Swallow This (7 page)

Whether it’s a case of allergens, contamination with food poisoning bugs, or rotting food, any such ‘production faults’ (as they are known in the industry) will very likely hit several seemingly distinct and separate lines simultaneously. When one such factory supplying Tesco was informed that some rice in packs had become mouldy, for example, the FSA had to issue a product recall information notice on all batches of no less than eight ready meals: chicken jalfrezi, Szechuan chicken, chilli con carne, chicken tikka masala, beef in black bean sauce, sweet and sour chicken, chicken korma and balti vegetable curry. The sheer scale and productivity of the manufacturing enterprise also clocks up risk: a typical factory might be ‘cooking’ 2,000 portions of rice at a time in the same machine. So when a problem arises on the production line, it affects millions of portions of food in no time at all.

Are these mammoth food factories really just scaled-up versions of a domestic kitchen, as manufacturers would lead us to believe? If consumers of their products had an accurate mental picture of how their products were made, they could arbitrate on this point by casting an informed vote. But in the modern convenience food system, production is strictly out of sight and out of mind. Food retailers prefer us to focus on more attractive things – their adverts, the luscious marketing images on the packaging, the special offers and promotions, anything, in fact, other than what actually happens down on the factory floor. And having gained access to this strange and unsettling world for myself, I’d say that was an extremely wise policy.

3

Clean label

Food manufacturers have embarked on a major exercise designed to quell our fears about the composition of their products. They were forced into it. Food investigations provide regular editorial meat for the media. Millions of us read books and articles and watch exposés on how the food we eat is produced, setting up nagging worries.

Sensitised by scare and scandal, more of us now approach processed food with a sceptical eye. We scan labels for E numbers, the European Union’s code for substances used as additives, because we see them as flashing red alerts for nutritionally compromised, low-grade industrial food. As one food industry commentator put it, ‘E numbers have a very high “label-polluting” effect’. We home in on ingredients and additives with long chemical names. What on earth is carboxymethylcellulose, or mono- and diacetyl tartaric esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, we wonder, and an increasing number of us are deeply suspicious of foods that contain them.

A growing citizen army wants to eat real food, and seeks out what’s come to be known as the ‘kitchen-cupboard’ guarantee: if you wouldn’t use mystery ingredients X, Y and Z in your own cooking, why on earth would you eat them in ready-made food? As one food processing executive explains: ‘One of the problems we face is people’s confidence in chemicals. Chemicals is [sic] seen as a nasty word.’

For decades, the chemical industry tried to put a lid on this grassroots revolt by arming food manufacturers and retailers with a pat little keep-calm-and-carry-on script. Here, in the words of the International Food Additives Council, a trade association representing the interests of food additive and ingredient producers, is how it goes:

With well over 2,300 food additives currently approved for use, it would be staggering to list the components of each of these substances. However, every additive – like every food we consume – no matter what its source or intended purpose, is composed of chemicals. Everything, including the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the foods we eat, even our own bodies, is made up of chemicals.

The sub-text here, just in case you had missed it, is that those of us who worry about additives and inscrutable industrial ingredients are scientific incompetents, who, if we really understood the science, wouldn’t be in the least bit alarmed. The argument is further elaborated in a dogged attempt to put an end to the persistent, seditious line of thought that processed food is qualitatively different from natural food:

There is much discussion regarding ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ chemicals. Many of those synthesised in the laboratory are also found naturally occurring in foods. Chemicals are chemicals; the distinction between a ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ chemical is itself artificial. The molecular structure of each is exactly the same and the human body does not discriminate based upon the source. For example, sugar found in sugar cane (sucrose) is no different in composition and function than refined sugar. Similarly, citric acid produced commercially by enzymatic fermentation, is the same naturally occurring chemical that makes lemons tart. To say one chemical is safer than another because of its origin simply does not make sense.

Note the implication in that final phrase: anyone who is suspicious of processed food is an irrational, confused hysteric.

