I've said before that I think he's doing a disservice with the description of what constitutes UPFs, and this paragraph shows some of the problems with it:
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Products that are clearly UPF, he says, include reconstituted meat products, instant noodles and soft drinks.
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Reconstituted meats include sausages - something which has been a dietary staple for thousands of years. Chopping the meat to a fine texture, adding salts, stuffing it in a casing, then smoking it to preserve it was a way to avoid wasting a lot of meat, as well as make sure your family had meat to eat. Bologna is classified as a reconstituted meat, and while it may not be the best example of meat, and may have a list of ingredients as long as your arm, at least it's a source of meat (and the vitally important B-12) for those who can't buy a roast, or even ground beef (or doesn't have any way to cook those).
Classifying the cheapest meat based product made primarily from meat as a UPF in order to tax it is not going to help the poor eat any better. There is a lot of junk in it (sugars, preservatives, etc), but regular bologna IS still mostly meat - even the sickeningly sweet lebanon bologna so popular in Pa Dutch Country is still slightly more than half-meat. But most bologna is at least 2/3 meat, and some bolognas are closer to 9/10 meat.
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He adds: “If you take, for instance, ice-cream. Probably 99% of ice-cream in the UK market is ultra-processed. And maybe you have 1% which is not, which is probably very expensive. So then, if you tax all ice-creams? Beautiful.”
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Taxing the expensive non-UPF ice cream the same way you tax the cheap UPF ice cream doesn't mean people will switch to the expensive ice cream for a treat - they'll still buy the cheaper ice cream because it's cheaper - they'll just pay more for it, and it'll still be far worse for them than the non-UPF icecream ever was. Not so beautiful, IMO.
(And is that ice cream he declared to be non-UPF really not a UPF? It's made in a factory, packaged in a plastic container, and has a label, which by his definition of UPF seems to make it automatically eligible to be classified as a UPF)
The thing of taxing foods just because they happen to check enough boxes of the very arbitrary definition of a UPF (factory processed, plastic packaging, label, and maybe some ingredients not found in a home kitchen - such as casings for homemade sausage, or preservatives for bologna) is not going to be helpful overall. By his own definition of what constitutes UPF foods, there are going to be a LOT of foods that are actually as minimally processed as possible in order to preserve them longer (frozen or canned veggies, and reconstituted meats) that do provide much needed nutrients, and should not be automatically termed UPF, then taxed and made even more financially out of reach for the poor.