Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman
That conclusion is shrewd. Food manufacturers do spend a lot of time watching their backs and limiting their liability precisely because they are in a high-risk business.
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
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