How disappointing it must be for the companies that have invested so much time and effort in disseminating this message to see that it simply hasn’t been believed. Despite their concerted efforts to rubbish public concerns about the additives in processed food, they just won’t go away. Realists in the food industry now accept this is the case, as this industry spokesman explains:

We know that consumers want a return to familiar ingredients and in recent years, terms such as ‘natural’, ‘authentic’, ‘preservative-free’ and ‘additive-free’ have proliferated on the packaging of food products in Europe. These clearly portray the consumer’s desire to return to simple, less-processed ingredients which are familiar to everyone, and the rejection of additives. For agri-food companies, claiming 100% natural products, and crusading against additives, leads to success in Europe.

It’s the same story worldwide. When the US Whole Foods Market chain issued a roll call of ingredients that it would not permit in any of the products it sold, this ‘Unacceptable Ingredients for Food’ list sent shock waves through the global food industry. This list currently runs to over 70 additives and obscure industrial ingredients, from acesulfame K, ammonium chloride and azodicarbonamide, to tert-butylhydroquinone, tetrasodium EDTA and vanillin, and it is added to from time to time as controversial ingredients shoot up the public agenda. In the case of high fructose corn syrup, for instance, a sweetener that is increasingly in the frame as a key driver of the US obesity epidemic, Whole Foods Market gave its suppliers until the end of 2010 to reformulate and remove it from all products destined for its stores.

Whole Foods Market, of course, is often stereotyped as catering for the worried wealthy, but every other food retailer now knows that perceived naturalness is a very effective shortcut to what’s known as ‘premiumisation’, that is, getting your customers to believe that your products are good quality. As one observer of food industry trends explains, ‘many [product] formulators do turn to the list of unacceptable ingredients published by Whole Foods’.

Now that once stalwart additives and ingredients have their names up there in flashing red lights, food manufacturers have a major headache. They have come to rely on flavourings and obscure sweeteners to replace the natural tastes in food that industrial processing destroys. They have depended on fake colours to make over-processed, degraded beige-brown food look more appealing. They have needed preservatives and antioxidants to extend shelf life. Without these, and all the other weapons in its trusty armoury – emulsifiers, stabilisers, sequestrants, gelling agents, thickeners, anti-foaming agents, bulking agents, carriers and carrier solvents, emulsifying salts, firming agents, flavour enhancers, flour-treatment agents, foaming agents, glazing agents, humectants, propellants, raising agents, flavour carriers and binders – the modern processed food industry is drained of its life blood.

So under pressure to clean up their act, many food manufacturers have latched on to the emerging concept of ‘clean label’. In the last decade, this is the big idea that has moved from the health-store margins of the food industry to grip the mainstream. The term has no legal definition, but in the industry, ‘clean label’ is widely taken to mean that the
ancien régime
of food additives, with all its negative connotations, has been replaced or removed, that the ingredient listing is simple, that is, made up of recognisable ingredients that do not sound chemical or artificial, and that the product has been processed ‘using traditional techniques that are understood by consumers and not perceived as being artificial’. As the director of one market research company put it, the word ‘natural’ ‘works as a heuristic to shoppers, a shortcut to a product being good for them, something they’d be happy to give their children’.

Some companies have taken up the clean label concept to reformulate their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients and additives that raise health or quality concerns with substitutes that are generally thought to be less problematic. Other companies, however, unconvinced that they can pass on the cost of radical reformulation to food retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of substances that allow them to present a much more scrubbed and rosy face to the public, without incurring excessive cost. In their hands, clean labelling has become an exercise that dispenses with the services of the food industry’s dirty dozens, and introduces us to an initially more wholesome and healthy-looking bunch of new friends.

