You can fight for universal access to food and care about food quality.
Ultra-processed food is not a boutique concern. It is structurally linked to poverty, healthcare costs, disability, and shortened life expectancy. Poor kids are not just hungry; they are disproportionately fed the worst food because it is cheap, subsidized, and aggressively marketed.
Treating UPFs like cigarettes is not about scolding parents or banning nuggets. It is about regulation: labeling, advertising to children, corporate accountability, and subsidy reform. Those are left economic fights, not moral panics. For the right these are business as usual. They don't want the labels, but they want to advertise poison to your children, and they don't want any accountability, but they do want your money.
Hunger and ultra-processed food are not competing concerns; they are symptoms of the same system. A politics that says âoeat least theyâ(TM)re eating somethingâ quietly accepts a two-tier society: dignity and longevity for some, bare survival for others.
Let's be clear:
No child should go hungry.
No child should be structurally pushed into lifelong metabolic disease because the cheapest calories are engineered junk.
Corporations should not profit from poisoning people while the public pays the healthcare bill.
