Walk down any supermarket aisle, and you’ll encounter an attention-grabbing kaleidoscope of bright packaging, bold fonts, and the biggest of promises. Sturdy paper cups of instant noodles guarantee warmth in minutes, frozen dinners hard-sell hearty satisfaction, and sugary cereals assure an alphabet of nourishing micronutrients. These ultra-processed foods, termed UPFs, while ever present and wildly popular with American shoppers, are the perennial scapegoats in modern nutrition, teeming with artificial dyes, flavor enhancers, emulsifiers, and hydrogenated oils that are blamed for obesity, chronic diseases, and dietary destruction.
While foods like potato chips, packaged cookies, and frozen chicken nuggets are commonly known to be ultra-processed, more virtuous products like protein bars, plant-based milk alternatives, silken tofu, and even infant formula fit squarely in the UPF basket, too, thanks to ingredients like xanthan gum and carrageenan. Lately, they’ve even come under the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, with recently confirmed health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. frequently demonizing UPFs. But what if this narrative is missing the bigger picture?
UPFs are more than just the sum of their ingredients—they are the boxed mac and cheese that stretches a week’s grocery budget, the tub of ice cream that provides consolation after a stressful day, and the nostalgic breakfast cereals that accompany weekend cartoons. These foods hold a specific cultural resonance, tied deeply to memory and comfort. Some food advocates are increasingly complicating the perception of UPFs as one-note villains by telling stories about survival, memory, and systemic inequality.
Jessica Wilson, a California-based registered dietitian and cultural food justice advocate, recalls that UPFs were a cornerstone of her childhood meals. “I was raised by a single mom who wasn’t good at cooking and didn’t like it, so we relied a lot on UPFs at the time,” she says. Last year, Wilson conducted an experiment wherein she ate a diet consisting 80% of UPFs, like Trader Joe’s soy chorizo and Costco frozen pupusas, for a month. She found that the diet helped with her nagging decision fatigue and, even more interestingly, she was often able to create balanced meals that included all food groups: proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.
As she worried less about what she would prepare for meals and felt more satiated overall, Wilson discovered that “a week or so in, I was no longer as tired in the afternoon.” She still eats some UPFs, like jarred pasta sauce and Trader Joe’s frozen Asian-style vegetables with stir-fry sauce, and she recommends that her clients lean on them in moderation when anxieties over food and meal preparation start to take over. Critically, not all foods deemed ultra-processed are created equal. Many types of canned beans, yogurt, and granola—typically thought of as nutritious and less commonly demonized—are all considered UPFs, too.
Critics of UPFs often point to the health concerns associated with the high levels of sodium, sweeteners, and preservatives that extend shelf life and make these foods more enjoyable to eat. Diets high in UPFs have been linked to increased risks of heart disease, diabetes, and other chronic illnesses. “Hypertension, fatty liver disease, certain cancers—almost every chronic disease—is associated with a higher incidence of eating UPFs,” says Dr. Jen Cadenhead, a behavioral nutrition researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University. She clarifies, however, that no direct relationships have been established yet by the wider research and medical community; these are just associations. And on the flip side, though practices like eating a raw diet—which means excluding all processed foods—or doing a juice cleanse have frequently been advertised as being healthier, these have been linked to nutritional, caloric, and protein deficiencies.
At the heart of the UPF debate lies a stark truth: fresh, whole foods are not accessible to everyone in the United States. Farmers’ markets, organic produce, artisanal bread, and detox smoothies are often held up as the gold standards of healthy eating, but they are, for the most part, simply out of reach for low-income families. While a snack-sized pint of strawberries is priced at $3.30 as of January 2025’s national price averages, a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese, along with the required quarter cup of milk and four tablespoons of butter, is a more complete meal with three servings for just $1.97. An analysis that tracked U.S. food prices over 12 years also found that unprocessed foods are consistently more than two times costlier per calorie than UPFs.
This reality is exacerbated by systemic inequities that make the preparation of whole foods a logistical and financial impossibility: low wages, food deserts, and inadequate public transportation to reach higher-quality grocery stores. Under SNAP and WIC, UPFs often end up being more affordable, less time-consuming to cook, more widely accessible, and more shelf-stable than less processed and whole foods. Framing UPFs as harmful without addressing these systemic problems oversimplifies a complex issue, especially as the Trump administration eyes major cuts to SNAP and WIC, exacerbating an already threatening affordability crisis around groceries for the country’s lowest-income households.
At the heart of the UPF debate lies a stark truth: fresh, whole foods are not accessible to everyone in the United States.
As the discourse around UPFs evolves, chefs and home cooks alike are reclaiming and reimagining them. Sarah Fennel, known for her website Broma Bakery and the author of the recent cookbook Sweet Tooth, has incorporated frozen tater tots into a Super-Bowl-watch-party-worthy cheeseburger casserole, while Molly Baz created an orange creamsicle poppy seed cake inspired by the flavors of those delightfully sticky ice cream bars.
Others are crafting their own versions of well-known brands. Cookbook author Frankie Gaw has been steadily working his way through a recipe series that reimagines American food brands in Asian American culture, such as gochujang caramel Pop-Tarts and sesame-miso-flavored Cheerios. “I thought it’d be an interesting experiment to redesign those legacy brands and use them as a Trojan horse to start a dialogue around food and culture,” Gaw says. “What if immigrant kids of different cultural backgrounds could see themselves in the everyday staples in an American grocery store? Not only was this series a way to reimagine foods with diverse flavors and branding, but it was (selfishly) my way of trying to heal a lot of immigrant kids who never saw themselves or their families represented in culture.”
Though he typically makes everything from scratch, Gaw doesn’t shy away from including UPFs as ingredients in his dishes, such as Green Rice and Spam and Black Sesame Oreo Go-Gurt. To those who may think he is “glorifying” UPFs, he says, “Anything in overabundance can be considered unhealthy, and I will happily die on a hill of burgers and French fries and chocolate chip cookies talking about foods that bring me joy and remind me of my childhood.”
There’s something liberating about reclaiming these foods. It’s a way of acknowledging that these foods sustained us. They’re a part of our stories, and we don’t have to be ashamed of them.
