THE LANCET PUBLISHED ANOTHER STUDY ON ULTRA-PROCESSED FOODS LAST WEEK. FORTY-THREE EXPERTS, HUNDREDS OF STUDIES, THE USUAL HEADLINES. AND NOW EVERYONE'S CONFUSED ABOUT WHETHER THEIR LUNCH IS KILLING THEM.

I sell prepared salads, so I get asked about this constantly. "Are your products ultra-processed?" It's a reasonable question with no good answer, because the term itself is broken.

Here's what actually matters: not whether food has been "processed," but whether it still resembles food.

Humans have always processed food. Bread requires milling, mixing, proofing, baking. Cheese is literally controlled rot. Even a salad is processed—someone washed it, chopped it, bagged it. Processing isn't the problem. The problem is when processing erases the ingredients entirely.

That's what the Lancet researchers are actually concerned about. Not the salad in your fridge. The products where "cheese" means a paste engineered to behave like cheese. Where flavor comes from a lab because nothing in the formula has any. Where the ingredient list reads like a chemistry set because that's what it is.

And look, I get why this confuses people. The grocery store doesn't separate food into "real" and "engineered." It's all just there on the shelf. A bag of pre-washed spinach sits next to a bag of something that used to be potatoes before it became a crisp. They're both "processed." They're both convenient. But one is still spinach, and the other is a food-adjacent product that required a team of food scientists to exist.

The problem is we've been using the same word for both.

I've had customers ask if our Greek salad is ultra-processed because it contains a preservative. Fair concern. But there's a difference between adding something to keep real feta from spoiling and replacing feta entirely with a mixture of modified starches, emulsifiers, and "natural flavoring" that approximates the idea of feta.

Our salads use processing to preserve real ingredients, not replace them. The chickpeas are still chickpeas. The vegetables still taste like vegetables. We're not rebuilding food from proteins and starches and emulsifiers. We're keeping real food safe long enough to reach your store.

Does that require some level of intervention? Yes. We wash things in chlorinated water because E. coli is real. We use modified atmosphere packaging because oxygen makes food rot. We add citric acid because browning isn't just aesthetic—it's a sign of degradation. None of that is romantic. But it's also not the same as taking apart a potato, removing everything that makes it a potato, and reassembling it into a chip that will outlive us all.

The Lancet study talks about health risks. Fine. But I think the deeper issue is trust. When you can't identify what you're eating, when the ingredient list is full of things that don't sound like food, when the product seems to violate basic rules of how food behaves—that's when people get nervous. And they should.

I'm not pretending we're some virtuous outlier. Plenty of companies are doing this right. But there are also plenty that aren't, and the industry has been really comfortable with the ambiguity. As long as "ultra-processed" remains vague enough, everyone can claim they're fine.

That's not exciting. But it's honest.

The panic around "processing" misses the actual issue: you should be able to recognize what you're eating. If you can't, maybe ask why.