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Studies have linked them with multiple chronic diseases. Journalists and health influencers characterize them as poison. Some public health experts call for a global halt to producing and consuming them.

But the debate around ultraprocessed foods is not nearly as settled as it may seem. As a researcher who studies social movements for healthy and sustainable food, I have been documenting the history of processed foods and examining debates around the science and politics of ultraprocessing.

In basic terms, ultraprocessed foods are mass-produced, industrial formulations that use ingredients not typically found in a home kitchen, and that generally contain little to no intact whole foods.

Yet the very definition of ultraprocessed is highly contested. While a growing number of advocates say that ultraprocessing is dangerous to public health, skeptics counter that the fervor around the topic has become a moral panic, and insist that some ultraprocessed foods can be part of a healthy diet.

People have been processing food—that is, transforming crops and animals into food ingredients and products—for all of human history. Cooking, which historians generally consider the first form of food processing, goes back as far as 2 million years. In the millennia and centuries that followed, people developed and refined other traditional food processing methods, including grinding, baking, fermenting, drying and pressing.

New types of food processing were created during the industrial age, beginning in the mid-18th century.

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