My schoolmates mocked me for being a UPF-free, ‘weird lunchbox’ kid. Turns out my mum was right all along

In the 90s my mum embarrassed me with her rejection of ultra-processed foods – but the growing body of evidence about them is vindicating her

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very specific childhood experience arose from being a “weird-lunchbox kid” growing up in the 90s with a food-conscious mother. It was the sense of palpitating trepidation felt when opening your school lunchbox, knowing that what lay within was going to be seen as “weird” in comparison with the sliced-white-bread-plastic-ham sandwiches, cheesy Wotsits and Club biscuits everyone else was gobbling.

What’s that?” your classmate would ask, their nose wrinkling as they took in yesterday’s veggie curry, crumbling homemade falafel or – my mother’s speciality – a “deconstructed sandwich” of doorstop-thick fresh bread, filling of some kind (often cucumber) and attendant crumbs floating freely in the bag. (Why bother assembling at all?, my father asked once, when you could simply throw in all the elements and shake?)

Now, though, it’s 2025, and the weird-lunchbox kids, but more importantly their parents, have been vindicated by continuing revelations about the dire health outcomes of eating ultra-processed foods (UPFs). Most recently, diets with high levels of UPF have been linked to harm in every major organ in the human body, not to mention a range of health conditions. News to some but not my mother, a pioneer of healthy eating and cooking from scratch, an early adopter of quinoa and reader of food-packet ingredients. This was the age of Cheestrings and Micro Chips – I still know the jingle for the latter by heart – yet my mother doggedly resisted. At best, her insistence that such food was unhealthy fell on deaf ears, and at worst, was rudely mocked, not least by me. I knew what an E-number was before I knew my times tables. If an unrefined carb existed, my mother knew about it.