Melissa Helmsley's solution against UPFs
Melissa Helmsley's solution against UPFs
Finding your way around this global health threat.
Fifty years ago, in the summer of 1974, Bob Dylan began work on the song that would become Idiot Wind. He recorded it that September, then re-recorded it in December, and the song would appear on the album Blood On The Tracks, released in 1975.
It’s a cryptic, angry song, and sadly prescient. After tearing through eight verses and three choruses, Dylian ends with these lines:
“Idiot wind
Blowing through the dust upon our shelves
We’re all idiots, babe
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.”
Dylan was right. 50 years after Idiot Wind, it seems we can hardly feed ourselves. The gastronomic time-bomb that is undermining our food cultures is the enormous array of fake foods which are known to nutritionists as UPFs: Ultra-Processed Foods.
That term was first coined 15 years ago by Professor Carlos Monteiro, of the University of Sao Paolo. Prof Monteiro recently warned in The Guardian that UPFs “are increasing their share in and domination of global diets, despite the risk they represent to health in terms of increasing the risk of multiple chronic diseases.”
And just how many multiple chronic diseases are we talking about?
A survey back in February found that UPFs were linked to no fewer than 32 harmful effects to health. These include cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental health, and early death.
There was a time when, in order to get that sort of outcome, you actually needed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to turn up for work.
What is significant here is not just the damage to our health, but also the damage to our mental health. Mess up your microbiome, and you mess up your mind.
Now wonder Prof Monteiro is calling for heavy taxes on UPFs, a ban on advertising, and warning notices on packets in the style which now feature on cigarette packets.
Monteiro has a big fight on his hands. Global mass production of food is in the hands of a tiny amount of trans-national food companies, and we all know who they are: Nestle; Coca-Cola; Unliver; ABF; General Mills; Pepsico; Mars; Mondelez; Kelloggs; Danone.
These companies are behemoths, organisations whose heft shapes the world’s political and social weather. They shape the language and the philosophy of food through relentless commercial and political pressure, and politicians seem unable to stand up to them.
Take our own most recent endeavour to protect the health of the nation’s children. Daily hot free school meals for kids? Right on, bro! No wonder 900 primary schools joined the scheme in April alone, bringing the number to 1,400.
But, as Ruth Hegarty discovered in a searing piece in The Irish Times “I went down the rabbit hole of meal specification sheets and what I found was not pretty; dense ingredient lists and eye-watering use of additives and processing aids. This is industrial food.”
That means chicken from China. It means “pasta meat sauce.” It means €3.20 per meal per day.
“If using public money for food, should the Government not try to follow its own green public procurement guidelines to support Irish farmers, and reduce environmental harms? Shouldn’t it at least try to feed our children well?”
The answer to Hegarty’s question, it seems, is: No. Unless those farmers can produce “pasta meat sauce.”
And another one bites the dust. Despite talking the talk with threatened advertising bans and packet warnings, Governments have rolled over and handed the keys to Big Food. Meanwhile, Big Food hands everyone a Go Straight To Hospital card.
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.
Of course, there is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. Melissa Helmsley’s new book of recipes, Real Healthy, is a crack of light in the darkness of UPFs, a cookery book specifically addressed to how to avoid UPFs.
Helmsley knows that a generation of people who never did domestic science at school need to have tips to prepare and produce food for every day, to prevent the lapse into the Tuesday night pizza and the Thursday lunchtime desk snack that winds up making you feel tired and cruddy.
So, she makes Real Healthy supremely practical: here is how to make lunch for everyday work time; here is how to batch cook; here is how to make dishes in one pot or on one tray. The recipes are concise, the ingredients accessible, and Melissa has thought about how to reduce prep time and reduce wash-up time. Make her Shepherd’s Pie and not only does it contain lentils along with minced meat, it’s also a one-pot production. Win, Win!
“If we ignore the rise in UPFs and accept their ubiquity, we will move further and further away from real healthy food and all its technicolour flavour, benefits, pleasure, nourishment and joy!” she writes. Start with the Fried Egg Fetamole on Toast, and you won’t look back.
Great piece on such an important topic. UPFs are a bigger health scandal than smoking.