Information Diet

Originally sent to subscribers on April 1, 2026.

My book club is reading Ultra-Processed People: Why We Can’t Stop Eating Food That Isn’t Food. [Yes, I could have just said “I'm reading" the book but I needed you to know I'm in a book club. Weird flex, I know.]

Ultra-processed food is food that has been created or modified for convenience, craveability, and shelf life. Some UPF comes in obvious forms: Fritos, Ding Dongs, Diet Coke. But some of it is sneakier: ice cream, juice from concentrate, the friendly-looking Kale, Farro, and Roasted Artichoke Salad I thought was perfectly safe. As the author summarizes, “If it comes in plastic and contains at least one ingredient that you wouldn’t usually find in a home kitchen, it’s UPF.”

All that processing comes with a cost. The author argues that processing leads to a whole slew of health problems, everything from overweight to cancer. And, with most people in the US and UK getting most of their daily calories from UPF, that’s an issue.

I was lying on the couch yesterday, reading the final pages of the book, eating potato chips, when Wiff got my attention.

“What’s it about?” she asked.

I gave her the same info dump I just wrote above. And when I finally walked away from the dry-erase board, out of breath, I asked, “What do you think?”

“I regret asking,” she said, leaving the room.

But learning how the Jimmy Dean sausage is made has a way of making you want nothing to do with it. Soon we began our quest to cleanse ourselves of UPF.

“Are Cheez-Its UPF?” she yelled from the bedroom. “What about the Tostitos?”

“I can’t pronounce half the ingredients,” I yelled back. “So...yeah?” I open the pantry and threw them both away. The lack of the e in Cheez should have been a dead giveaway.

“I’m guessing the Tate’s Cookies are UPF?” she asked.

“Definitely!” I rummaged around and found the bag. “I’ll toss ’em!”

I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Instead, I stood there and ate the six remaining cookies, careful not to moan too loudly. Being the Soft Baked variety, many were stuck together, so I ate three of them stacked like a club sandwich. I couldn’t bear to waste them, even if I was forced to consume six servings of soy lecithin, vegetable glycerin, and “natural flavor.” The bag says MADE IN THE U.S.A. I told myself I was a patriot.

Hot off the success of removing, or eating, the UPF in our home, I started looking for UPF in other areas of my life.

There are obvious candidates, like the news and social media. Like UPF, they’re engineered for quick consumption and generally lack nutritional value. They’re easier to consume, but leave you less fed. How often do you finish an article and feel sated? Have you ever set your phone down after binging Instagram and thought, I’m so glad I did that? I quit the news a little over a year ago but still allow myself a nibble here and there whenever something interesting pops up—like what's going on in Iran or whomever Taylor Swift just dined with. [Dakota Johnson?!].

Then there are the sneakier candidates.

I’ve enjoyed reading more over the past few years, and after seeing ads for book-summary services, I thought one of them might help me absorb more material faster. I found one called Shortform that makes “dense, actionable summaries that give you the key points without fluff.” No fluff, sure, but the summary of another book I’m reading—Ron Chernow’s Titan—was so refined that it was just a list of fleshed-out bullet points. It felt like UPF.

The summary contains the same basic information as the original book, but the processing—the refinement and distillation—stripped out the stuff that makes reading enjoyable. Chernow can make a 1,000-page biography read like a novel, but his voice was gone. I missed encountering new vocabulary—words like impecunious, noisome, or penurious—words I can’t wait to whip out at my next dinner party so I can look like an even bigger blowhard. It lacked references to concepts like the Second Great Awakening and Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, the ancillary accoutrements that can spark interest in other topics and lead you down weird rabbit holes. I started to confuse information with nutrients, and I missed the nourishment.

Reading the summary felt like eating Fritos: you get a ton of calories, but after taking them knuckle-deep into a jar of Tostitos Queso dip (100% UPF), you’re left wondering whether this is what humans were meant to consume. It’s like we’ve gotten so good at processing for ease and efficiency that we keep ending up with things that are easier to consume but worse at feeding us.

I think that’s what worries me the most—not just that processed things nourish me less, but that they might retrain my appetite. If I spend long enough eating intellectual Dino Nuggets, I might forget I once liked real chicken. That’s the trade-off convenience never advertises: I might just lose my taste for the real thing. The box should come with a warning label.

So I’m trying to slow down. To read physical books. To write with a real pen on real paper. To resist the urge to turn everything into something faster, slicker, and easier to swallow. What the hell am I doing with all the extra time saved anyway? 

I’m trying to embrace friction and leave room for the minor inconveniences that are often part of the experience itself. Convenience has its place, sure, but sometimes the things that are worth consuming aren’t always the ones that go down easiest.

Unless, of course, they’re Tate’s Soft Baked Cookies.