I went to the link and failed the quiz at the end asking if each food was unprocessed, minimally processed, processed, or ultra processed.

I got the fish sticks right - those are pretty obviously ultra processed.

However, I said that the chickpeas were minimally processed, and peanut butter was processed, whereas they said the chickpeas were unprocessed, and the peanut butter was minimally processed. Which I suppose they could be considered to be, I just don't consider that to be the case if you're comparing those products to a straight from the field product.

To me the chickpeas are minimally processed (rather than unprocessed) because they grow in a pod on a chickpea plant. Even if you don't consider picking them to be part of processing, shelling them IS a process - one that you would need to do yourself if the food production industry didn't take care of that process. Also, having some experience in the farming industry, if those chick peas were picked in a state where they were either too dry or too moist for ideal storage, they will be put through a moisture adjusting process. It's very rare to harvest any kind of bean or grain at the perfect ideal moisture content, so almost all grains and beans need at least a little moisture adjustment after harvest before long term storage.


I also consider the peanut butter to be processed (rather than minimally processed) IMO - it's not just the fact that the peanut butter only had 2 ingredients (peanuts and salt), it's that the peanuts themselves are encased in a shell when harvested from the dirt, so they need to have as much dirt as possible removed from the shells covered with dirt before the peanuts can be removed from the shells - 2 processes necessary before anything else can be done with those peanuts. While it's possible to make peanut butter from raw peanuts, the color of the peanut butter in that photo makes it pretty obvious they've been roasted, which is also a process. The dark specks in the peanut butter in the photo indicates that they haven't had the skins removed though, so that's at least one processing step that was not used on it. On the other hand, the grinding necessary to produce a smooth peanut butter generates a lot of heat - and the grinding itself is a process, with the heat produced by the grinding process being an incidental process in the production of peanut butter.

Neither the chickpeas nor peanut butter is ultra-processed, because they haven't had a bunch of extraneous additives and additional processing to make sure those additives do a specific job in preserving color, adding to shelf life, or creating unrealistic flavors.

Having said all that, very, VERY few foods are truly unprocessed. Pretty much everything in the grocery store has been processed in some manner - even fresh fruit and veggies have gone through some kind of processing. For instance even an apple harvest be processed in the sense of sizing and grading them to decide which ones will be packed for sale by the pound at your local store, which ones will be sold in bags at your local store, and which ones will go to a cannery to be processed into applesauce, apple butter, or apple pie filling. Truly unprocessed would be picking an apple straight from the tree and eating it raw.

My point is that I think they need to do a much better job of defining the differences between unprocessed foods (which would mostly mean still in the field/garden/orchard/pasture), minimally processed (just enough to make it possible to store, or to make it edible), processed (for instance when making cheddar cheese) and ultra processed (where the sky's the limit as far as additives and processing techniques are concerned).