Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (26 page)

“A dish or a drink could be very high in fat and people wouldn’t be aware of it,” Drewnowski said. “So it can cut both ways. Good if you’re reducing fat, and not so good if the diet is already heavy in fat and people aren’t aware of it. Fat is trickier than sugar. My point, back when I did my studies, was that in these mixtures of sugar and fat you find in so many products, most of the calories come from fat. I had this disagreement years ago with researchers who were working on the hypothesis that obesity is caused by carbohydrates, which is what sugar is. They were using things like Snickers bars and chocolate M&Ms and thinking, ‘A-ha, sweet foods, carbohydrates.’ And my point was, yes, they
are
sweet, and there
is
sugar in them. But they are not carbohydrate foods—60 to 70 to 80 percent of their calories was coming from fat. The fat was invisible, even to the investigators themselves.”

D
ean Southworth was enjoying a quiet retirement in Florida after thirty-eight years as a food scientist for Kraft. He and his wife, Betty, were living in a modest house in the palm-lined island town of Fort Myers Beach, smack between the inlet that runs to Estero Bay, with its luscious sunrises, and the Gulf of Mexico, with its magnificent sunsets. Southworth, finally, had the time to take in both. During his years at Kraft, he had spent long days trying to develop new products, trying to stay ahead of the competition. Now, he did things like take long walks and help run the local Kiwanis Club. He hadn’t abandoned his previous life completely, though. Whenever he got the urge, which was quite often, he would enjoy the fruits of one of his finest inventions: the spread known as Cheez Whiz.

Southworth had been part of the team that created Cheez Whiz in the early 1950s. The mission had been to come up with a speedy alternative to the cheese sauce used in making Welsh rarebit, a popular but laborious dish that required a half-hour or more of cooking before it could be poured
over toast. It took them a year and a half of sustained effort to get the flavor right, but when they did, they succeeded in creating one of the first mega-hits in convenience foods. Southworth and his wife, Betty, became lifelong fans and made it part of their daily routine.
“We used it on toast, muffins, baked potatoes,” he told me. “It was a nice spreadable, with a nice flavor. And it went well at night with crackers and a little martini. It went down very, very nicely, if you wanted to be civilized.”

So it was with considerable alarm that he turned to his wife one evening in 2001, having just sampled a jar of Cheez Whiz he’d picked up at the local Winn-Dixie supermarket. “I said, ‘Holy God, it tastes like axle grease.’ I looked at the label and I said, ‘What the hell did they do?’ I called up Kraft, using the 800 number for consumer complaints, and I told them, ‘You are putting out a goddamn axle grease!’ ”

Cheez Whiz was already
something of a horror to nutritionists. A single serving, which Kraft defined as just two level tablespoons, delivered nearly a third of a day’s recommended maximum of saturated fat as well as a third of the
maximum
sodium recommended for a majority of American adults. Sit down with a drink in front of the TV and start heaping it onto salty, buttery crackers, and both daily limits would quickly be blown.

As for its taste, Southworth conceded that the spread had never been in the same league as a fine English Stilton. But it hadn’t pretended, even
wanted
to be. In the laboratories at Kraft, in fact, Cheez Whiz had been designed to have the mildest flavor possible for the broadest public appeal. Upon its release on July 1, 1953, the advertising emphasized its expediency, not its taste:
“Cheese treats QUICK. Spoon it, heat it, spread it.”

Nonetheless, in his kitchen that day, Southworth knew that something had changed. Staring at the label, parsing the list of ingredients, he eventually found the culprit, though not without some effort. There were twenty-seven items listed in all, starting with the watery by-product of milk called whey, taking him through canola oil, corn syrup, and an additive called milk protein concentrate, which manufacturers had begun importing from other countries as a cost-cutting alternative to the higher-priced powdered milk produced by American dairies. One crucial ingredient was
missing, however. From its earliest days, Cheez Whiz always contained real cheese. Real cheese gave it class and legitimacy, Southworth said, not to mention flavor. Now, he discovered, not only was cheese no longer prominently listed as an ingredient, it wasn’t listed at all.

