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Modern sodas are certainly ultra processed.

Pine soda is, however, definitely soda. There might be a difference in the source of carbination (fermentation vs artifical carbonation) and the amount of sugar (fuckin berries n' roots compared to the eldritch god that is High Fructose Corn Syrup).

You don't remember much from what you read about Spam did you.

Spam was developed for the US Army during WW2 as a CHEAP way to get a lot of calories to soldiers at the front lines. It's never been considered fancier than ham because Spam gets made from off cuts , scraps, and cheap cuts of the pig. It's merely a cured unsmoked fatty pork paste with some spices added and then poured into a sealed can and pressure cooked.

The preservative you are so worried about is simply nitrated salt, commonly called Pink salt because it's dyed pink to give you a fast visual warning that this ain't table salt and should NOT be used for that EVER. Your local butcher shop will probably sell you some, (they might even just give you the couple of tablespoons you would need to cure the 5lbs of pork you just bought from them). Or you can just as easily order a pound of Pink salt from amazon like I do. Warning: a pound of it is a lot of curing salt, but I make 20lbs or more of bacon every year at home.

After you have the meat, all you need do is make you brine, (water, spices of your choice, and a table spoon or two of the Pink salt - how much depends on the size of your batch), and the patience to wait 4 or 5 days it takes for the magic happen. Then if you don't want to pressure cook it while canning, you can slow cook your pork in the oven, then grind it into a fine paste adding whatever seasonings and spices you choose for more flavor, put it in freezer bags, (I use vacuum sealed bags), and freeze. You now have your own home made Spam.....It's not hard to do, just a bit time consuming while you wait.

Is it better than commercially made Spam? Most probably because you can make it taste the way YOU like it. And not how Hormel thinks it should taste. Recipes are just a goggle away and simple as all get out.

And none of them were really what we would call “soda”. Heck the closest to that would be modern root beer. But considering the lack of other “medicinal” herbs, they definitely don’t count.

Obviously nobody was making regulation Coca-Cola, but the dividing line is getting a lot less clear already. Why is a distillate of some cursed local herb fine, but fresh-squeezed cochineal dye not?

A lot of candies, not all of them. Certain candies have emulsifiers and other ingredients that didn’t exist historically, so you couldn’t get that texture or such.

I actually have emusifiers in my kitchen, and I didn't have to buy them anywhere weird. At this moment I have no idea if it's more or less involved to make them than celery salt, which you mention, and which itself has to be industrial-era.

You probably can find a candy that would meet this bar, but at some point it's less of a category and more of a meaningless list of a few very specific foods that are major diet constituents for very few people.

I should say that the inconsistent, mishmash category of UPFs that exists does show evidence of being harmful, and there is a lot of work trying to pin down which part, exactly. And which has given confusing results to date; I think this is the last thing I read on it before it was paywalled.

And a lot of modern chewing gum is plastic, so I think I don’t have to explain why that’s not possible in the kitchen.

Just stopping to point out that's not food, you aren't supposed to swallow it. It's about equally as close to candy as to a teething ring.