Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman
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.
Maybe you usually buy some cold cooked meat, turkey perhaps, or ham? It’s always useful for sandwiches and easy meals. Food-wise shoppers tend to be doubly vigilant while shopping in this category. Hanky-panky in the meat department always has potential to trigger a yuck reaction, and the presence of phosphates on a label is widely interpreted as an ominous sign. It provides evidence of meat that has been swollen by injecting it, or ‘tumbling’ it in a drum, with bulking chemicals and water. So processed meat manufacturers are increasingly turning to clean label ‘phosphate replacers’, sticky, binding substances derived from tapioca and other starchy foods, that do the job of retaining added water, but allow a chemical-free label. Observant shoppers might notice the presence of tapioca starch on the ingredients list, and wonder vaguely how a tropical tuber got into their sliced ham, but it sounds a whole lot more cuddly than sodium/potassium/calcium/ammonium polyphosphate E452.
Picking up some rustic-looking salami, even the most guarded shoppers might relax when they notice rosemary extract on the ingredients list. We’d love to believe that this cured meat has been lovingly aromatised with fragrant herbs. Actually, rosemary extracts are clean label substitutes for the old guard of techie-sounding antioxidants (E300-21), such as butylhydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylhydroxytoluene (BHT). Food manufacturers use them to slow down the rate at which foods go rancid, so extending their shelf life; basically, they act as preservatives.
Rosemary extracts do have an E number (E392) but manufacturers prefer to label them more poetically as ‘extract of rosemary’, and lose the offending E, because that way they sound like lovingly made Slow Food ingredients, especially if they are also labelled as natural or organic. Never believe for a moment that this antioxidant in your salami is there to provide an aromatic herbiness: its role is to stop the meat discolouring in air so that it retains that desirable fresh appearance for weeks.
Rosemary extracts do, at one stage of their production process, have something to do with the eponymous herb, albeit usually in its dried, rather than fresh, form. However, the herb’s antioxidant chemicals (phenolic diterpenes called carnosol and carnosic acid) are isolated in an extraction procedure that ‘deodorises’ them, that is to say, removes any rosemary taste and smell. Extraction is done either by the supercritical fluid-extraction method, which uses carbon dioxide, or using chemical solvents. The solvents in question are hexane (derived from the fractional distillation of petroleum), ethanol (a petrol replacer from the fermentation of sugar and starch), and acetone (the flammable pungent fluid that dissolves nail varnish). Neutral-tasting rosemary extract is then