The challenge faced by companies under pressure to reformulate products has been to find alternative ingredients that can perform the same functions as the old ‘nasties’ – that is, they must cost less than the natural equivalent, have a good shelf life and be easy to process – but can be described in a much more appetising way. In this endeavour, food manufacturers look to a plethora of global ingredient supply companies that understand their technical needs and provide clean label solutions to the food manufacturer’s dirty little label problems. In the industry’s own terminology, these solutions aim to square the consumer’s yearning for naturalness with the manufacturer’s need for ‘functionality’. In practical terms, what this means is that even if you are a thoughtful eater, someone who diligently inspects product labels, food manufacturers are always one step ahead of you. In fact, if you are still fretting about E numbers, you are way behind the curve. That was food awareness reading book number one; now we are on to reading book number two.

Supposing, for example, you were standing in the supermarket eyeing up a pot of something temptingly called a ‘chocolate cream dessert’. You read the ingredients: whole milk, sugar (well, there has to be some in there), cream, cocoa powder and dark chocolate (they all sound quite up-market), but then your urge to buy falters as you notice three feel-bad ingredients. The first of these is carrageenan (E407). You may or may not have read headlines reporting that this setting agent, derived from seaweed, has been linked with ulcers and gastrointestinal cancer, but even if you haven’t, there’s a good chance that the E number will put you off anyway. Carrageenan belongs to a group of gummy substances, including guar, agar, konjac, inulin, locust bean, acacia, xanthan, cellulose and pectin, known as hydrocolloids. It is now regarded in food industry circles as an ‘ideally not’ [to be included] additive.

The second of these worrying ingredients is a modified starch (E1422), or to give it its full chemical name, acetylated distarch adipate. It started off its life as a simple starch, of the kind you’d find naturally in potatoes or rice, but it has been chemically altered to increase its water-holding capacity and tolerance for the extreme temperatures and physical pressures of industrial-scale processing. Spot this, and chances are that the term ‘modified’ will put you off, and if it doesn’t, then the bothersome E number most likely will.

The third problematical ingredient is gelatine. It’s anathema to observant Muslims, Jews and vegetarians, and even secular omnivores may be wondering what this by-product of porcine hides is doing in their pudding.

Fortunately for the manufacturers of your chocolate cream dessert, there is a Plan B. They can remove all three offending items, and replace them with a more sophisticated type of ‘functional flour’ hydrothermally extracted from cereals, that will do the same job, but without the need for E numbers. ‘Because they are flours’ explains the sales pitch for one such product, ‘all our ingredients produce home-made and additive-free textures with a touch of authenticity to make products stand out from the crowd … Our functional flours have a reassuring declaration as ‘wheat’, ‘corn’ or ‘rice’ flour – simple ingredients familiar to everyone.’

Another possibility for cleaning up this dessert would be to use a ‘co-texturiser’ that would cost-effectively deliver the necessary thick and creamy indulgence factor. As the supplier of one such product puts it: ‘They bring out the more subtle differences in texture that we experience in our mouths while eating, such as mouthcoating and meltaway.’ Texturisers, just like modified starches, are based on highly processed, altered starch designed to withstand high-volume, high-temperature, high-pressure manufacturing, but because they are obligingly classified by food regulators as a ‘functional native starch’, they can be labelled simply as ‘starch’, with no troublesome E number at the end.

So, out come two additives and one ingredient that many people avoid, to be replaced by a single new generation ingredient, one that is opaque in its formulation – proprietary secrets, and all that – but which won’t trigger consumer alarm.

With the chocolate dessert in your trolley, you find yourself at the deli counter. Fancy a dip for dunking your nachos? Possibly not, if you noticed that they contained an old-school preservative with an E number after its incomprehensible name, something such as sodium benzoate, or sorbate, nitrites, nitrates and sulfites. Not only do these sound like science lab chemicals, you might also have heard that several of them have been linked to ADD, allergies and cancer. But food manufacturers can get round your resistance by using instead a label-friendly preservative, made by fermenting corn or cane sugar with specific cultures that form organic acids and fermentation products; these have a similar bacteria-inhibiting effect. The boon here for the manufacturer is that they can be labelled as ‘cultured cane/corn syrup’, or ‘cultured vinegar’, and that sounds positively classy.