Sep 9, 2019 7:00 AM

Let's All Just Chill About Processed Foods

Processed foods are bad for you, right? So super-processed, plant-based meat must be terrible, right? Not so fast on either count.

You are you and I am me because of processed foods, because our ancestors learned how to cook meat and make bread and, perhaps more importantly, beer. Accordingly, our brains grew and our guts transformed. But those two words smashed together, processed foods, take on new terror in this era of organic, locally sourced, artisanal, cage-free, free-range, I-want-to-know-the-given-name-of-the-chicken-I’m-eating food.

Into this zeitgeist of culinary purity waltzes the plant-based meat movement, providing beef alternatives that are about as processed as processed can be. The Impossible Burger, for instance, is engineered taste by taste, smell by smell, texture by texture, to replicate ground beef—the stuff even bleeds like the real thing. KFC is testing plant-based chicken nuggets and wings. But some chains like Chipotle are crying foul, saying the stuff is too processed for their delicate tastes. (This is Chipotle, after all: that bastion of healthiness where a typical meal packs more than 1,000 calories, along with a massive amount of sodium and saturated fat.)

But it’s time to get real about processed foods. For one, processed doesn’t have to mean unhealthy, and indeed it’s only because of certain processed foods that people around the world get the nutrition they need. Two, processed foods keep better, cutting down on food waste. And three, if we expect to feed a growing population on a planet with finite arable land, we have to engineer new sources of food, protein in particular.

The core of the confusion around processed foods is definitional. According to the Institute of Food Technologists, processing is—and get ready for this—“one or more of a range of operations, including washing, grinding, mixing, cooling, storing, heating, freezing, filtering, fermenting, extracting, extruding, centrifuging, frying, drying, concentrating, pressurizing, irradiating, microwaving, and packaging.”

So … virtually everything you put in your mouth is processed. “Highly refined foods like yogurt, olive oil, and bread have many, many processing steps, and they don't look anything like the original product they started with,” says Connie Weaver, a nutrition scientist at Purdue University.

Processed foods can be essential for human health. Iodized salt, for instance, has helped people the world over get the iodine their bodies need to function. “There's this really confusing nomenclature going around right now, with this idea that we can classify food as being good or bad based on its degree of processing,” says Ruth MacDonald, a nutrition scientist and registered dietician at Iowa State University. “And it makes no sense from a nutritional perspective, and it really makes no sense from a food science perspective either.”

What people likely mean when they invoke processing has more to do with ingredients. Any bread will involve grinding, mixing, fermenting, and heating. But white bread goes through an extra step to bleach the flour, which removes some natural nutrients, which are later added back in to make it fortified. And something like a Twinkie takes processing to a whole new level, with added corn syrup and, for good measure, high fructose corn syrup thrown in as well.

It’s the added ingredients that have given processed foods a bad name, because while not all processed foods are junk foods, all junk foods are processed. Supercharging taste with saturated fat, sugar, or salt can be easy, but they're unhealthy hacks when taken too far.

What this means is that, as consumers, we should be asking questions not about the processing so much as the ingredients. The Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger, from Beyond Meat, aren’t what you’d call health foods. For every 4 ounces, you get 14 grams of fat from Impossible and 18 grams from Beyond, compared to 23 grams from 80 percent lean ground beef. Looking at the calories, it’s 240 for Impossible, 250 for Beyond, and 288 for beef. But sodium is where the plant-based alternatives go wild: 370 mg for Impossible and 390 mg for Beyond, compared to just 75 mg for the real thing. In fairness, being plant-based, Impossible and Beyond incorporate fiber, which is nil in real beef, and are fortified with vitamins and minerals.

But it’s with one particular ingredient that the Impossible Burger has run into controversy: soy leghemoglobin, the vegetarian version of heme, which gives blood its color and metallic taste. You’d normally find soy leghemoglobin in the roots of soy plants, but in the interest of efficiency Impossible Foods has genetically engineered yeast to churn out the stuff. They combine soy leghemoglobin with more soy and potato and other plant ingredients to build a convincing duplicate of ground beef.

Soy leghemoglobin is a novel ingredient in the food supply—it occurs naturally only in the roots of soy plants, which no one eats. So in 2014 the company filed a “generally recognized as safe” review with the FDA. A year later, the agency responded with questions about the safety of soy leghemoglobin. Impossible Foods then resubmitted, and the FDA came back with no further questions in 2018, meaning the agency deems the ingredient “generally recognized as safe.”

The key bit here is the FDA didn’t give a hoot about how the ingredient was made—by genetically engineering yeast, in this case—but about how the ingredient might affect human health. That is, a processed food isn’t necessarily unsafe because it’s a processed food. A processed food might be unsafe because it’s got a bad ingredient in it.

“Are these products processed?” asks MacDonald. “Yeah, they're highly processed—the Impossible Burger has a ton of things in it that are all processed. Not that that's a bad thing necessarily, but it is way more processed than ground beef is.”

What you really should be thinking about when considering ordering that Impossible or Beyond burger is whether its ingredients fit your diet. Certainly don’t eat the Impossible Burger if you have a soy allergy, and take note of that sodium tally if your doctor told you to cut back on salt.

The thinking behind the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger isn’t to give vegans a way to eat “meat” guilt-free, but to wean meat-eaters off the real thing. And sure, these alternatives are far more processed compared to a burger made of lentils and mushrooms mashed together. “That's wonderful, that's delicious, and probably quite nutritious, but it's probably not going to replicate meat, and it's not going to allow meat-eaters to stop eating meat,” says Sue Klapholz, VP of nutrition and health at Impossible Foods.

That’s important, because this new era of food science could help dig us out of growing problems facing the world’s food supply. It’s abundantly clear that our food production is busted and almost uniformly terrible for this planet—we waste a quarter of the food we produce, while the global food system accounts for perhaps 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Cows burp up methane, and a single bovine consumes up to 11,000 gallons of water a year. The promise of plant-based meat, as well as meat grown from cow cells in the lab, is that technology can create more sustainable alternatives to beef and chicken and pork. That’s the promise, anyway—we need much more data on the energy footprint of these technologies.

The solution, as has been the solution for humanity from the moment we learned to dehydrate meat for long journeys, is to process our food to be more nutritious, longer-lasting, and sustainable. If you don’t like it, well, have fun eating raw kale and crickets for the rest of your life.