To think it's impossible to eat a UPF free diet as an ordinary person?

I think there’s the usual hysteria about this latest iteration of ‘clean eating’ with that easily runs into orthorexic territory. Remember that most people (influencers) giving ‘advice’ on diets of any kind are selling something.

I choose to improve my diet without aiming for ‘perfection’ and getting too sucked in to the culture surrounding avoiding upfs. I moderate my intake and make concessions for the good - I have salad cream on my salad because otherwise I wouldn’t eat salad, make miso soup from packaged miso because otherwise I’d have a tin of Heinz cream of tomato, and eat high end dark chocolate because otherwise I’d have a twix.

Its early days and I will try and improve things further as I go along but I’m learning and to try for the perfect wholefood diet immediately and forever will be setting myself up for failure.

I watch a lot of Japanese cooking videos and their diet, while shockingly high in salt, is still rated as one of the healthiest in the world due to the small overall amount of food eaten, fermented foods, many, many vegetables and quality proteins. They’re not afraid of the odd deep fried spam fritter though and they’re certainly not afraid of white rice.

Just your best in this terrible food environment we live in, aim to improve what you can, when you can and don’t be too hard on yourself.

So don’t make sourdough! Buy a bread maker and spend about 5 minutes putting ingredients in it for a healthy wholewheat loaf.
Most jam that you buy has the same ingredients as home made.

Get bones from your butchers (they are usually free) simmer for several hours with herbs and veg. Freeze. There's your stock

You're choosing to spend the time on sourdough and jam.

Plenty of people eat very low amounts of UPF food without taking much time.

I really don't want to be a smug mumsnetter type but honestly, we never use stock cubes or gravy granules or any of that stuff.

We always put chicken bones on for stock and dh sometimes goes out to buy beef bones for making stock in the pressure cooker.

Gravy is a reduction of the meat juices with a bit of wine or vermouth (UPFs I guess).

For added flavour, I use miso, like a pp said. It's a UPF for sure. An OXO cube is probably not worse.

In terms of things like bread, I just don't eat it much. Occasionally make a brown loaf and add wheatgerm. Or just buy one.

Do you live near a co-op? Their in store bakery bread is pretty good. The only additional ingredient is ascorbic acid (vitamin C).
I don't know what other supermarkets put in their in store bakery bread but maybe it's worth checking the ingredients.

With the six hours a week you'll save on the sourdough, you can hunt your own cows and boil their bones.

We buy the frozen beef bone broth cubes from M&S in place of stock cubes nowadays. The ingredients list is literally: water, beef bones, tomato paste, onions, carrots, salt. Bone broth is also very easy to make yourself and freeze into the required portions in an ice cube tray. Overall, I do find your all or nothing stance a bit strange and unnecessary though. It’s absolutely fine to have a mostly UPF-free diet, still have the occasional treat and be perfectly healthy.

It doesn't take six hours, though. It takes a couple of minutes to mix (and top up the starter), then leave it, do all the other things in the day, then come back to bake it (whilst getting on with other things), etc.

It means planning and scheduling, yes - for example, having beef and automatically putting the bones on for stock so that the stock is ready/in the fridge/frozen in cubes for when you have planned to make the soup - but not spending hours doing anything.

Buy the m&s liquid stock, ingredients for the beef one are "Water · Beef Bones · Chicken Bones · Salt · Tomato Purée · Yeast Extract · Onions · Carrots · Leeks · Parsley · Garlic · White Peppercorns · Ground Bay Leaf."

So don’t make it 🤷‍♀️ plenty of store-bought loaves are very low UPF now (we use the spelt toasting loaf from M&S)

As others have said you don’t need to be perfect and make everything from scratch eliminating every UPF - just make healthy changes that work for you.

I was looking at secondhand cookbooks today - nearly the save money ones overly relied on either sausages, or chicken - appreciate chicken’s not upf but it’s not a diverse range of protein and we eat too much of it.

Yes it’s really hard - you can buy beef brone broth (freja etc) but of course it pushes soup etc up from a cheap meal to a pricy one…

The amount of ingredients in a stock cube that make it a UPF will be a minuscule amount of the final dish.
You can buy plenty of pre prepared ingredients that will speed up cooking but are not UPF eg chopped frozen onions.

I don’t think you need ‘days’ to do batch cooking.

I buy bread but do my own stock most of the time (leftover bones from a roast + leftover veg and parmesan rind that i keep in frozen tuperware until i have enough to do a load of stick which i then freeze in small container for later use)
id love to do sourcough bread but 1) all my attempt failed and 2) it is time consuming!!
i am mostly upf free but thats a way of life rather than a choice. My husband thinks it is because i am from the countryside… maybe it is, maybe it isnt.
i would love to know how to can veg and fruits like my grandmother did but i am very afraid of botulism and i work FT with 3 kids so not really realistic. Also i dont see the point to keep vegs i will buy from Sainsbury’s!
i defo have a little bit of an unrealised trad wife in me!

'Processed' is different to Ultra Processed Food.

Sourdough bread freezes really well, I normally make a batch of rolls & defrost them as I want them. There’s no way I’m going to faff about making my own stock though, as long as most of the ingredients in my homemade soup / ratatouille / whatever aren’t UPF I’m happy.

There are some things that are very hard to get hold of non-UPF versions of that should be possible, stock cubes is one. However rather like vegan options, while it was a minority thing, it wasn’t well catered for, if more and more people are eating low UPF diets, there’s a market for producing and selling non or low UPF options. Stock would be a good option for food manufacturers to easily produce an alternative- especially as some of us would pay a premium for it.

Just make regular bread. It is far better than mass produced. Use a bread machine if you prefer.

Everything is difficult if you become a perfectionist.

Buy a bread maker.

But how do you dry beef stock? You need to... process it.

It's unrealistic for me, and I can live with that. Overall I'm reasonably healthy.