What it's really like trying to minimise UPFs - expectation v reality

[StiffyByngsDogBartholomew]

I've been trying to minimise UPFs for 6 months or maybe a bit more. We always had a very homemade diet anyway and weren't exactly starting from eating ready meals or jarred sauces.

i used to be a pastry chef, i trained in all areas of the kitchen. Im a really good cook, can make pretty much anything from breads and croissants to jams and fancy sauces. We have a decent food budget of £450 a month for 3 and while I work full time I have a shift which gives me plenty of time at home. I love cooking.

But even given all the above I'm bloody sick to death of it and I've started buying premade food like coleslaw again. I've just got totally exhausted constantly having to think of everything in advance and make everything. Eg if I want to make chicken and mushroom pie I need to make the flaky pastry and to make a gravy or white sauce. Packed lunches and breakfasts are much more difficult or expensive. I've either got to make the bread for the toast myself or pay a small fortune for bakery bread.

Constant arguments over not buying pappy sliced bread and household revolts over not buying flavoured crisps, Pringles, gravy powder, bars of chocolate, cheap ice cream, or cheap squash.

ive tried so hard to make sure everything we were eating was wholesome but its so bloody hard. Even starting from a very low threshold of UPFs and still including some I just can't be bothered.

some examples...
you want avocado on toast for breakfast - got to make the bread or buy it

want a hash brown on your full English - got to have sautés instead or make hash browns that do not taste anything like the same, however good a cook you are

burger and chips for a Saturday night now means you've got to make your own burger buns and chipped potatoes or wedges. Want onion rings with it ? Yeah they won't be a patch on the ones you buy in the freezer section.

no quick dinner options like a pizza from the reduced counter in the supermarket

want a curry ? Make it all from scratch including the naan bread, mango chutney etc

want a bit of something sweet to have after the packed lunch non upf pasta salad that you made homemade honey and mustard mayonnaise dressing for ? Gotta make it yourself.

the only yoghurts you can eat are plain with some fruit added. That's nice to start with but after a while the thought of a black cherry yoghurt was too much to resist

spend hours at the beginning of the month prepping pastries, curry sauce bases, wontons for wonton soup

want a quick pudding ? What are you going to have ? Oh yeah, nothing. you've had to make it beforehand or wait for it to cook. A quick bowl of ice cream or a lolly is out unless you've had to take out a second mortgage to buy it. Or made it yourself.

nothing is quick. It requires either vast amounts of time to make foods to replace takeaways, cake, bread, ice creams etc even if you decide that you can't actually cut the UPFs entirely. And unless your family is 100% on board you will be fighting a losing battle. You seem to spend your entire life thinking about, buying, making and clearing up food.

the takeaway from it is that I will still avoid emulsifiers wherever possible and do my best but I just can't keep fighting this battle to the level I've tried, it's just unsustainable.

Bottlegreen squash is what we use. Quite expensive though.

Even shop-bought fish fingers can be non-UPF. Birdseye cod ones are fine, unless you're being really militant about seed oils as they have some rapeseed oil. But I confess that stressing about seed oils is one step too far for me so I'll live with that!

Mostly cook from scratch, and my breadmaker is my best friend (once you've made your own from artisan flour you'll never go back), slow cooker, one where you can brown in the same pan, for just chucking everything in and forgetting about it. Farm shops are often good for small producers who don't use the nasty stuff. Fresh or frozen fruit to put in plain yogurt.

We have weeks we’re UPF free and weeks where we lean heavily on them. I have a supermarket bread that works and pita bread. I buy 3 loaves at a time and if we’re out before the next shop we buy what’s easy. Plain salted chips and tortilla chips. Lots of curries, a tray bake or two, chili or tacos, pasta once or twice a week. A quick meal is now pasta with butter and parm, black pepper for the adults, or eggs/cheese/beans/tuna on toast. I eat less hummus even though it takes 30 seconds to make.

Desserts we eat more of than before which cuts DH and kids fighting it.
pumpkin or zucchini bread
Rice pudding
brigadeiros (a quick fudge a friend from Brazil taught me)
Some brands of plain biscuits

It's very hard with allergies. We can choose to be upf free and my DC to have calcium deficiencies or we can eat upf and they will have stronger bones. We try to reduce where it's possible for us, but I'm not going to get obsessive about it. I'm on a few Facebook groups where it seems like disordered eating for many.

I’ve adjusted our diet.

I no longer use puff pastry, I make shortcrust.

I do use a more expensive mango chutney and think homemade curry with all the 1st principle spices and homemade naan is good enough. Mango chutney stays.

I make hummus but we have it less.

I don’t buy coleslaw and no one seems to notice. I make a 3 bean salad instead, maybe chuck in a bit of quinoa.

My DH likes homemade mayo, but Heinz ketchup was a step too far to remove. Ketchup stays.

I make all our cakes, but homemade icing sugar is too grainy, so it stays.

