Crustless Spinach Quiche, and Ultra-Processed People

A hash brown casserole or quiche is often featured in my weekly meal preps, and this is a crustless quiche that I've been making on repeat lately. It has a handful of ingredients and is very quick to put together. 

My daughter enjoys a wedge of this quiche and some fruit, and perhaps a piece of toast on the side, for her school day breakfasts. I adapted it from this recipe. It is a very flexible recipe and can be used to dispatch many bits and bobs from the fridge- various herbs, veg, cheese bits, etc.

Crustless Spinach Quiche

• Preheat oven to 375F.
• Spray a 9 or 10 inch pie dish with some oil spray.
• Empty 1 10-oz box of chopped frozen spinach into a microwave-safe dish. Microwave for 3-4 minutes until defrosted and squeeze out excess water.
• Scatter the spinach in the pie dish.
• In a blender, blend
• 5 eggs
• 3/4 cup cottage cheese
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Pour this egg mixture into the pie dish
• Sprinkle with a bit of shredded cheddar cheese
• Place the pie dish on a baking sheet (to catch spills and make it easy to put in and pull out of oven) and bake for 25 minutes or until golden brown and puffy
• Serve warm or cold. Store in fridge. Makes 6 servings.

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Happy Autumn Equinox! My daughter turned 14 last week. How the years go by. It was a weekday so we planned a simple dinner at home. The birthday girl is deeply into the "fall aesthetic"- cozy orange throws, fall-scented candles, pumpkin string lights... 

She requested pumpkin cupcakes with chai frosting, and lasagna, baked sweet potatoes, and apple cider. I couldn't find apple cider, for some odd reason, but the rest of the meal was easy enough. 

For the cupcakes, I used this recipe as is. I planned to add chai spices to the frosting, and wouldn't you know it, I completely forgot until after frosting them! The cupcakes were fine; the frosting was a little too sweet for my tastes. I won't rush to make this recipe again but it was good enough for the occasion. 

To frost the cupcakes, I dyed the frosting light orange and tried a silly little pumpkin design (inspired by some images online), with bits of pretzels as pumpkin stems. 

* * *

I read an interesting book last week: Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken. It came out in 2023 and I have been wanting to read it for a while. The author is a British physician-researcher. The book is readable and often funny, an exhaustive and exhausting dive into the world of ultra-processed food, a world that we are all very much immersed in whether we like it or not. I don't know that I can summarize the whole book here, but I will mention a few interesting things that I took away. 

The very first question is- what is ultra-processed food, or UPF? The author boils down the definition to this: if it is wrapped in plastic and contains at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t normally find in a standard home kitchen, it’s UPF. 

The ingredient list of a food is the easiest way to tell what category it falls into. Common markers of UPF include ingredients rarely used in home cooking, such as high-fructose corn syrup, protein isolates, hydrogenated oils, and artificial flavors, colorings, and emulsifiers. 

A useful way to think about it is the NOVA system/ classification of food, developed by Brazilian researchers. It makes the important distinction between processing and ultra-processing. 

1. Unprocessed or minimally processed food: fruit, veg, flour, pasta
2. Processed culinary ingredients: oil, sugar, salt, butter, starches
3. Processed foods (ready-made mixtures of the first two): salted nuts, canned beans, freshly made bread
4. Ultra-processed food (UPF): Formulations of ingredients, mostly of exclusive industrial use, fractionating whole food into substances and chemically modifying these substances

The author starts by placing UPF in context of human history. Over billions of years our bodies have superbly adapted to using a wide range of food. But over the last 150 years food has become…not food. These substances constructed from novel molecules and using new processes entered our diet gradually, then gaining pace to form the majority (60%) of what people eat in the US and UK. It has become the national diet of our nations. 

All over the world, traditional diets are being displaced by UPF as part of a global nutritional transition. Reading this reminded me of how I was a schoolchild when Nestle launched Maggi noodles in India. They came to our school and handed out free Maggi packets, brilliantly earning an entire generation of lifelong consumers. 

It is easy to see why food packaging and preservation were hailed as good innovations in general. But why did the usual ingredients get replaced by UPF versions? It is all about price and costs. UPF ingredients save money. They allow centralized manufacturing, allow better product transport, and extend shelf life. They mimic real and expensive ingredients like milk, cream, eggs. We can replace almost any ingredient with a cheap modified version. Modified starches can replace fats and dairy, hold water during freezing, and bulk out any sauce. Thus cheap crops like corn and soy can be turned into unimaginable amounts of money. 

The human market for corn cobs is very small, but you can make a lot of money by turning the corn into HFCS, a base ingredient and additive for almost every product. Milk has less value than baby food, ice cream and yogurt. Tomatoes have less value than ketchup or pasta sauce. 

Why is UPF a problem?

A diversity of reasons, and this is just a sampling:

• UPF is soft due to breakdown of food matrix, causing dental problems
• It is soft so you eat it fast, eating far more calories per minute
• It has high calorie density as it is dry, high in fat and sugar and low in fiber
• It is micro-nutrient deficient
• It displaces whole foods from the diet
• There is a mismatch between the taste signals from the mouth and the nutrition content
• It is addictive and for some people, binges are inevitable
• Damages the microbiome, which could allow inflammatory bacteria to flourish and a leaky gut
• Convenience, price and marketing of UPF urges us to eat constantly and without thought
• The additives and physical processing mean that UPF affects our satiety system directly
• Drives environmental destruction, carbon emissions, and plastic pollution

UPF is consistently associated with higher scores on food addiction scales compared to real food. It is always UPF that people report problems with. A scientist named Hall performed an experiment comparing 80% NOVA group 1 (with some group 2 and 3) diet (what we might think of as home cooking) with a 80% NOVA group 4 (UPF) diet. Diets were matched exactly in terms of salt, sugar, fat, fiber and participants could eat as much as they liked. (The unprocessed diet was more expensive and took time and skill to prepare.) Participants ate an average of 500 calories more per day on the UPF diet. Hall’s theory is not simply that UPF is delicious and we enjoy eating it. It is that the new UPF environment is affecting our ability to self-regulate. 

