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Well shit, then I guess learned helplessness is the only possible answer. Not using the eyes in your skull to perceive that the veggie tray is categorically different from the canned "Hearty Vegetable Stew" with 30 added grams of sugar, along with more unrecognizable ingredients than not. It's all processed! Nothing to be done about it.
That’s not the point. The point is that ‘processed’ is a bullshit designation that doesn’t mean anything and has no information about the health impact of a foodstuff.
Pop tarts aren’t unhealthy because they’re “processed food”. One could likely have an entirely healthy diet consisting of processed food. The term is irrelevant.
There was a bit I read once, possibly even on Slate Star Codex, that went a bit like this:
Person A: I don't want to eat (food item), it has too many chemicals in it.
Person B: I don't understand what you mean. Everything we eat is composed of chemicals - even water is a chemical!
Commentary from blogger: But, of course, B is being deliberately pedantic, and knows perfectly well that A is objecting to ingredients with complicated names that nobody uses in home cooking and most people don't even know what they are, e.g. sodium benzoate.
It seems like you're being Person B here? Yes, "chemicals" and "processed" are technically overbroad, but they work pretty well for normies to communicate concepts like, "this category of food tends to be low in fiber, high in added sugar and salt, and has good odds of being designed by food scientists to be as tasty and un-satiating as possible so you'll eat more of it per sitting and thus spend more money buying more of it".
B knows what A is gesturing at, but doesn't know what A means because A doesn't either, and that's the point of the objection.
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Scott's covered two hypotheses for what the issue with "processed food" is:
Yes, many definitions exist which do not correspond one-to-one with a reasonable hypothesis such as these, and to the extent they do not they will be less effective than they could be, but the basic idea of categorising things this way is not insane.
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I’d hazard a guess that regardless of definition, processed food will have a strong correlation with unhealthyness.
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Listening to the FDA here won't work well. But somehow I doubt that "I look at the food and decide whether it counts as processed" will work well either.
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