A Defense of Ultraprocessed Foods

SPAM defeated Hitler. Now we're trying to ban it.

Dwight Eisenhower wrote in celebration that “During World War II, of course, I ate my share of SPAM along with millions of other soldiers.” Nikita Kruschev’s praise was more direct: “Without SPAM, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army.”

Without SPAM, the Allies would have fallen to Hitler. Therefore, SPAM is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century.

This is a defense of the entrepreneurs and food scientists who brought ultraprocessed foods to market, in a time when lawmakers are moving to ban them.

Jay Hormel was, according to lore, the first Minnesotan to report for duty at Camp Dodge, Iowa, to fight in World War I. The son of a first-generation German immigrant who founded a pork-packing operation in 1891, Jay was assigned to Ice Plant Company 301, a refrigeration logistics unit in France. He noticed that the American forces had a supply chain bottleneck: shipping space across the Atlantic was severely constrained. His solution was to bone meat before freezing it, saving 40% of cargo space and dramatically increasing the volume of protein that could reach the Western Front.

Twenty-five years later, in another world war, Hormel Foods again was tasked with solving a logistics problem, this one ancient: rancid meat. The disease botulism takes its name from botulus, the Latin word for sausage, because improperly cured sausages were responsible for outbreaks throughout early modern Europe. Hormel discovered that, if you treat pork shoulder with sodium nitrite and cook it within the sealed can (a method now named retort canning), it kills all the harmful bacteria and prevents any botulinum spores from germinating. This made SPAM the most efficient shelf-stable protein product ever invented.

By 1944, over 90% of Hormel’s canned output was purchased by the U.S. government. Over fifteen million cans per week were shipped to Allied forces overseas.

Hormel’s breakthrough built on a lineage of food scientists who had spent a century solving this problem. Nicolas Appert had discovered thermal sterilization in the 1790s, though it’s not clear he understood why it worked. Louis Pasteur identified the microbial mechanism in 1864. The USDA authorized sodium nitrite for use in meat products in 1925, once researchers understood that it was sodium nitrite, not nitrate, that prevented botulism. Finally, the innovation of retort canning destroys any vegetative bacteria.

Starvation is one of humanity’s ancient plagues, and food scarcity and spoilage its twin heralds. We have been trying to solve these problems for millennia, and with what we now call ultraprocessed foods, we finally did.

The ancient techniques of salting, smoking, drying, and pickling were helpful, of course, but not sufficient. Hundreds of millions of people still died from famine. Scarcity and spoilage reflect the fact that growing food and delivering food are two separate problems. We could not solve starvation unless we tackled both.

Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution are largely credited with saving billions of lives from starvation by solving the “growing food” problem. Subsistence farmers the world over became more successful and efficient because of technologies he popularized.

But it was inventors and entrepreneurs like Appert, Pasteur, and Hormel that solved the “distribution” problem with ultraprocessed foods.

However unsympathetic industrialized food manufacturers may be, the founders and scientists who built those companies were solving real problems. They were not poisonmongers. The specific innovations we now demonize under the label ultraprocessed were engineered to feed the armies that saved Europe, and further developed to essentially defeat starvation. To the extent it still exists anywhere in the world, its almost always caused, as economist Amartya Sen famously demonstrated, by political problems—failures of government, not failures of crops or private businesses.

Yes, we now have a new health crisis, obesity, and it’s a genuine crisis that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans per year. But this is a crisis of abundance, not scarcity. And simply banning ultraprocessed foods won’t solve the problems of our food economy; it may make them worse.

Every ingredient and process now targeted as a driver of the obesity epidemic was originally developed to solve a problem of food access or safety. Sodium nitrite prevents botulism. Corn syrups prevent crystallization and spoilage. Maltodextrin controls moisture and extends shelf life. Extrusion makes raw grains edible without cooking. Emulsifiers prevent separation. Modified starches bind water to prevent mold growth.

It’s not like simply banning ultraprocessed foods would suddenly make poor people substitute real foods in their place. People look at places like Italy or France and assume that Americans would suddenly eat like that if not for those evil food conglomerates stuffing us with fake food. But the cultural and economic systems that would make that transition possible were eroded not by those businesses, and not by consumers making poor choices, but by government policy that distorted business decisions and encourages poor health choices.

