Swallow This (10 page)
Authors: Joanna Blythman
Food Ingredients 2013 was full of products that are made by ‘special’ and ‘unique’ processes, ‘innovative technologies’ and ‘sophisticated manufacturing methods’, but the detail of them is never spelt out. No surprise there. The majority of the products that were on offer are protected by a little ® or ™ registered trademark symbol, which marks out a company’s exclusive ownership of a product. The presence of the trademark signifies its intellectual property rights over a product and enables it to legally prevent others from copying or ‘free riding’ on its investment. From a consumer point of view, the trademark symbol also has another very important function: it allows companies to hide behind an ethos of commercial confidentiality and trade secrets to duck any less than superficial questions about how their products are actually made.
The brand names of many products being promoted at Food Ingredients did offer small clues as to their purpose. Hydro-Fi™ is a ‘high performance synergy of citrus fibre and hydrocolloids (essentially glues), designed to ‘improve the yield of meatballs’. It is one of the latest products that use ‘gum technology’. SuperStab™ (the sales material shows a glass of water with an oil-like substance swirling through it) is ‘the ultimate natural emulsifier’ made from ‘an innovative proprietary process with specific raw material screening and preparation’. A yeast extract, Bionis®, boosts the ‘meaty, condiment and umami flavour notes in frankfurters’. A ‘speciality starch’ called Culinar Keep promises ‘prolonged shelf life of sensitive ingredients’ so ‘increasing productivity and savings costs’. Amongst other selling points, Meatshure®, an ‘encapsulated acidulant’, ‘prevents protein extraction’ and ‘controls alginate reaction to yield desired binding’. The pitch for Cavamax®, various cyclodextrin formulations, is that they offer ‘targeted protection and masking of specific flavourings’. Volactose is ‘a whey permeate that ‘allows exceptional handling in the manufacturing environment’ producing ‘superior surface browning’. A light brown liquid named Ecoprol, a melange of propyl gallate, citric acid, potassium sorbate, orthophosphoric acid, acetic acid and propylene glycol, sounded like a truly original fisherman’s friend, because it ‘extends the shelf life of fish, especially in the processing and marketing phase’.
Food manufacturing terminology is as linguistically taxing as a foreign language, and possibly even more impenetrable to the uninitiated, because the underlying concepts and semantics are so utterly different from those that underpin lay discussions of the properties of food.
Tired after hours of walking round Food Ingredients, and uncharacteristically, not feeling hungry, I sought refuge at a stand displaying cut up fruits and vegetables; it just felt so good to see something natural, something instantly recognisable as food in a sea of products that were quite the opposite. But why, I wondered, did they have dates, several weeks past, beside them? It was only in conversation with a salesman for Agricoat that I learned that the fruits had been dipped in one of its solutions, NatureSeal, which because it contains citric acid along with other unnamed ingredients, adds 21 days to their shelf life. Treated in this way, carrots don’t develop that tell-tale white that makes them look old, cut apples don’t turn brown, pears don’t become translucent, melons don’t ooze, and kiwis don’t collapse into a jellied mush. As for leafy salads, a dip in NatureSeal leaves them ‘appearing fresh and natural’.
For the salesman, this preparation was a technical triumph, a boon to caterers who would otherwise waste unsold food. And there was a further benefit. Because NatureSeal is classed as a processing aid, and not an ingredient, there is no need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their ‘fresh’ fruit salad was weeks old.
Somehow, I couldn’t share his enthusiasm for NatureSeal’s waste reduction potential because a disturbing thought had dropped into my mind. Had I eaten ‘fresh’ fruit salads treated in this way? Maybe I had bought a tub on a station platform, seeing it as the healthiest option in amongst an otherwise dire choice of junk? Or perhaps I had settled for it on a hotel buffet breakfast, thinking that it would be preferable to toast made from rubbish industrial bread?
