Packages of plant-based meats, which are classified as ultra-processed, at a grocery store in 2025. | Bloomberg via Getty Images In little more than a decade, the term “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs) has risen from an obscure academic coinage to one of the most potent ideas in the American food imagination. It has saturated media coverage of diet and disease, spawned a profusion of guides teaching shoppers how to spot UPFs at the supermarket, and animated Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to rema