After binging on spectacle and forgetting what real food means, we’ve arrived at a disturbing juncture: a culture that idolizes artificial food. This goes beyond occasionally enjoying junk food. We’re talking about a near reverence for the hyper-processed, the scientifically engineered, and the theatrically enhanced edibles that dominate modern life. In this grand finale, let’s unravel the implications of treating fake food as king – on our bodies, society, and future.

Idols of the Aisles: How Fake Food Took Over

Walk into any grocery store today and behold the myriad of ultra-processed products that line the shelves. These items bear little resemblance to anything found in nature – they are industrial creations of refined carbs, sugars, fats, additives, and artificial flavors. And we love them. In fact, Americans get a majority of their calories from ultra-processed foods now. Recent data shows a staggering 57% of adults’ caloric intake comes from ultra-processed foods, and for children, it’s even worse at 67% of daily calories​. Yes, you read that right: over half of what the average person eats in a day is something formulated in a factory, not grown in a field or cooked in a home kitchen.

How did we reach this point of worshipping the artificial? The reasons are manifold: convenience, cost, marketing, shelf life, and engineered tastiness. These foods are literally designed to hook us. As one physician put it, “Ultraprocessed foods are clever manipulations of mostly unhealthy ingredients, titrated to appeal to common cravings — tasty by design, but it’s all a trick.”​ They’re cheap, available everywhere, and consistent. Compared to a fresh apple (that might have a bruise or variation in taste), a bag of “apple-cinnamon sugar-o’s cereal” gives you the same hit every time – plus cartoon characters on the box. It’s not hard to see how we got addicted to the hyper-palatable and the hyper-convenient.

Food companies have effectively become the new high priests of our dietary habits, and their communion wafers are cheese puffs and cola. They preach convenience and fun, and we, the followers, partake eagerly. We celebrate new flavor drops of sodas like they’re pop culture events. We form fandoms around limited-edition Oreos. We’ve come to believe that innovation in food means a new shape of chicken nugget or a plant-based burger that bleeds fake blood. It’s a far cry from innovation meaning, say, better access to actual fresh produce.

The Body Pays the Price

Worshiping artificial food comes with serious health consequences – reality is catching up with us, and it’s not pretty. Diets high in ultra-processed foods have been linked to at least 30 different chronic health conditions in an umbrella review of studies​. The list includes obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, depression, and even dementia​. It turns out that filling up on nutrient-stripped, additive-laden products is basically an experiment in malnutrition and metabolic havoc. As Dr. Stephen Devries (a preventive cardiologist) noted, these foods are a “perfect storm” for overeating and ill health: “laboratory engineered to maximize appeal, calorie-dense, and with little or no fiber or other healthful nutrients”​. In other words, they trick our brains and shortchange our bodies.

The statistics bear it out. The obesity rate in the United States has hit record highs (over 42% of adults as of recent CDC data), trailing closely behind our rise in ultra-processed consumption. Type 2 diabetes is being diagnosed earlier and in greater numbers. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease – something virtually unheard of a few generations ago – is now common, even in teens, due largely to high-sugar, high-fructose diets. We are literally sickening ourselves with the very foods we glorify.

What’s especially insidious is that those who are most vulnerable – in lower-income or “food desert” communities – often rely the most on ultra-processed, cheap calories. When a bag of chips is cheaper per calorie than fresh vegetables, the choice seems economically logical, even if it’s nutritionally tragic. Food insecurity now often means nutrient insecurity. As Dr. Devries pointed out, the plight of the food insecure is worsened by the fact that the easiest available options tend to be ultra-processed foods​. This creates a cruel loop: poverty leads to poor diet; poor diet leads to health problems; health problems make it harder to rise out of poverty. Our worship of artificial food has a societal cost that goes beyond individual waistlines.

The Mind and Culture – An Eroding Relationship with Food

Beyond physical health, consider what the artificial food era is doing to us psychologically and culturally. Food has always been more than fuel – it’s tradition, identity, pleasure, community. But when fast, fake food dominates, those aspects erode. We eat in our cars, alone. Families eating together around a home-cooked dinner, sharing the day’s stories, is less common. Instead, maybe each family member grabs their own microwaved something and retreats to their screen. The social ritual of eating is under threat, replaced by the convenience of individualized, on-demand feeding. It’s efficient, sure. But is it fulfilling? Many would argue it’s not – leading to a strange sadness of the soul, even as the belly is full.

Some experts even tie ultra-processed diets to mental health issues. There is emerging research correlating high consumption of junk food with increased risk of depression​. It could be biochemical (poor diet affecting brain health) and it could be social (a fragmented food culture contributing to loneliness or lack of communal experiences). Likely it’s both. The mystery here – and a bit of dark irony – is that in chasing convenient calories, we might be starving something more intangible in ourselves.

