The more common term you're looking for is "ultra-processed food"

Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not?

Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate?

Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it?

If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?

The term comes from the Nova classification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification

> Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.

They have a different definition of "no culinary use" than I do!

Earlier in the definition it uses the more conservative phrase "no or rare culinary use," which I think is more accurate. The point is just to attempt to categorize foods by processing levels in a way the public can understand.

I am curious what items in the list differ for you. When's the last time you grabbed your isolated fructose and maltodextrin to season your steak?

The way I think of it is if I were to cook a chicken breast or bake a loaf of bread and then write down the ingredients, they'd be chicken, oil, salt, pepper; or flour, water, yeast, salt. Now go look at the ingredients of a chicken breast (raw, marinated, or cooked) and a loaf of bread in the grocery store and note the differences between the ingredient list. If the ingredient list for an item from the store includes things a household wouldn't have at home, like fructose or maltodextrin, that item would be considered ultra processed.

I'll note that I don't eat as healthy as I should, people should do what they want, and it's possible to still be unhealthy while avoiding ultra processed foods.

Thanks for linking that. Their rubric for ultra-processed is easy enough to grok that folks could use this at a grocery store. We're on a kick to remove "parameters" from tasks right now, so this definition is clearer than thoughts like "stick to the outside of the store."

Reducing the parameters on tasks, and eliminating tasks has been a huge win for us. Tranquility, and still results.

This is venturing off-topic, but can you expand on "eliminating tasks." Is eliminating a task like setting up auto bill pay, or getting rid of items that I don't want to clean?

Yes to both. This is my heuristic:

- think about what would happen if something is simply left undone

- can I do the same task with fewer steps

- if I relaxed the definition of success a little, does it get a lot easier?

- can I farm it out to a person or a service? (Like bill autopay, or Instacart)

I mean, the cattle itself is turning a green pea into beef through a highly complicated and expensive process. Call me a scientific reductionist but there's no reason you can't theoretically replicate that in a lab.

I don't see anything in the Beyond Meat ingredients which is a scary chemical. It's just various plant proteins, starches, and oils that we've been eating for millennia already. Plus some fruit coloring, vitamins, and the like.

That's not to say it is automatically healthy or a useful product (e.g. one can certainly argue about too much "tropical oils"), but that also doesn't make it automatically dangerous either. That is called the naturalistic fallacy.