Processed foods have become the go-to villain in America’s health story. Picture the packages crowding supermarket aisles: frozen dinners, canned food, soda, chips. They’re packed with preservatives and additives and often blamed—especially by champions of the Make America Healthy Again movement—for soaring rates of obesity and chronic disease. On Sunday, Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would “act on” a citizen petition calling for an overhaul of how such foods are regulated.
But just how harmful are they, really?
That’s the central question in a new book by professors Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, released Tuesday. Feed the People! Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better doesn’t deny that the modern industrial food system has serious flaws. Still, the authors argue, it has dramatically improved food access and safety—reshaping public health in ways that would have once seemed unimaginable.
In the excerpt below, adapted from the book, they contend that processed foods—even ultra-processed ones—aren’t the dietary demons many make them out to be. And today’s calls to purge them entirely and “eat clean,” they suggest, offer no magic fix. In fact, such advice may even leave us worse off. —The Editors
In 1929, the canned-meat company Libby, McNeill & Libby printed a now-legendary pumpkin-pie recipe on the side of cans of its 100% Pure Pumpkin. It was an enormous hit, and pumpkin pie became a national superstar. But the can’s branding wasn’t quite accurate—and still isn’t. According to FDA regulations, the contents of a can of pumpkin can be made of a variety of squashes we don’t conventionally call pumpkins. And, in fact, most canned pumpkin you’ve ever eaten is probably something called a Dickinson squash.
Apologies if you’re a pumpkin purist. But if you are, and you’ve just found this out, what’s the alternative? Roasting and pureeing a pumpkin yourself? That’s a bad idea. Store-bought pumpkins don’t have the right starch or water content for the custard. Go to any bakery or grocery the week before Thanksgiving and ask them what they use for their pies. They’ll tell you the truth: It’s from the can.
