. The UN has drawn one line out of many potentially valid ones. My point here isn't to argue word semantics. I'm just saying look at what the average person would consider "ultra-processed", whatever their definition (or lack thereof) might be.
P.S. I'm not even sure what you consider "ultra-processed bread" is good for people in any case.
I don't have a scientific definition for you. Just use your common sense to figure out what average people would intuitively call ultra-processed, whatever it means to them. I'm pretty darn sure you would not arrive at the conclusion that ordinary people consider bread and most vegetables "ultra-processed foods".