It is widely agreed that the American diet has issues. This is one of our ever-shrinking number of bipartisan convictions: Something should be done about the volume of ultraprocessed foods we’re eating. We even have a health secretary who has made that sentiment a cornerstone of his political career — and has been promising, for months now, that he is just on the verge of producing a workable definition of what an ultraprocessed food is in the first place.
This honestly isn’t an easy task. The scientific rubric — as used in all those studies linking ultraprocessed foods to negative health outcomes — is, per one professor, “agnostic to nutrition”: It splits foods into four very broad categories, based on how much they’ve been altered from their original states. The processes behind “processed” food can include familiar home techniques like canning vegetables or baking cookies. “Ultraprocessed” implicates a lot of industrial operations unlikely to take place in your kitchen, without really distinguishing between machine-extruded junk food and, say, mass-produced whole-grain bread — and it sounds a lot more egregious if you’re already picturing regular old processing as something that happens only in a factory, rather than stuff humans have been doing for centuries.
It’s those flavor-dusted pseudo-foods in particular that we’re so alarmed by, even as we continue to love eating them. Our suspicion runs so deep that we’ve even started using it to characterize other, nonfood phenomena. Hours wasted staring at your phone are, according to one doctor, “ultraprocessed time.” A writer for The Guardian warned about Hollywood offering lazy viewers “a diet of ultraprocessed films, full of sugary rushes, empty scenes and endless exposition.” One filmmaker, writing about artificial intelligence, said we were developing “ultraprocessed culture” that “fills us with the equivalent of empty calories,” while a computer scientist applied the food categories to media, from minimally processed (books) to ultraprocessed (TikTok feeds). Some say we’re living in an ultraprocessed world, in which private experiences are increasingly engineered from the outside.
To be “ultra-” is not inherently bad. The prefix is just Latin for “beyond” — slightly different from the “extremely” we hear today. (“Ultramundane,” for instance, means “beyond the world,” as in supernatural, not “really boring.”) A writer for The Forward chewed on this 21 years ago while questioning the term “Israeli ultranationalists”: Being “ultraefficient” was clearly good, and “ultramodern” a matter of taste, but attaching the prefix to a political position felt disapproving. For this, the writer argued, we might thank the French, with their 17th-century ultramontanes (seen as too beholden to the Pope, “beyond the mountains” in Rome), their radical ultrarevolutionnaires (les ultras) and, as the monarchy returned, their ultraroyalistes.
The same prefix in English soon brought us ultra-Anglicans, ultrademocrats, ultraradicals, even Ultra-Goths. (That was 1866, in reference to architecture, not black-clad music fans.) Today words like “ultraconservative” or “ultraliberal” tend to suggest a kind of Overton-window violation: The implication is that there’s a normal way to hold certain beliefs, but the subject has veered beyond that into questionable territory.
One of the main places you still see “ultra-” in positive use is marketing. Odds are decent that your kitchen currently contains Dawn Ultra dish soap, Hefty Ultra Strong trash bags or Michelob ULTRA, now America’s best-selling beer. (“Live Fit. Live Fun. Live Ultra.”) You might apply Systane Ultra Eye Drops, chug a Monster Energy Ultra, lace up your Adidas Ultraboost sneakers and head off to Miami’s Ultra Music Festival. U.S. registered trademarks contain every imaginable variation: Ultra Lube, Ultragrain, Plasmajet Ultra+, Ultra MAGA Beer.
What have these products gone beyond? Regular old Dawn or Hefty bags or Plasmajets or MAGA beer, presumably. Makers of consumer electronics use similar words to mark the different tiers of their products: “If you, as a manufacturer, want to show that you mean business,” the site ITdaily said last year, “stick words like Pro, Max, Ultra, Plus, Premium (or a combination of them) behind the product name.” Some companies try to lean in fresher directions, as with AMD’s “Halo” processors and Lenovo’s very Gen-Z “Aura Edition” — but even Apple, long reliant on its Airs and Pros, is said to be working up an Ultra line.
Even in marketing, though, you might begin to sense that “ultra” is slipping toward the old-hat and déclassé. It’s a zoomy, energy-drink, lasers-and-polymers, “X-Treme” sort of label: Just as with food, screen time, cinema and politics, it suggests a kind of muchness, a cheap intensity. Food manufacturers still offer their Cheezy Blast varieties and wildly artificial flavors; if anything, these options have grown ever more novel and intentionally grotesque, appealing to your very disbelief at their existence. But you’ll also notice, say, PepsiCo’s denuded “Simply NKD” Cheetos and Doritos, “now reimagined without any colors or artificial flavors” — as if freshly picked from the Dorito bush and crisped in an elderly doritero’s brick oven. Trade publications talk periodically about the advantages of quieter advertising, promising an escape from muchness into simplicity and peace: Do you really crave more extremity, more beyondness, more more?
You might; you might even enjoy them more as vices and indulgences. But if there were some kind of market for the connotations of prefixes — for their vibes — it does feel like the neutral “ultra-” would be hitting a bit of a slump. Count up the uses you encounter, and there’s every chance you’ll see it attached to very few good things and pinned on a lot of things you’d suspect are bad for the body, the mind, the polity, the soul.
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine.
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