I make all our bread and pizza bases, but use a Panasonic maker. 3 mins a day and done in 3 hours. I add ground linseed, chickpea flour and a seed mix (that I make up and keep in a jar). The kids love it. They don’t like sourdough. Rolls for burgers is a weekend job. Pizza is easy mid week meal as done by the machine.

We eat more veggie dishes and have loads of seeds and nuts as snacks.

My thermamix is a godsend.

Fudge?!
can you share?

Oh my kids are disappointed, but that’s life! You’ve got to cut yourself a bit of slack.

I have a recipe for a homemade microwave sponge pudding that can be ready in a few minutes. I will find it shortly and post it back here.

But otherwise, yes, I agree. I live on my own so the bread situation is manageable but if I had a household consuming as much bread as we did when there were teens in the house, I would have had to have a bread maker at an absolute minimum, because we'd have been getting through a loaf a day.

You can make Nutella! it’s a treat but really tasty. It needs a great food processor.

We eat approx 90% upf free, and I’m veggie.

i use a bread maker as I can’t be arsed with anything else! I occasionally buy sourdough from the bakery.

Also air frier wedges are dead easy.

though tbh dh has the same breakfast every day (overnight oats with frozen fruit and Greek yogurt) and I normally have porridge (ditto fruit etc).

I tend to batch cook lots of tomato sauce, bean stew and soup.

sometimes I cba though, so we just have omelette (tortilla or packed full of veg) with veg and sweet potato wedges. We also have a lot of stir fries as these are dead quick and easy and risotto (usually green veg and mozzarella)

so most stuff we eat it straightforward. I try to pack in loads of flavour by frying onions etc for a minimum of 15 mins, adding wine, paprika etc.

’treats’ are shortbread, chocolate and crisps (olive oil ones) which I buy once a month and are free from emulsifiers etc.

my ds’s are both adults now are cook from scratch or batch cook most of the time too as that’s what we’ve always done tbh.

It sounds like you are eating some very complex meals/ trying to effectively replace supermarket ready meals with home made equivalents.

I am fairly UPF free but I eat much simpler things. Many meals would usually be a steak/ chicken/fish with vegetables or salad. Salads generally feature a lot, as it’s easy chopping up fruit/ vegetables and adding protein. Or batch cooked homemade soup. I do make a more elaborate seafood dish at times etc, but that tends to be more of a treat than everyday.

Breadwise, I don’t usually eat it, but if I do I get it from my local bakery where I can see a guy make it in front of me and know it’s just sourdough, so don’t count it as UPF.

Dessert would be yoghurt and fruit. Or just fruit, especially banana. Breakfast might be yoghurt and fruit, eggs/ omelettes feature a lot.

I do have dark choc in the house for a quick snack though 😋

I really dont think you need to go quite so overboard. And I live on lentils and okrs! 😁

Your meals sound really well thought out

I’ve been 90ish% UPF free for about 6 months too. Just me and DH, so I have the luxury of cooking in peace in the evenings. DH is veggie, I’m not, but I mostly cook veggie meals. I have lots of fifteen minute recipes up my sleeve for when I cannot be arsed. I’ve always cooked most meals from scratch, so this has been ok. I miss a jar of pasta sauce for its convenience and lack of having to think, but I actually don’t fancy them anymore. I should probably just put leftovers in the freezer more often.

I learned to make sourdough during lockdown (along with everyone else), but I now have a routine for making a loaf that fits in with us being out and about and busy. I make one loaf a week which lasts the two of us. I quite often use it in panzanella or as breadcrumbs or croutons. Every now and again I make double, slice and freeze for back up. I sometimes make quick flatbreads as a side to lots of dishes too. I miss wraps, but haven’t bothered making my own yet. I’ve filled the freezer with portioned out unbaked treats (biscuit doughs, cinnamon buns, etc) that I can take out and whack in the oven.

I probably eat more cheese and dairy (like loads - Greek yoghurt, kefir, cream, crème fraiche, butter) than I used to. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not. A game changer was buying a Ninja Creami (look it up, I had no idea they existed!). I tried the frozen yoghurt and sorbet options and wasn’t at all excited by them, but the gelatos are so good that I don’t want shop bought ice cream anymore. It takes 5mins to make a gelato and pop in tubs in the freezer. Then I just take a tub out and run through the Creami when I fancy it.

Finally, another thing I did was gather a cupboard full of those kilner style jars (pretentious, I know) and filled with a big assortment of dried fruits, seeds, dark chocolate chips, nuts and a homemade granola. It keeps for a long time and it’s like a pick n mix. I can just grab something to graze on when I walk in from work, or make a quick bowl of granola and yoghurt to take for lunch.

I’m not a total saint. I like the odd bar of chocolate (although I’m much fussier about my choice now)and occasional can of coke. We go out to eat once a week and I will order whatever I like without restriction. But my tastebuds have definitely changed and I no longer fancy a lot of the foods I used to really crave.