In UPF, most of the molecules in whole foods are stripped away leaving only calories. There is an idea that we are chasing flavors in search of missing nutrition. We may be eating more food to compensate for becoming increasingly deficient in micronutrients. Artificial sweeteners create mismatches between sensations in the mouth and nutrition in the gut. 

UPF manufacturers hijack taste interactions to make us eat their food. First, they use a trick that great cooks have been using for centuries- flavor enhancement. At particular concentrations and combinations, sweet, sour, salt and savory all enhance flavor, making food more delectable. Modern coca-cola has caffeine bitterness, and extreme sourness from phosphoric acid, along with a huge amount of sugar (nine teaspoons in a can, MUCH more sugar than you would add to a drink like lemonade that you make at home) and fizziness and coldness to make the mixture extremely palatable. UPF is speedballing different tastes and sensations to force far more calories into us than we could otherwise handle, creating enormous neurological rewards that keep us coming back for more.

What to do if you want to stop eating UPF: This is not a diet book, and there are no great answers here. The author has a few suggestions:

1. Going on an 80% UPF diet for a few days to see what it does. You realize that it is not food but an industrially produced edible substance and you will want to stop eating it.
2. If you recognize an addiction problem, seek help. You may find it much easier to be abstinent. 
3. You may want to take an approach that you will eat some UPF but steer clear of the problem products.

I've always known, as most of us have, that UPF is a problem, but the book confronts you with the enormity of the issue and the extent of the harm. When I evaluate my own family's consumption of UPF, I'm pretty sure that we eat considerably less UPF than the national US average. At the same time, I'm pretty sure that we eat more UPF than we should. 

The antidote to UPF consumption is home cooking. I am the fortunate position that I enjoy cooking and baking from scratch, I have (and make) time for it, we have access to fresh ingredients nearby, and the budget to buy them. Home cooking is a solid commitment and requires considerable hours and a lot of energy spent each week shopping for food, preparing it, managing the kitchen, and cleaning up. 

However, UPF do find their way into my kitchen, in a few different ways. 

I make compromises for the kids, who are steeped in UPF culture and prefer those versions. My last post is a good example of this compromise. The kids like store-bought/restaurant ranch dressing, so I buy ranch dressing packets (much UPF) to make a semi-homemade version, with the idea that they will eat a lot more fresh veggies if they have a favorite dressing to dip them in. Another example: They love granola bars/ protein bars which are totally UPF, with minimal nutritional value. I would be very happy to provide them with trail mix with nuts, dried fruit, and chocolate chips even, or to make energy bars from scratch, but the kids won't eat that, so we keep buying the granola bars. Ditto for the flip yogurts and the ice cream novelties. I will never stop making different foods from scratch and offering a variety of food to my kids, but there are things we buy every week that I would really rather not. 

I make compromises for the sake of convenience and macronutrients. I've been wanting to increase my protein intake, in conjunction with strength training, to build muscle. Protein powder (UPF) is a very easy and convenient way to do this, so I drink a serving every day. I don't want to eat meat and fish, no matter that those are whole foods, and I want some diversity beyond lentils, beans, and tofu, so I eat occasional UPF meat substitutes. 

Some UPF foods are favorite treats. I'll give in to my daughter's requests and buy packets of Maggi now and then as a special treat or a sick-day meal. On a stressful day, I'll go get a bag of flamin' hot cheetos, because for me, it is the most perfect food ever invented, and a total treat-yo-self moment. These are designed to hit the "bliss point" and they do so very successfully for me. I will say that, in general, I am put off by most UPF, and hot cheetos and Parle-G biscuits (and a handful of other products) are exceptions. What derails me are foods that are not UPF, things like potato chips (potatoes, oil, salt), roasted cashews (cashews, salt) and chips and salsa (also usually without any UPF ingredients). So I disagree with the author that all blame falls on UPF.

Some UPF foods I utilize as a form of harm reduction. Store bought cupcakes would be UPF to the max (just look at the ingredient lists), so I make cupcakes at home, but do add artificial food coloring to the frosting for decoration, to make it festive for special occasions. 

Overall, I could definitely make more of a habit of reading labels and ingredient lists, but the way I handle things now is mostly a practical way to eat reasonably well in this environment without being obsessive about it all. (It is interesting that just eating normal foods feels weird and obsessive, isn't it?)

A great point that the author makes is that we are ultra-processed people not just because of the food we eat. Most of the other products we buy are engineered to drive excess consumption- our phones and apps, our clothes, our social media, our games and TV. Living in this world requires a certain mindset to avoid losing oneself and helplessly giving in to it. It is like you have to wake up and choose simplicity every day. There is a lot to be said for going back to basics and enjoying simple foods and basic recipes on repeat, and treating food as fuel, instead of making every meal a taste sensation. 

Related reading:

NYT review of this book
NYT Ultra-processed foods challenge

What is your opinion of UPF and how do you deal with UPF foods in your life?