And then a further penny dropped. Even though I was someone who never knowingly eats food with obscure ingredients that I don’t recognise, I had probably consumed many of the wonder products at Food Ingredients 2013 unawares. So many of these products have been introduced, slowly and artfully, into ready-made, processed foods that many of us eat every day, in canteens, cafeterias, pubs, hotels, restaurants and takeaways that buy in and serve up factory-made products, everything from reheatable bistro meals and ready-to-bake baguettes, to ready-to-serve cheesecake and pre-rolled pizza bases. The fact is that we are all eating prepared foods made using such state-of-the-art food manufacturing technology, and mainly doing so unwittingly, either because these food components and aids don’t need to be listed on the label, or because weasel words, such as ‘flour’ and ‘protein’, peppered with the liberal use of the adjective ‘natural’, do not give us the full flavour of their production method. What’s more, we don’t have a clue, and probably neither do many manufacturers, about what this novel diet might actually be doing to us.
Outside the exhibition halls, in the lobby, the movers and shakers of the food manufacturing world stood in huddles, cutting deals, swopping business cards and posing for photos for the next corporate brochure. Given the scarcity of anything truly food-like to graze on at Food Ingredients, it wasn’t too surprising to see that a long queue had formed for a pop-up pretzel stand. I was almost tempted to join it until I found myself wondering whether, perhaps, those warm pretzels owed their humid chew, their sheen, their flavour, their colour, or their smell to some of the innovative products on display inside. Instead, with a spring in my step I headed for a breath of fresh air outdoors. Food Ingredients had seriously blunted my appetite, and only reconnecting with food in its natural state would kick it back into life.
5
When you pop into an M&S food hall, you need a will of iron to walk past the in-store bakery without buying anything. After you have pushed your trolley down those sterile, odour-free, teeth-chatteringly cold aisles, past shelves banked high with convenience food in boxes, who isn’t going to be seduced? The pleasing contours and golden hues of the assorted Viennoiserie, traybakes, muffins, tea breads, pastries and loaves create a visual architecture that primes us to expect real food in a fresh-from-the-oven state. That captivating aroma curls its way under the nose, stimulating the salivary glands, engendering feel-good thoughts of happy homes, nurturing childhoods and reassuring, dependable everyday pleasures. With its base notes of yeasty bread, buttery croissants and crusty scones, and its top notes of cinnamon, fragrant apple, vanilla and chocolate, you would make a fortune if you could distil and bottle this heart-melting scent: Parfum de Home Baking, the nation’s comfort blanket.
Nowadays, many of the in-store bakeries at M&S are state-of-the-art. This is relatively recent. By the chain’s own admission, they used to be behind the market in terms of sales and volume and were viewed as ‘clinical, uninspiring, out of touch and with below-average food-hall profitability’. They looked utilitarian, just like the standard supermarket in-store bakery where any come-hither scents created must compete with the brash odours of the washing powder aisle, but then they were revamped. Now they are smartly kitted out with gleaming white-tiled walls, stylish pendant lights, and a floor that looks like timeless limestone. Everything on sale is displayed unwrapped in rustic wicker trays, in baskets resting on wooden crates, or on jute sacks; this creates a more informal homespun look and encourages you to help yourself. Staff wear chefs’ whites under a linen-like apron, and a smart Nehru-style black cap, a mood board design ethos that combines the sophistication of Dean & DeLuca-style Manhattan deli chic with country barn.
The point of all this effort is to ‘create theatre’ in the food hall, ‘drive purchase’ of other items (that is, get customers to buy more of everything else), and help establish M&S’s ‘food credentials’ as a specialist food retailer. This strategy has paid off handsomely. Profitability has tripled as the bakeries have seen record-breaking like-for-like growth.
These bakeries look and smell so good, you might just think ‘Why on earth would I bother to bake?’ Even for dedicated home bakers who sit glued to the latest round of
The Great British Bake Off
for nights on end, it is terribly tempting to hang up your pinny and just graze from the in-store bakery. After all, M&S is widely held to be a cut above the other chains, and those loaves, cakes, buns and muffins do look like something an Earth-goddess-mum-come-craft-baker would knock up – and with all the associated simple virtues. Strategically situated near the shelves of pre-wrapped bakery goods, these goodies seem, by comparison, positively homely and low-tech. But are they?
