Is Ultraprocessed Food?
Speaker: Stanley Ulijaszek (School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford)
Monday 16 June 2025
In this presentation the framing of ultraprocessed food (UPF) is examined from an anthropological perspective. For an anthropologist, food is more than nutrition, although it is certainly important in relation to health and well-being. Food for an anthropologist relates to health and well-being, cultural values, the social organisation and material cultures that surround it, identity, environmental connections and economic systems, and food systems in both broad and narrow senses. As defined in the past decade or so, UPFs are those high in fats and oils, refined carbohydrate and sugars, and well as a wide range of possible additives for preservation, long shelf-life, taste and palatability. They are a rapidly developing category which has built on existing categories of foods, processed and unprocessed. The category and global reach of UPFs category continues to grow, especially in relation to the industrial complex that supplies most food now. This presentation describes what UPFs are and are not and examines if and how UPFs are integrated (or otherwise) into anthropological framings of food, including health, economic and food systems, and material cultures and technology.