We’ve also seen how quickly misinformation and extreme attitudes toward food can flourish in this environment. One month, an all-meat diet is lionized on social media; the next, raw juice cleanses are in vogue. People swing between these artificial extremes, looking for salvation in the next trend, almost with religious fervor. The balanced, varied diet that nutritionists quietly recommend just isn’t sexy enough to break through the noise. So our collective understanding of what to eat grows ever more polarized and confused. We demonize certain whole foods (like carbs or grains) while blindly trusting processed shakes labeled “keto” or “detox.” It’s as if we seek a higher truth in food, but we’re looking in the wrong temple.

Environmental and Ethical Fallout

No discussion of artificial food worship is complete without noting the environmental impact. The processed food industry doesn’t just take a toll on us, but on the planet. Producing ultra-processed snacks and disposable, single-serve meals often involves resource-intensive supply chains and creates mountains of waste. Think of all the plastic wrappers, the single-use bottles, the energy spent in factories churning out soda and candy. Meanwhile, perfectly good produce rots in fields or supermarkets because we oversupply and underconsume real foods. We end up with both waste and want coexisting: as noted earlier, about one-fifth of all food produced ends up lost or wasted​, even as hundreds of millions go hungry​. Our values are literally out of balance with our needs. By revering the packaged and processed, we contribute to a system that is unsustainable long-term – depleting soil and water on one end, and filling landfills on the other.

There’s also the ethical dimension of how we treat animals and workers in this quest for cheap, abundant processed food. Industrial farming and factory conditions have often been the underbelly of our fast-food nation. When we prioritize quantity and novelty over quality, corners get cut – whether it’s the treatment of livestock or the livelihood of farmers. Artificial food worship can blind us to these externalized costs, because the products are so neatly divorced from their origins. A chicken nugget bears no reminder of the chicken’s life; a shrink-wrapped tomato in January says nothing of the carbon footprint to ship it from afar.

Coming Back to Earth – Rekindling a Respect for Real Food

After surveying this landscape, one might feel a bit hopeless, or even guilty, sipping that soda. But the goal isn’t to shame anyone (we’re all part of this system) – it’s to wake up to what’s happened and consider how to recalibrate. The opposite of worshiping artificial food isn’t swearing off everything and going to live on a farm; it’s simply bringing some mindfulness and balance back to our relationship with what we eat.

Some promising shifts are already bubbling up. There’s a growing farm-to-table movement, and interest in organic and minimally processed options is on the rise. Dietary guidelines and doctors (when they can be heard over the cacophony) now emphasize whole foods and plant-rich plates. Even public policy might be catching on: for instance, some experts are urging that official dietary guidelines start addressing ultra-processed foods explicitly, given the evidence of harm​. Education is key. People are slowly re-learning how to cook simple meals, spurred by everything from pandemic lockdowns to budget constraints (cooking at home is still cheaper than eating out in the long run, despite the convenience of the drive-thru).

We might also harness the same social media that fueled the problem, as part of the solution. Already, there are influencers making “real food” cool again – showcasing garden harvests, doing challenges of cooking on a budget, or debunking diet myths with science. The tide can turn, if skepticism and curiosity replace blind indulgence and apathy.

Ultimately, the broader implication of artificial food worship is a question: what kind of society do we want to be? One that mindlessly consumes and performs for the algorithm, at the cost of our health and humanity? Or one that remembers food is a gift – to be enjoyed, yes, but also respected?

There’s a bit of a mystery in how humans will answer that in the coming years. We stand at a fork in the road (pun intended). Down one path, the neon lights of endless novelty and quick fixes beckon – a continuation of the status quo, perhaps leading to a future of Soylent shakes for all meals and VR dinner parties where no one actually eats. Down the other path, there’s a reconnection with something real – perhaps a renaissance of cooking, a resurgence of farmers’ markets, a collective decision that our food system should nourish us in the true sense of the word.

As we conclude this series, the takeaway is both cautionary and hopeful. The caution: We’ve seen how viral stunts and artificial appetites can hijack our better judgment, detaching us from what our bodies and communities truly need. The hope: By recognizing this detachment, we can choose to course-correct. We can enjoy the occasional wild food novelty (life’s too short not to have a little fun), but also remember that real nourishment – the kind that sustains health, culture, and planet – isn’t found in a flashy challenge or a foil packet. It’s in the simple, genuine foods and shared meals that have fed humanity for generations.

So, the next time you catch yourself salivating over a TikTok of a towering rainbow burger or contemplating the latest diet fad pill, pause and ponder: Is this feeding me, or am I feeding the hype? The answer might just steer you back to something more fulfilling than any viral trend: a real, delicious, and nourishing connection to your food.