We think our shopping bill has gone down a bit, but we were quite big spenders before. We’ve stopped buying lots of snacks, prepackaged desserts like Gu or cheesecake, pots of hummus and guac, expensive vegan ‘meats’ and condiments, but do buy more bags of flours and nuts than before.

I agree it's about not assuming you can replace all the things you'd expect to eat.
Ironically, about 30 years ago in my 20s I wanted to write a diet book which was based on the principle that you couldn't eat anything that came into your house with more than 3 ingredients (so eg dried pasta with water, flour, salt, tinned tomatoes, tinned pulses fine but bugger all else pre-made).

I'd never heard of UPFs, I was just very into smallholding and the surrounding 'wholesome' lifestyle (I guess these days it'd be called Cottagecore), but realised it was also a very quick way to lose weight due to having to actually make cakes biscuits etc if we wanted them!

I wish I'd actually done it, I reckon I'd have made my fortune

[and I can still make a mean home-made oat cake, even if I don't often bother...]

& I should say that these days I buy a packet of chocolate digestives if I actually want them, I just try to keep the packaged shite to a reasonably low level

I tried to be 100% but realised it was nigh on impossible. I think I'm probably at about 80%.

Bread - we buy baguettes or get it from a local shop which is sourdough and not processed. I probably bake once or twice a fortnight.

Fish fingers - I've given up and just accept this is UPF.

The kids still eat regular ketchup.

Burgers - we get them from the freezer section where it's just beef.

I have got into the habit of making stock every time we eat a chicken. I freeze in large ice cube trays then pop in a ziplock bag.

Pesto, always home made. Takes no time.

Hummus - sometimes homemade, sometimes shop therefore UPF.

Tofu is popular in our house as long as it's crispy.

Marmite is the one thing I've continued eating throughout. Can't be perfect!

A lot of Waitrose and M&S ready prepared foods are now not UPF, which helps for fake aways etc.

Have you tried Yuka app? You can scan things and it gives it a score.

For example I just scanned my 60p Sainsbury’s pitta bread and it got an ‘excellent’ score since it has one preservative in it but with a low risk.

Equally, I think as long as you aren’t living off chicken kievs and pot noodles you’re probably fine. Some shop bought bread is not going to kill you, it’s all about balancing dosage and risk.

I agree that it's extremely difficult without spending a lot of time and money! I don't try to be completely upf free, but when I do buy processed foods I make sure they come with a very short list of ingredients. Jams and chutneys I would never make myself!
Tastes do change over time, and I really don't miss the sickly sweet flavours of fruit yogurts. I'd much rather have a plain yogurt with fresh fruit (but it did take me years to get to this point).
I also buy decent bread. I don't resent paying more for that. I think that in general, we've been conditioned to expect food to be dirt cheap, and it's an expectation we need to move away from (if we can afford it!).
I also batch freeze a lot. So I cook twice the amount and freeze half. Best thing I ever learnt to do!
In your place, I'd try to relax your expectations a little. It sounds like you're doing a great job!

Geeta's mango chutney is upf free if you ever need to stock up

We eat very few upfs but I make very simple meals.

I seldom make pastry so pies are usually topped with potato or suet dumplings. Or stews, curries and casseroles in a slow cooker. Much less hassle. If we have salad, the dressing will be vinaigrette.

Meals are usually, meat or fish with three veg. Bread is wholemeal from a bread maker. I make a cake maybe once a week. I make batches of jam in the autumn, enough to last a year. If DS wants a snack he has toast & jam or leftovers.

Generally if a meal takes more than 15 mins prep, I don't make it.

Your standards are very high. We just mostly do without things like naan bread. Also we don’t aim for 100%. Something like mango chutney is fine to buy imo, it’s not like you’re eating it every day.

But you’ve hit the nail on the head really which is that’s it’s a culturally different way of eating. You have to spend more time, money and headspace on food if you want an interesting and varied diet, as they do traditionally in places like France and Italy. You also mostly do without things that only exist in UPF form, like hash browns.

My kids have never experienced having squash or pappy bread at home, so I don’t get pushback on that but they do go bonkers at friends’ houses. But it’s because UPF is hyper palatable, it’s not your fault.

I dont try and be totally upf free as frankly i dont think it's realistically possible in this day and age with the expectations on working parents, i figure if ive managed to reduce them a decent amount, thats a win.
We've managed to get into a good routine of making our own bread twice a week now and tbh we didnt ever have stuff like a burger in a bun for dinner, far more likely to throw chicken and veg, potatoes into a tray and roast in extra virgin olive oil with garlic and herbs. Or make a shepherds pie or whatever.
I almost sort of allocate us a weekly ration of upfs and use it on stuff that gives us mega convenience, eg kids lunchbox yoghurts, stock cubes, stuff like an odd blob of ketchup!