The Evolution of Irresistible Convenience Food

Out in the unsettling world of clickbait, family pets seem to have a special place in the pantheon of what the bored or purposeless internet user finds irresistible. So here’s a story of Macklin and Lenny, the two cats I feed each morning but I am sure you are neither bored nor purposeless and that is a good thing, as there’s a purpose in this tale.

Lenny and Macklin are brothers but are a striking contrast to one another, both in appearance and character.  Macklin is slim, very smart, hyperactive, while Lenny is solidly built, indolent and — it grieves me to say it — would not score well in a cat IQ test. That’s Macklin sitting on a fence post and Lenny posing in a laundry basket, unsure of what to do next.

I love them both of course, but that’s not the point. When they first came into our home, we provided dried cat food ad lib. That was very convenient  and seemed to work well for the cats, even if Lenny was a little greedy for his meals and gained weight. But then he developed a problem. He became bunged up. I’ll spare you the details, but veterinary intervention was required and the vet made it clear that his fluid intake was insufficient relative to the quantity he was eating. 

How do you explain to a cat that he really needs to drink more? Availability of water had not been the problem. We didn’t dwell on this question for too long before deciding that we should move Lenny  onto wet cat food. Actually, that meant both cats moving onto the wet stuff. 

From the outset  this change suited them very well, so we thought we’d cracked it; wet food was the answer. When we ran out of supplies we went to the supermarket to pick up some more of Brand A, but it wasn’t available. We bought some sachets of Brand B. I was shocked when they refused to eat it. They wanted the original stuff and they really let me know that was the case. They started to behave like the food critics on Masterchef.

Of course you can’t stand by and watch your cat starve. So,we sourced some of Brand A, and that did the trick for the time being. But suddenly we were in a new world of cat food gastronomy and the little quirks of their fussy eating became a daily battle. What would they eat? What would they not eat? We tried brand C, but only brand A did the trick. 

In my youth I seem to remember cat food being pretty homogeneous stuff that came out of a tin, the scrapings of meat that was not considered fit for human consumption.  Now it is all sachets and secret ingredients. Somethings going on. 

It’s clear that in the cat food business, a small investment in finding the magic formula to hook a cat can lead to a big reward. Incrementally, the whole marketing process becomes refined, each cat food company competing for market share with increasingly sophisticated advertising, packaging and, of course, a recipe irresistible to your cat. 

Well, you may ask: If cats are happy, what’s the problem? Who’s dead?  

Concerned as I am for cats, I have a wider concern. The food industry is not just trying to seduce cats through a process of inexorable marginal product refinement; all of us are on the receiving end of this fiendish process. And, as Chris Van Tulleken lays bare in his BBC 2 documentary Irresistible – Why We Can’t Stop Eating,  quite a lot of us are ill and dying early as a consequence. [1]

That might seem counterintuitive given that our population is ageing. It’s true that the rich and educated are, on average, living longer. The poor, less so. They are eating cheap processed food, becoming obese, diabetic, and developing a multitude of health problems. This bleak picture is somewhat complicated by the way in which individual metabolism responds to modern diet. Not every person on a poor diet gets sick, but circumstantial evidence of the scale of the problem is there to see in the doctor’s waiting room, the hospital queue, in the high street of your town.  The problem, Van Tulleken suggests, is Ultra Processed Foods.

In 2009 Carlos Monteiro, working with a team of researchers at the University of São Paulo, coined this term. A key ingredient of an Ultra Processed Food are laboratory produced ingredients not to be found in a normal kitchen; preservatives, flavourings, emulsifiers. [2]  

Chris Van Tulleken interviews a series of scientists who have worked in different parts of the food industry. One by one they testify to the sophistication of the development process, the juggling of ingredients, getting the “mouthfeel” just right, the testings and tastings  — all of the elements that combine to produce a product which, eaten once, we just can’t pass by in the supermarket.

Henry Dimbleby in his book Ravenous sets out the  statistical evidence:  A “10% increase in the proportion of ultra-processed foods in a person’s diet is correlated with a 12% increase in cancers, a 21% increase in depressive symptoms, and a 12% increase in cardiovascular disease risk”  

In July 2020 Dimbleby led the team writing the National Food Strategy. This proposed actions to help disadvantaged children and to promote environmental and animal welfare standards. The recommendations for disadvantaged children were supported by Marcus Rashford in his 2020 Covid-related campaign but largely ignored by the then Conservative UK Government. Their friends and funders in the food industry may just have had something to do with this.  [3]

Professor Tim Spector is a particularly significant critic of Ultra Processed Foods. He  has written a series of books which overturn many commonly understood ideas about what constitutes a good diet. The subtitle of his 2020 publication, Spoonfed, tells us a good deal about just how radical his ideas are:  “ Why almost everything we’ve been told about food is wrong.”  

Someone not wishing to read their way through his excellent back catalogue would be well advised to move straight to his recently published Food for Life cookbook. The introduction is an excellent and up to date summary of the science and arguments which support what he is saying. Crucial to this perspective are  the millions of microorganisms that live in your gut. He explains in plain language the recent  science which shows how this microbiome influences your health and how changes to your diet may tip the balance of its constituents in your favour or to your detriment. 

His recipes will have more immediate appeal to the adventurer in food than the neophobe, but Tim Spector’s approach is realistic and practical and avoids punitive regimes. He is determined to ensure the food you eat will remain one of the pleasures in your life. If your diet is in a bad place, you can  change what you eat incrementally and feel better for it, at every stage. Indeed, even if you think your diet is pretty good, Prof Tim will likely give you some interesting and, for the open minded, tasty suggestions on how it could be even better. 

His focus is not just on health. He is also concerned with the impact of food production on the environment and its overall sustainability. Above all, he is a relentless critic of the food industry. We may expect some fierce pushback from their outriders as the debate unravels. 

Endnotes

[1]  Irresistible: Why We Can’t Stop Eating   

[2] Carlos Monteiro and UPFs  I’ve heard UPFs called Frankenstein food, but that does not seem accurate to me. We do not recoil from them — rather the contary.

[3] Henry Dimbleby  Ravenous  Highly recommended! I heard Henry Dimbleby interviewed by Gavin Esler at Wigtown Book Festival in October 2023. The Festival is always a great day out, but this was a really splendid event.

[4] Tim Spector   The Food for Life Cookbook   If it’s the cookbook you’re wanting, be careful not to buy Food for Life, also  by Tim Spector. It’s an interesting read — but not a cookbook!