Nobody likes their self-perceived flaws pointed out by others. It's not about softie.

Call it cultural inertia if you prefer.

But if they are making this direct link between ultra-processed foods and increased mortality, then surely it's these specific substances that are responsible for it?

Not necessarily. Think about it like cigarettes. The nicotine is what gets you addicted, but it is not what kills you. In a similar vein, these additives might cause you in some way or another to consume an unhealthy diet in the most general sense. So the effect can be more indirect.

What's a good modern text to approach the genre?

Never look at comments below news articles.

You start with macroscopic photolithography, add material science of semiconductors and then iterate a million times. It didn't start at nanoscale.

We used to have standardized package sizes in the EU for things like butter, chocolate, etc. So stupid to give that up

I figured if she was scared enough to ask a stranger to hold her hand, it would be meaningful to her to do it.

This is such an important realization, I think. It was a little bit awkward for you, but imagine her internal process.

Programming term. Variables in programming languages can hold different types of data, such as whole numbers, floating point numbers or strings of characters ("text"). Untyped languages figure out on the fly what can and cannot be done to the content of a variable, while typed languages strictly keep track of the type of content (not the value) to catch bugs and improve performance, for example.

Ursula Le Guin of Earthsea fame put it nicely:

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-colored plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life- of a sort, for a while.

You could argue most of the money some top athletes make is from advertising deals and you might see that as amoral. Being really good at running is impressive, but doesn't inherently contribute hundreds of millions of dollars worth of value to society.

Critical mainframe legacy banking software runs on Gameboy color!