Not surprisingly, Kraft kept this change to itself. I couldn’t find any public discussion of it even nine years later, when Southworth related his story to me. So during a visit to Kraft’s headquarters in 2011, I asked if he was right, if Kraft in fact had taken the cheese out of Cheez Whiz. Actually, a spokeswoman told me, there was still some cheese left in the formula, just not as much as there used to be. When I asked how much, she declined to say. It no longer appeared on the label, she added, because Kraft—in attempting to simplify its long lists of ingredients—had switched from citing components, like cheese, to listing their parts, like milk.
“We made adjustments in dairy sourcing that resulted in less cheese being used,” she told me. “However, with any reformulation, we work hard to ensure that the product continues to deliver the taste that our consumers expect.”

Southworth was more blunt in his assessment of what happened to his creation.
“I imagine it’s a marketing and profit thing,” he said. “If you don’t have to use cheese, which has to be kept in storage for a certain length of time in order to become usable, flavor-wise and texture-wise, then you’ve eliminated the cost of storage, and there is more to the profit center.”

Southworth’s grievance was surely heartfelt; he even phoned his food-scientist friends who still worked at Kraft to complain. But Cheez Whiz had other, deeper troubles beyond its sixty-year-old formula being fiddled with, beyond it being cheese or not cheese. The spreadable dip that transformed American snacking and cocktail parties when it first came out had already become something of a dinosaur, overrun by Kraft’s own indefatigable efforts to unleash a slew of newer, snazzier cheese-related products. Granted, many of these items—Easy Cheese, Velveeta, American Singles, Philadelphia Cooking Creme, and a group of blends called Philadelphia Shredded Cheese, which combine real cheese with cream cheese—defy definition. Federal regulators have resorted to terms like
cheese food, cheese product
, and
pasteurized processed American
to describe what the industry itself loosely calls cheese. Taken together, however, the effort by Kraft and its smaller competitors to recast and expand the traditional provision known as cheese has achieved stunning results.

Americans now eat as much as 33 pounds or more of cheese and pseudo-cheese products a year, triple the amount we consumed in the early 1970s. During that same time, beverage makers managed only to double the per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks to 50 gallons a year; in fact, in recent years they have seen a dropoff, as consumers switched to other sugary drinks. America’s intake of cheese, by contrast, continues to swell, increasing 3 pounds per person per year since 2001.
^*

The nutritional math, when it comes to cheese, is staggering too. Depending on the specific product, 33 pounds of cheese delivers as many as 60,000 calories, which is enough energy, on its own, to sustain an adult for a month. Those 33 pounds also have has many as 3,100 grams of saturated fat, or more than half a year’s recommended maximum intake. Cheese has become the single largest source of saturated fat in the American diet, though it is hardly the only culprit.
Day in and day out, Americans on average are exceeding the recommended maximum of fat by more than 50 percent.

The soaring amounts of cheese we eat is no accident. It is the direct result of concerted efforts by the processed food industry, which has labored long and hard to transform the very essence of cheese and its role in our diet. Some of this effort is focused on changing its physical nature, converting cheese into a form that is durable as well as quick and cheap to produce. The key to this makeover is the product called processed cheese, which Kraft pioneered nearly a century ago and which fueled its rise to the position of America’s largest manufacturer of cheese, with annual global sales of $7 billion.

By itself, however, the industrialization of cheese does not explain the surge in consumption. To triple America’s intake in forty years, the food industry has also worked vigorously to change the way cheese is eaten. It is no longer a rare treat to be savored with guests, before a meal. In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become an
ingredient
, something we add to other food. And not just any ingredient, either. Cheese is now being slipped into packaged foods that are found in almost every aisle of the grocery store, from the frozen pizzas that now boast “triple cheese,” to peanut-butter-and-cheese crackers, to packaged dinner entrees that tout their contents with names like “extreme cheese explosion,” to the breakfast sandwiches stocked in the meat cooler. Moreover, to boost the usage at home, the dairy aisle has been loaded with cheese made more and more convenient for use in recipes. Where there used to be a few blocks of cheddar and Swiss and some packs of sliced cheese on the shelf, there are now vast hanging displays of cheese—shredded cheese, cubed cheese, blended cheese, string cheese, crumbled cheese, spreadable cheese, bagged cheese, cheese mixed with cream cheese.

