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A wonder food is a packaged food product that promises extraordinary health and/or convenience benefits. These benefits are communicated on packaging, in marketing campaigns, and in media testimonials. Because of the industrial and mass market conditions necessary to package and market foods, wonder foods are unique to the industrial food marketplace. Health wonder foods boomed in the 19th century due to advances in nutrition sciences, the intensification of industrialization, and the eugenicist, imperial, and extractivist politics of this time period. Nutritional entrepreneurship prompted the creation of unique foods that were situated at the intersection of commerce and science, including digestive biscuits, meat biscuits, digestive ferments, sodas, and grain cereals. Following World War II, a range of wonder foods promised to feed the world, as public and private Western global food aid efforts intensified to mitigate the spread of communism. Algae, fish flour, dried milk, and spun soy protein each had moments in which they were poised to solve global hunger and win the Cold War. Later, genetically modified Golden Rice promised to feed the world and solve vitamin A deficiency. Concomitantly, the post–World War II era ushered in a food processing renaissance. Wartime technologies helped create convenience wonder foods like TV dinners that claimed to change consumers’ lives through the added value of time, longer shelf lives, and more processing to cut cooking time. In the 1990s, the Flavr Savr tomato was genetically modified to produce delicious and hardy tomatoes that would be a win–win for growers, shippers, grocers, and consumers. Finally, complete meal replacements like Soylent promised a 21st-century lifestyle imagined by Victorian futurists, yet digestive complications bring this wonder food full circle to the digestive anxieties of 19th-century wonder foods.

Traditional forms of food processing have deep roots in human evolutionary history and across ancient civilizations. Food-processing innovations that began in the 18th century played a key role in spurring the Industrial Revolution and shaping the development of the global food system as we know it. Starting from the mid-20th century, novel food-processing technologies led to an abundance of processed foods in the marketplace, spurred on by industry-led research applied in the service of meeting increasingly large-scale consumer demands. Processed foods are championed by some as a crowning achievement of the modern food industry, a central element in a system that provides safe, affordable, and convenient foods to diverse populations around the world. To others, processed foods are most notable for their social, environmental, and public health downsides. Specifically, advocates of the NOVA food classification system, proposed and developed in the early 21st century, have raised concerns about the uniquely pernicious impacts of what they deem “ultra-processed foods” (UPFs)—industrial food formulations designed for maximum convenience and palatability—and have called for regulations to rein in UPF production and consumption. Critics of the NOVA framework, however, call into question the scientific validity and public policy utility of the UPF category. These opposing stakeholder perspectives reflect a combination of both fact-based and value-oriented differences of opinion.