While all baked goods not made in an in-store bakery must, by law, come labelled with a complete list of every ingredient and additive in the mix, so that if you are interested, you can see what you will be eating, the same requirement does not apply to anything sold from in-store bakeries. Still, you’d think that progressive retailers would offer such information voluntarily.
I tried to find the ingredient listings for M&S in-store bakery products online. In the ‘About our food’ sections of the M&S website it simply said ‘As some of our foods are freshly prepared in our stores, this page can help you find out the nutritional content’. It gave a breakdown for everything from the walnut loaf to the pecan and almond Danish pastry – how much fat, protein, salt, calories and so on – in one of those supposedly illuminating charts that purport to be the ultimate exercise in transparency, but which are more or less incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a professional dietician. Fulsome nutritional details, but no sign of an ingredient listing.
I then asked the M&S press centre to provide me with the information, and got back a civil, but unilluminating response:
I’m afraid as we don’t sell food online (other than our food to order), we don’t have a central database that I can direct you to, so it’s a bit tricky. If you could let me know the specific bakery products you’d like the ingredients for, I can certainly try to find out for you.
And was it just me, or was there a rising note of defensiveness in the final line:
Would you also mind giving me a bit more info about the book – what’s the angle you’re looking at?
It sounded as though it could be like pulling teeth to extract ingredients lists via the regular press channels, so on a quiet Monday morning, I decided to visit an M&S in-store bakery in person, as a member of the public, thinking that this would be a more direct way to get an answer. I asked one of the women who was working away behind the baskets of bread and buns if I could see the ingredients listing for the products on sale. She looked a bit perplexed; this was clearly not a question she had been trained to answer. Still, trying to be helpful, she showed me information about allergens (soya, eggs, peanuts, etc.) and yet again, offered up that already familiar nutritional information. But, she said, there wasn’t a list of ingredients as such, only a behind-the-counter product guide for the bakery staff’s guidance. It did list ingredients by product, but she wasn’t sure if she could let me see it. Why was I asking anyway? Knowing what’s in your food should be a matter of public record, and the relevant information readily available, but it was beginning to feel like an off-the-wall, Freedom of Information Act request. Eventually, though I managed to see a copy of the manual.
Flicking though the manual, it soon became apparent that there are quite a few nuggets of information contained within it that would act as a reality check for anyone who thinks that what they buy here isn’t that different from the homemade equivalent. For starters, it knocks on the head the wishful thinking inherent in the term ‘in-store bakery’: the cosy notion that these products are created from scratch on the premises. The manual makes it clear that, on the contrary, the products are purchased, usually frozen and ready to be finished off in ovens, from named third-party bakery companies all over the UK, then sold as fresh. Several of these suppliers are well-known brands in the world of catering, supplying products to everything from train station takeaways and hotels to coffee shops and supermarket chains. This is why the products in those country fair baskets look hauntingly familiar. You will have seen them, or products very similar to them, on many occasions, and in various settings.
First up was the M&S jam doughnut. The functional product description in the manual is as follows: ‘A doughnut, deep fried in vegetable oil and injected with raspberry jam filling. Supplied with four plastic bags per case. Using these bags, doughnuts to be coated with approximately three grams of sugar in-store.’ The product sheet makes clear that the doughnuts arrive cooked and frozen and can be kept that way for nine months. All that the ‘bakers’ had to do was put them through the oven on a set programme (number 7 in the case of doughnuts, which is 120°C for eight minutes, followed by 100°C for three minutes), then allow them to cool before sugaring them in the bags provided. Et les voilà, nice ‘fresh’ doughnuts!
The same push-button method of baking applied to other items on sale. Once these products are delivered to the store – either unbaked or part-baked, and frozen – staff simply had to bake them off at a specified oven programme: French apple pastries (Programme 15), custard pastries (Programme 17), cinnamon croissants (Programme 5), bread rolls (Programme 12), and so on. Perhaps the Real Bread Campaign was overstating its point when it described such in-store bakeries as ‘tanning salons’ for products that have been made in industrial bakery plants elsewhere, and joked about the ‘Great British Fake-Off’, but you can see what it was getting at.