The substitution fallacy assumes that real, whole foods already exist at comparable price points and convenience levels that Americans can simply swap into their lives. Anyone, even those with means, who has tried to eat well knows this isn’t the case. But the reasons have almost nothing to do with food industry malice or consumer ignorance.

America once had, like many places in Europe that still do, dense networks of local food producers, regional food traditions, multi-generational cooking knowledge transfer, and walkable market infrastructure. In other words, the food economy was arranged around smaller institutions and local networks of food preparation and shared eating.

This model was undermined and replaced by government policy over the course of about forty years. The New Deal’s agricultural subsidy regime started the process in the 1930s, and the 1970s Farm Bills under Nixon’s USDA completed the transition.

Those policies deliberately restructured American agriculture around commodity monocultures like corn, soy, wheat, and rice. Farmers were encouraged to industrialize and conglomerate. As Earl Butz, Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture described it, the official policy directive was “get big or get out.” They listened. Farmland consolidated and shifted to the commodity products that made the raw inputs for ultraprocessed foods absurdly cheap compared to fruits, vegetable, and animal products.

A genuine market in agriculture would price corn and soy at levels reflecting actual demand. Instead, the subsidy structure created a permanent oversupply problem, which in turn created a permanent incentive for food manufacturers to find novel uses for cheap corn and soy derivatives. This is why we put ethanol into our gasoline and sweeten our Coke with high-fructose corn syrup. In a freer market, neither of those things would exist. Very likely the same market logic would apply to artificially cheap products like hydrogenated soybean oil, soy lecithin, and maltodextrin.

The food industry didn’t conjure up demand for these inputs. Government policy effectively dictates what to grow.

Meanwhile, the crops necessary for the “real food” diet receive comparatively negligible subsidies and, worse, they face disproportionate regulatory burden. A small diversified vegetable operation or pastured livestock farm faces many of the same USDA compliance requirements that were designed for industrial-scale processors. The regulatory architecture rewards scale in ways that make small production economically marginal. “Get big or get out” is still the law of the land, all these years later.

The same policy failures on the “growing food” side apply on the “distributing food” side. Municipal zoning regimes since the mid-twentieth century have favored large-format retail, auto-dependent commercial strips, and separation of residential from commercial use. This systematically disadvantaged the kind of small, walkable neighborhood grocers and butchers that still define food retail in much of Europe. When those businesses disappeared, they took with them the local supply chains that connected regional producers to urban consumers. The only ones that remain are supported by immigrant networks that operate outside the regulatory architecture that makes small-scale food production uneconomical (this is why Chinese food in New York and taco trucks in LA can be so good and so cheap).

It’s well-known that industry lobbying and questionable industry-funded nutritional science was responsible for the original Food Pyramid and other ridiculous USDA dietary guidelines. But remember: they were being heavily incentivized to grow what the government policy told them to grow. They had to find a market for them. So the government obliged with policy positions that happened to align with the economic interests created by the subsidy regime. Eat more grain. Use more soy oil. Avoid the butter and eggs from the small farms we’re already pushing out of business.

The result was a food industry reorganized by government policy and a population that was told by that same government that eating ultraprocessed food was healthy. Industry was following the incentives laid out for it to produce it, and consumers were following official guidance when they replaced butter with margarine, cooked with vegetable oil instead of lard, ate cereal instead of eggs, and snacked on “low-fat” products loaded with sugar.

Simply banning ultraprocessed foods is just another distortionary policy that risks making meat and dairy products effectively unaffordable for the poor.

Strip away the processed food and you don’t suddenly get Italy’s cucina povera. You get poor people with no time, no local food infrastructure, no cooking tradition, no affordable alternatives, and no accurate nutritional information—now also with no access to the cheap calories they were depending on.

The problem is not, and never was, the miracles of food science. It is, as it always is, distortionary government policy and over-eager bureaucrats.

The answer is not to ban the tech that solved starvation. It is to dismantle regulations that made them the only option. Reform the subsidy regime so that commodity monocultures no longer crowd out diversified agriculture. Apply regulatory parity so that a pastured livestock operation isn’t buried under compliance costs designed for industrial processors. Let food prices reflect actual supply and demand rather than political allocation.

Food scientists are not the villains of this story. They’re not incentivizing Americans to eat poorly, they’re making sure they don’t starve.