If one phrase has defined food writing over the past few years, it is “ultra-processed”. Coined by researchers to describe products manufactured from industrial ingredients, additives and flavourings rather than cooked from food, it has migrated from academic journals to bestseller lists and, lately, to parliamentary briefing papers. The numbers explain the attention. Analysis of the National Diet and Nutrition Survey suggests 54 per cent of the average British adult's calories now come from ultra-processed products, rising to 66 per cent among teenagers. By age three, British toddlers are getting nearly half their calories this way.

The difficulty for the shopper is that the supermarket shelf offers little help. Words like “natural”, “wholesome” and “clean” have no agreed meaning, and the wholegrain cereal with the reassuring packaging can contain more sugar per bowl than a biscuit. Deciphering an ingredients panel has become a skill in itself, which is precisely where the web has stepped in.

Barcode-scanning apps such as Yuka, which we have reviewed on these pages before, will grade the contents of your trolley in seconds, and open databases now let the curious look up almost any packaged product. The counterpart to all this label-reading, though, is simpler and older: buying ingredients rather than products in the first place. Here the internet has quietly transformed what is possible. The dusty health food shop with three kinds of lentil has been replaced by online grocers carrying thousands of lines of grains, pulses, nuts, seeds and spices, delivered to the door at prices that undercut the supermarkets.

Whole Food Earth launces Whole Plate


One of the most established is Whole Food Earth, a Kent-based online grocer that has spent over eleven years selling some 2,900 lines of wholefoods, from a 500g bag of oats to a 25kg sack of chickpea flour. It has now launched something more ambitious than a shop: a national initiative called the Whole Plate, built on the principle that food which was grown, not manufactured, should make up most of your plate, most of the time. There is a free 30-day email pledge offering one swap, recipe or idea a day, a growing wall of recipes from home cooks across Britain, and, most interestingly, a planned open label for products made from recognisable kitchen ingredients with supply chains traceable back to named farms. Any brand or retailer meeting the criteria will be able to apply.

That last element addresses the real gap. Apps can tell you what to avoid, and cookbooks can tell you what to make, but the missing piece has been a trustworthy signal on the shelf itself, backed by suppliers who can show where an ingredient actually came from. Whether the Standard achieves the reach it needs will depend on who signs up, and its criteria are yet to publish in full.

Still, the direction of travel is encouraging. For seventy years the food system optimised for shelf life and convenience, and our diets followed. The web, for once, seems to be pulling the other way: towards transparency, towards ingredients, and towards a plate our grandparents might recognise.