[docandrew]

Depends on the food - something like acorns, for example, they are inedible for humans in their whole form, but hulling, grinding the nuts, and rinsing them of tannins makes a tasty nutritious flour.

The word “processed” is kind of a lazy heuristic - butchering, cooking, hulling, mixing, those are all ways of processing that are healthy and effective.

Creating something like a Twinkie is a whole different ballgame and looks more like a triumph of chemical engineering and material science than anything related to baking or cooking.

[kipchak]

My personal favorite oversimplification is you shouldn't eat what the average person would try and stop a zookeeper from feeding to a monkey.

Some bread made from acorn flower, cooked butchered meat or hulled rice would be fine, but giving them a Twinkie or Mountain Dew seems like the kind of thing that might lose them their job.

[the_arcadian]

The problem is that I've read "If you give a mouse a cookie" to my daughter so many times that I would naturally assume that giving a twinkie to a monkey would result in a bedtime-story length chain of humorous events.

[docandrew]

That’s funny, but not a bad rule of thumb!

[spidey1]

I've heard the term "Ultra processed foods" used for twinkie like foods.

[pencilguin]

Unfortunately, "plant-based meat substitute" is, canonically, ultra-processed food.

[Ferret7446]

Why unfortunate? Plant-based meat substitutes are exactly as unhealthy as one would assume from them being ultra-processed. They are made to taste good in the same way (adding lots of fats, sugars, salt, etc.).

Perhaps there are ultra-processed foods that are not unhealthy, but that does not include "Impossible Meat".

[pencilguin]

It is unfortunate because we cannot in good conscience ask people to switch from barely-processed meat to ultra-processed meat substitutes, despite the meat industry's heavy contribution to looming climate disaster.

Many of us have switched to things other than meat, but that choice seems beyond most people.

Another alternative is what is called "lab-grown meat", which is not a meat substitute, per se, but is actual meat that might be a lot less harmful to produce. Where it sits on the "processed" spectrum is hard to assess. Obviously it is, in one sense, 100% processed, but details matter.