Jul 31, 2026 · 55 min · 11 segments
**LISTENBACK** to Dr. Phillip Baker on 'unprocessing' your diet and tackling the rise of ultra-processed foods (UPF's). One of Nourishing Matters scene setting episodes from late 2020, our most…
Anthea FawcettHost
Okay, so junk food is a pretty colloquial and wide-ranging term that can cover a lot, the good, the bad, and the not so ugly, perhaps, from homemade cakes to ultra-processed alphabet ingredient foods that you've just alluded to.

And some of these can last almost a lifetime on the shelf and certainly in landfill or in the ocean.

But we humans have been processing foods for thousands of years in simple ways, one way or another.

Can you just give us an overview of what role food processing has played in human evolution and history? And obviously a lot of it's a good news story, but it's the latter part that's what's really perhaps scary.
And this is also, you know, something that, I've taken a really strong interest in is the history of food processing and how food processing has enabled human evolution.
One might say is that humans became humans, our large brain sizes, our physiology and so on, because we were able to process foods.
So the roasting of meat on a fire, we've been doing that for probably about 1.8 million years, humans and our ancestors.
The grinding of grains, wild grains, grinding with a stone, and we've been doing that for many hundreds of thousands of years as well.
Many traditional foods that we find in cuisines all over the world are processed.
So these, you know, food processing has played a huge role in human evolution, in the development of culture, food culture.
It's also played a huge role in the growth of civilizations, right? So being able to produce large quantities of grain, for example, and then process that grain, turn it into bread, is one of the enabling factors of growth of cities, of civilizations, of empires.
So food processing is just so deeply intrinsic to the growth of human civilization as well.
Something's really dramatically changed in the way we process foods, really in only the last 100 years or so.

Okay, so junk food is a pretty colloquial and wide-ranging term that can cover a lot, the good, the bad, and the not so ugly, perhaps, from homemade cakes to ultra-processed alphabet ingredient foods that you've just alluded to.

And some of these can last almost a lifetime on the shelf and certainly in landfill or in the ocean.

But we humans have been processing foods for thousands of years in simple ways, one way or another.

Can you just give us an overview of what role food processing has played in human evolution and history? And obviously a lot of it's a good news story, but it's the latter part that's what's really perhaps scary.
And this is also, you know, something that, I've taken a really strong interest in is the history of food processing and how food processing has enabled human evolution.
One might say is that humans became humans, our large brain sizes, our physiology and so on, because we were able to process foods.
So the roasting of meat on a fire, we've been doing that for probably about 1.8 million years, humans and our ancestors.
The grinding of grains, wild grains, grinding with a stone, and we've been doing that for many hundreds of thousands of years as well.
Many traditional foods that we find in cuisines all over the world are processed.
So these, you know, food processing has played a huge role in human evolution, in the development of culture, food culture.
It's also played a huge role in the growth of civilizations, right? So being able to produce large quantities of grain, for example, and then process that grain, turn it into bread, is one of the enabling factors of growth of cities, of civilizations, of empires.
So food processing is just so deeply intrinsic to the growth of human civilization as well.
Something's really dramatically changed in the way we process foods, really in only the last 100 years or so.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.