All You Eat is Ultra‑Processed Veggies

Unless you’re crunching raw carrots, obviously.

This probably says most about me, but my social media algorithms flood me with content about natural meat on the one side and ultra-processed vegan garbage on the other. Why would you choose a Beyond Burger with a small book’s worth of ingredients written on its back, instead of a piece of beef that is just…cow?

On a certain level, I’m sympathetic to the meme. Indeed, who would want to just eat plants that have been tampered with beyond belief? Just think about all the processing involved in making this meal:

We start with a plant blend, often heavily soy-based. The mix is milled to flour, then sluiced into a warm, oxygen‑free fermenter held at 39 °C. Inside, swarms of bacteria and fungi break the tough fibres into small, energy‑rich fatty acids while puffs of carbon dioxide and methane drift off through vents.

Hours later, the mixture drops into an acid bath. Hydrochloric acid and pepsin trim long proteins into bite‑sized pieces; an alkaline rinse then frees individual amino acids. These stream through narrow pipes to the next unit, where sleeve‑like chambers knit them into elastic protein threads. Collagen binds the bundles, iron pigments tint them pink, and tiny beads of fat settle between fibres, laying down the marbling.

Brief calcium surges tighten the weave, keeping the structure aligned. Extra heat is whisked away by cooling coils, gases vent overhead, and rinse‑water drains to ponds where microbes scrub the runoff. Even so, the line burns roughly twenty‑five feed calories for every one captured in finished tissue.

After eighteen to thirty months of milling, fermenting, snipping, knitting and conditioning, the plant flips to batch‑termination. The newly formed material is cut, chilled, vacuum‑wrapped, hauled hundreds of kilometres and, at last, dropped onto a sizzling plate. Voilà: dinner.

First of all, this all sounds very complicated, and for a mere mortal like me, without a degree in chemistry, it might as well have been written in Esperanto.¹ Secondly, I wouldn’t want to put any of that into my body.

Oh, and third: What I just described is how real cow-beef is made.²

Although most of us remember little from our chemistry and biology lessons, one thing should stick with us: animals don’t do photosynthesis. All the energy you consume stems from the sun, captured by some plants. Sometimes we simply eat those plants as they are. Fancy a carrot, anyone?

Other times, the plants need processing. We can process the plants by grinding peas into powder, spin the paste into fibres, tint it red with beet juice, press it into burgers. Or we can use big steel tanks, feeding sugar to yeast that brews milk proteins, or to fungi that knit into meat‑like flakes.

Alternatively, we can outsource the very same work. Animals essentially function as our slaves when processing our vegetables: Cows, pigs, chickens and so on stay on permanent shift, digesting, fermenting, and rebuilding plant molecules inside their own bodies. We supply the feed, they supply the biochemistry.

The two pipelines described, one running in stainless‑steel tanks, the other inside a cow, follow almost the same chemistry. There are three significant differences, however:

First, the animals are terrible at their job. A steer burns roughly ten plant calories to lay down a single calorie of steak. The other nine escape as body heat, manure and methane. That inefficiency inflates land demand, feed demand and, ultimately, the climate bill—about twenty‑five kilos of CO₂‑equivalent per kilo of beef. Run the same conversions under human control, and you keep far more of the energy in the food. A much more sustainable choice.

Second, the animal workforce has the worst employment contract on Earth. Cows, pigs and chickens work around the clock, cannot resign, live crowded lives spiked with antibiotics, and finish their shift at the slaughter line. If you don’t want to cause immense suffering, you should let humans control the processing of the plants.

And lastly, quite a peculiar difference: Although in both cases, we’re looking at re-arranged plants, we end up calling a steak “natural” or clean, and vegan alternatives synthetic or unnatural.

The natural‑unnatural divide is so common that it feels obvious. Walk a supermarket aisle and the message blares from every shelf: All‑Natural Beef, Clean Chicken, No‑Lab Fake Meat. Influencers praise “foods your grandma knew”, and podcasts hiss at “factory food.”

On a closer look, however, it should be noted that the divide “natural-unnatural” seems quite arbitrary. Humans are animals, clearly part of nature. When a beaver stacks logs and mud across a stream, we call the dam natural. Let a civil engineer pour concrete in the same spot, and suddenly it’s artificial. That should strike us as strange.

Nevertheless, I take it that what we mean by natural is something like “not tampered with by humans.” Even by that rule, there’s a good argument that most meat should be classified as “unnatural”: Feedlot cattle live on imported grain, not meadow grass. Broiler chickens reach market weight in five weeks thanks to selective breeding, climate‑controlled sheds and antibiotic feed additives. From artificial insemination to automated slaughter, the process is guided by people at every step. If this still counts as natural, what wouldn’t?

So why cling to the label, given all this fuzziness? Two possible reasons come to mind:

• Morality
  The sense that whatever is “natural” must be the ethically purer choice.

• Health
  The belief that food untouched by industry is automatically better for our bodies. Classification schemes such as NOVA reinforce this intuition. NOVA ranks food from unprocessed to ultra‑processed according to the degree of human tinkering³ – i.e., how “natural” our food is.

Neither reason holds up to scrutiny, however.

Think of the moral claim first. History is packed with “natural” things that can kill you (think ricin, arsenic or malaria), while “unnatural” inventions such as seatbelts and vaccines save millions of lives. It’d be strange to hold that providing someone with a life-saving vaccine is worse, morally speaking, than giving them life-threatening malaria. And in fact, when it comes to food, it seems to be the other way around. “Natural” steaks are built on illness, confinement and slaughter, while a pea‑protein patty spares both animal suffering and much of the planet’s carbon budget.

The health claim fares no better. In fairness, a lot of ultra-processed foods are, indeed, unhealthy. But that association exists mainly because many ultra-processed foods happen to be pumped full of cheap fats, refined sugars and excess salt (traits that spike calories and blood pressure), not because a blade or a mixer happened to touch the ingredients. In other words, it is the recipe of certain “ultra-processed meals,” not the act of processing, that drives the health outcome. Adjust the recipe, and the “ultra‑processed” label loses its predictive powers with regard to health.
And sure enough, NOVA’s classification is a mediocre heuristic for health at best: A calcium‑fortified soy milk and a pea‑burger land in the same “ultra‑processed” bin as soda, even though the former are significantly healthier than the latter. Meanwhile, a rib‑eye stake can be packed with saturated fat, but gets to be called “unprocessed.”

Every meal is sunlight first captured by plants and then reshuffled by chemistry. There’s nothing inherently nobler about letting that chemistry happen inside a cow than inside a stainless‑steel vat. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect meme-creators on Facebook to look past an arbitrary natural–unnatural divide, but the rest of us can do better. If you care about harm or sustainability, examine the working conditions, emissions, and efficiency of whoever is doing the processing—odds are the “unnatural” vegan version wins. And if health is your priority, skip the unreliable heuristics and read the nutrition label.

1. Shout-out to ChatGPT’s Deep Research, however!

2. What a plot twist, am I right?!

3. In other words, all the processing inside a cow is ignored. It shouldn’t be!