CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat

This product is the sort of product I suspect the fad blitz against "ultraprocessed foods" is really targeted at.

Not necessarily.

It might be some Big Meat conspiracy to combat these upstarts, but there's also reasonable data indicating that less processing results in better health outcomes.

But of course there is! That's not the point. You could also probably produce reasonable data indicating that food starting with the letter F results in worse health outcomes. But if you then avoid fenugreek, fava beans and fiddlehead ferns, you're not making up for the fried potatoes, fried cheese and fudge sundaes which really carried the correlation!

We want causal correlations. Someone decided that instead they wanted to divide food into categoried in this specific way, and then rank categories. And I don't think all of them were naive about what they were doing. I've read Merchants of Doubt, I don't give harmful industries the benefit of doubt when it comes to things like this.

You can wait for causal connections forever while reasonable people take precautions when seeing strong correlations.