I've found that people don't fundamentally understand what "processed food" means, on any side of the question. Even people who try to follow a "Raw Fruit" only

I've found that people don't fundamentally understand what "processed food" means, on any side of the question. Even people who try to follow a "Raw Fruit" only diet, pit their cherries, cut the skin and hard parts off of pineapples and peel bananas. Turning grain into flour and then into bread is processing, so is fermenting things, salting them, smoking them, drying them and so on. Do you take all raw, fresh, organic, home garden grown ingredients and put them in a pot of boiling water? Or how about making a reduction by boiling the water off, or making a gravy by mixing fat and flour together under heat? Processing is what animals do so they can eat their food. Even squirrels crack nuts and lions separate meat from bones. But humans have also learned to process food to even out uneven food harvests and bring some measure of surety to eating. I'm frequently surprised at the creativeness and inventiveness of Koreans, a culture I married into -- and a culture that's come into refrigeration much later than the U.S. A surprising amount of their traditional food preservation culture carries on today, earned through centuries of hardship and resulting in remarkably stable and healthy foodstuffs year round. Kimchi, the national dish is a prime example of this heritage. Even the kings of old had acres of food preservation and fermentation operations on the palace grounds [1]. Soy sauce, brought up in the article, is a supremely processed food -- the good stuff takes years of continuous processing to make. But on the path from Soy Beans to Soy Sauce, there's half a dozen stages where food stuffs can be rendered out of the process, making appetizers, side-dishes, snacks, main meal proteins, condiments, soup stock, and more. Soy sauce is the most processed outcome of this trail, a necessary thing to make inedible soy beans human consumable. However, very few people arguing against processed food would compare Doenjang and American Sliced Cheese. The former might be called a quaint but tasty traditional foodstuff, the "cheese" considered spawn of hell in some circles. But an easy argument can be made the Doenjang is probably more processed than Kraft sliced American cheese. 1 - https://imgur.com/r/korea/SUpPmts https://imgur.com/r/korea/SUpPmts