If you imagine you really know what you’re eating think again
GEORGE ORWELL was onto something when he wrote in his 1937 book, The Road to Wigan Pier: “We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.”
There is a lot that is deeply insidious about the convenience food industry’s practices, as catalogued in exhaustive detail by Joanna Blythman in her new book, Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets.
In 2013, for example, she tramped around Food Ingredients; the annual trade show for the processed food industry. The congress was held in Frankfurt when she attended. Each year, its vendors come up with more elaborate ways to concoct substitute ingredients for real food.
Cheese, as Blythman notes, becomes “goat-flavoured cheese powder”; lentils materialise in the shape of “high viscosity pulse flour”; and onions as “caramelised onion juice concentrate”.
The exhibitors’ motivation is simple: find ways to cut the cost of actual ingredients. As All in All, an Irish company that “blends” food ingredients, gushes: “Why buy ingredients when you can buy solutions?”
At the end of the day, Blythman’s appetite had withered. She was lured, however, by the sight of a fruit-and-vegetable stand; at last, she thought — something healthy and hearty.
She wondered though, why the lush-looking produce had best before dates that were weeks old. She discovered from an Agricoat salesman that his company had dipped the fruit in its solution, NatureSeal, which adds 21 days to a fruit’s shelf life by coating it in citric acid and unnamed ingredients so, for example, cut apples don’t turn brown. For the salesman, this innovation was a technical triumph. Caterers, for instance, would no longer lose unsold food. For Blythman, it was dispiriting.
“Often I’ve been stuck in a train station starving, with nothing to eat, and I think what can I buy that won’t be horrible and I pick a fruit salad. Or I’ll be on a plane and I think I can’t eat that meal but I’ll eat the fruit salad,” she says.
“You wonder why does this fruit salad taste so bad. It tastes nothing like my home-made fruit salad — those awful bits of honeydew melon that have no flavour at all, weird bits of apple that look like apple but don’t taste like a freshly cut apple.
“In the food industry the word ‘natural’ acts as a heuristic, which means it’s good for me and it’s good for my family to eat. What is perceived as ‘natural’ is a big goal of the food industry — to make it seem natural, to make people feel this is okay, this product has only got things that I would find in my grandmother’s larder. But really what has happened because of ‘clean labels’ there has been a lot of substitutions.
“You’ve got slightly different formulations doing pretty much the same job, by acting as a colouring or flavouring or preservative or emulsifier or stabiliser, but they don’t have an E number and they sound a lot more wholesome.
You’ve got those [formulations] in labelling at the back of the product and if you look at the front, you’ve got all these checklists, promises like no artificial additives, no synthetic such-and-such, low-fat, part of your ‘five-a-day’ (five portions of fruit and veg a day) and so on. It makes people think this must be fine.
“We don’t all want to be detectives, taking three hours to scrutinise our shopping trolley. We want to believe the food we buy is okay.
“We thought the food industry had cleaned up its act, taking out synthetic and artificial additives, but in my opinion it’s just got a whole lot cleverer. They’ve become more sophisticated at basically presenting products that are really very altered, not at all natural, but seem as if they are. They hide behind a wall of commercial confidentiality, which is a good way of stonewalling anyone who wants to know much about how processed food is produced.
“For example, and it’s not the worst thing in my book but quite typical, the thing of using an enzyme in a fruit juice to give it a cloudy effect. If you press an apple juice, say, and you do it in a harsh, very hi-tech way you end up with a very clear, processed-looking juice, but there’s a premium to be got for a juice that looks cloudy because people think it’s got more fruit in it so you can use an enzyme — it’s called a cloudifier — or a colouring that’s also a cloudifier to give a cloudy effect.
“There were things that I discovered that were quite disgusting and gory. A lot to do with using stabilised blood products and adding them to cheap meats. I was shocked at the use of collagen extracts from slaughterhouse carcases to bulk out cheap meats.”
The mechanics of the food industry — which is driven by a relentless drive for cost-savings — have become elaborate.
Blythman cites a case by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland that analysed the components of a pizza brand that bore a “country of origin Ireland” label. It turned out the pizza was made from 35 ingredients that passed through 60 countries on five continents.
With such byzantine supply chains, scientists that are so inventive and marketers so slick, there is a feeling from reading Blythman’s investigation that the horse has bolted. The industry is so profitable governments haven’t the appetite to police it properly.
Social change is a factor too. Who has time to cook a midday meal on a weekday? The average amount of household income spent on food has fallen from 50% in 1914 to around 10% today. There is a risky trade-off however, given the links between packaged food and drink and the health problems their consumption leads to, including obesity, cancer and heart disease.
Blythman admits she’s cynical: “If only it was a case of getting governments to tax miscreant foods or starting a campaign to get [proper] food labelling and so on. Anything like that, first of all, probably wouldn’t have any chance of success and would move glacially slow. If these things occurred, the food industry would be a few steps ahead of us all the time thinking of the next plan B, plan C.
“I take the attitude that you just have to avoid processed food. The second piece of advice is only one word: cook. It is the only way you can have control and personal food sovereignty over what you eat. Otherwise, you’re largely at the mercy of an industry that doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
There’s an interesting issue here. It’s people who are poor and hard up who get the worst, most degraded food, but there is also a sizeable chunk of middle class people with disposable income who routinely buy processed food, believing that it’s fine and healthy nowadays.
“I was looking at the label on a salad at a well-known high-end retailer the other day and on the labelling it said ‘lemon concentrate’ and ‘paprika extracts’. Lemon concentrate is a clean label’ flavouring so instead of getting real lemon juice you get a very laboratory-type product that gives you a lemon flavour.
Paprika extract — which sounds like something you might get in a yoga retreat that would be really good for you — is actually a colouring. That salad is a very middle class buy — €2.65 for a tiny tub, which is very poor value for money.
The best thing is not to buy that sort of stuff. Don’t pick it up. When you’re accustomed to mostly eating real food when you buy processed food it tastes odd. It doesn’t taste right.”
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