This deployment of cheese as a food additive has proven to be a windfall for food companies, driving up sales of cheese as well as the products that now use it to increase their allure. As a result, Kraft has become not only the largest cheese maker, it has climbed to the top of all food manufacturing. For consumers, however, the results may be far less thrilling. Cheese as an additive, with all of its undeniable bliss, has equally big implications for overeating.

T
he first step in the industrialization of cheese came in 1912 when a thirty-eight-year-old Chicago street peddler named James Lewis Kraft
found his calling. He had been selling traditional cheddar to grocers from a horse-drawn cart, rising before dawn each day to get his cheese from the South Water Street market downtown, the pricey, high-quality stuff his customers valued. Sales were strong, but there was one problem: constant
spoilage, which ate into his profits.
“Made up loss-and-gain account for December,” he wrote in his diary. “Found loss of seventeen cents. Worse than I expected.”

Some grocers wouldn’t buy his cheese at all in the summer, because it wilted in the heat. Others grumbled about how much was getting wasted each time they sliced off a wedge for a customer and a hard crust formed on the exposed surface. Kraft lost no time in trying to salvage his livelihood. He had no formal training in food chemistry. His first job, after leaving the family’s farm in Ontario, had been clerking in a grocery store. Undeterred, he started tinkering at night in the boarding house where he lived. He ground up several kinds of cheddar, and cooked them in a copper kettle, ending up with a glop of stringy, greasy goo. The heat separated the oil and protein molecules, leaving Kraft with an unsightly mess.

The experimentation went on more or less for three years until, one day in 1915, Kraft stumbled upon a solution. He was stirring a pot of cheese continuously as it melted, for fifteen minutes. When he looked down at the pot, he saw that the fat hadn’t bled out. The agitation from the continual stirring had kept the fats and proteins together. Now smooth and homogenized, the mixture poured easily into containers, where it solidified again. He rounded up some 3½- and 7½-ounce cans, sterilized them, filled them with the cheese, and embossed the label with his name, “Kraft Cheese,” and a promise that would soon get the whole country excited: This was a “cheese of creamy richness” that “will keep in any climate.” Before long, he ditched the horse and cart. He needed trucks to fill all the grocery store orders for his cheese-in-a-can.

Traditional cheese makers were appalled. They tried to get lawmakers to force Kraft to label his canned cheese with any number of
caustic descriptors, including
embalmed, imitation, made-over
, and
renovated
. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the manufacture of cheese and other dairy products, finally settled on a variety of more palatable terms like “American cheese food” and “American cheese product.” But the name that stuck came from Kraft’s own patent, in which he described his invention as a “process of sterilizing cheese and an improved
product produced by such process.” Henceforth, the broad category of cheese that is industrially improved became known as “processed cheese.”

Notwithstanding the critics, Kraft’s cheese turned out to be a perfect field ration for soldiers. He sold six million pounds to the federal government in World War I, and the idea of cheese that could sit around for months on end without needing refrigeration gradually caught on with grocers, too. Given the demands of the job, Kraft was soon joined in business by his four brothers, and by 1923 they had turned their company into the largest cheese manufacturer in the world, adding factories and an endless stream of new technology that sped up the fabrication while lowering production costs.

One of its most popular brands was Velveeta, which Kraft didn’t invent but acquired from another entrepreneur in 1928. Velveeta was made directly from milk, milk fat, and the whey that dairies previously discarded. The stirring that Kraft had done in his copper kettle was
replaced by sodium phosphate, a chemical additive, which acts as an emulsifier and prevents the fat from separating from the protein in milk. It also more than doubled the sodium content of processed cheese, and it siphoned away—via the chemicals—much of the cheese flavor, which is why processed cheese tastes so mild.