Doublespeak. William Lutz
must, grape concentrate, yeasts, water, eggs (albumen or yolks), gelatin, casein, isinglass and pectolytic enzymes as clarifiers, ascorbic acid or erythodbic acid to prevent darkening, and sulfur dioxide and potassium salt of sorbic acid as sterilizing and preservative agents. Anyone for a glass of wine?
You can’t even say you’re getting a lemon when you buy foods like lemon pudding or lemon cake mix, because the lemons in these products are fake. In fact, you don’t need any lemons to make lemonade. In 1982 the Food and Drug Administration denied a petition asking that the word “lemonade” be restricted to products containing real lemon juice. Howard N. Pippin, speaking for the FDA, said that “we don’t know how much lemon juice it takes to make lemonade.” He conceded that, under FDA regulations, a product could appear with a label reading “lemonade,” yet contain no lemon juice. That’s just what’s happened, because General Foods’ Lemonade Flavor Drink contains no lemon pulp, lemon peel, or lemon juice. It does contain citric acid, gum acacia, and “nutritive sweetener.” When a consumer wrote to General Foods and asked how they could make lemonade without lemons, the company wrote back that “the aromatic or essential component of all citrus fruits is also referred to as ‘natural flavor’ and is derived from the oil sacs in the peel and not from the juice.” Anyone want to buy “lemon oil sac component pudding and pie filling”?
If you look at all those products that use the word “lemon” on their packages, you’ll find few if any lemons were used to make any of them. General Foods’ Lemon Deluxe Cake Mix contains citric acid, while Royal Gelatin Lemon Dessert has fumaric acid, and Jell-0 Lemon Pudding Mix contains fumaric acid and adipic acid for tartness. You also won’t find any lemons in any of those lemon-scented ammonia cleaners, oven cleaners, furniture polishes, furniture waxes, air deodorizers, toilet bowl fresheners, or detergents that have the word “lemon” in big letters or a big picture of a lemon on their packages. Search as hard as you can, but you won’t find a lemon in the whole bunch. How does Lemon Freshened Borax or Lemon Fresh Joy differ from non-lemon products? Since they don’t contain real lemons, we are left guessing what ingredient they do contain that makes them different.
Fake Food
One of the fastest growing segments of the food industry is fake food. What, you ask, is fake food? Fake food looks and tastes like the real product (or so the manufacturers claim), but it is made from a cheaper substitute and sells for a fraction of the cost of the real thing. To be more accurate, the fake-food industry sells its products to the retailer for a fraction of the cost. Consumers usually end up paying as if the fake food were the real thing.
Some “food technologists” (as fake-food inventors like to be called) don’t even call their products food; they call them “food systems.” Food technologists develop such things as “cheese analogs” (fake mozzarella) and “restructured muscle products” (fake steaks). When these “food systems” are used in restaurants, there’s no requirement that customers be told what they’re buying and what they’re eating.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture allows food processors to combine 135 parts of water with one part meat stock and still use the words “beef stock” instead of water on their ingredient labels. You can buy such fake foods as California Foolers, which are non-alcoholic versions of alcoholic drinks; and fake flavors (known as flavorgeins and flavor enhancers) such as butter, Mexican, Oriental, and Italian flavors. You can even get combinations such as nacho-flavored fortune cookies. Companies are even developing a fake barbecue sauce flavor and a fake mesquite smoke flavor. Soon you will be able to buy barbecue- flavored and mesquite-flavored food without the food ever having been near a real grill.
A number of Japanese companies ship large amounts of fake frozen crab meat (or, more precisely, a “surimi-based crab analog”) to the United States. Surimi is a fish paste made by pressing and repeatedly washing deboned fish. The fake crab comes in the form of sticks or shredded meat and is made from cheap cod plus starch, salt, chemical seasoning, “essence of crab” (which is derived from boiling down crab shells), and polymerized phosphate. Sales of imitation crab meat exceeded $100 million a year in 1984 and were growing rapidly.
There are many other fake foods. Fake scallops are made from codfish with “essence of scallop,” then compressed into cylinders and sliced to look like scallops. Canned red salmon is produced by using 30 percent real salmon plus cod with starch, salt, chemical seasoning, and synthetic red coloring added. Fake salmon roe consists of little orange-red colored balls made from seaweed gelatin, filled with salad oil.
Japanese fake-food manufacturers have also gone beyond fake seafood to fake beef. Using cod or sardines, the fake-food makers add salt and knead the mass until it takes on a gluey consistency. This mass is then put through an extruder and ethyl alcohol is added so that the protein becomes a mixture with the elasticity of natural beef. Meat flavoring and coloring are added so that the final product appears to be minced beef which can be used in hamburgers and other products.
Another process used to make fake beef takes internal organs, diaphragms, and waste meat from real beef and glues them together with adhesives made from egg white, starch, and gelatin. After a strip of real beef fat is glued along the edges, the product is frozen into the shape of a sirloin steak, a filet mignon, or a similar product. Food technologists boast that these products have the “mouthfeel” of real steaks. Ah, yes, beef is real food for real people.
You can also get surimi versions of lobster and shrimp, and the fake-food makers are busy working on surimi-based cheese, hot dogs, potato chips, and luncheon meat. The idea of fake hot dogs and fake luncheon meat is right up there with real virgin vinyl and genuine imitation leather. Surimi manufacturers protest that their products are not imitations. “Surimi isn’t an imitation anything,” says James Brooker of the National Maritime Fisheries Service. “It’s a seafood. It’s a blended-seafood product.”
One triumph of “food technology” (as the fake-food business is discreetly called) is the “gourm-egg,” developed by Ralston Purina and now ten years old (the technology, not the egg). A “gourm-egg” is a foot-long rod of hard-cooked egg suitable for slicing into seventy-five perfect center slices. Through the genius of food technology, the yolks of these slices do not slip out of the white rims, even if the slices do have the texture of gelatinous rubber and a vague, sulfurous near-egg aftertaste. But then think of all the work involved in shelling seventy-five real hard-boiled eggs.
Then there are “seafood curls,” developed by Griffith Laboratories. Using fake shrimp fried in “microwavable” batter, Griffith serves them crisp with a spicy dipping sauce. Such mouth-watering treats will soon be outdone, if Professor Endel Karmas, a food chemist at Rutgers University, has his way. He is developing “fish chewies,” a chocolate-flavored fish-based concoction with the texture of a soft Tootsie Roll. And you thought the greatest tragedy to befall American cooking was the death of the real hamburger.
Food technologists are not a humorless group. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal in 1986, a group of food technologists once concocted what they called “trash soups,” just for fun. The soups were made almost entirely of by-products: minced cod, scallop mantels (which are the greenish, rubbery protective lips found in scallop shells), and a broth made from the effluent of a clam-processing plant that, after using the water to clean the clams, had simply dumped the water as sewage. The soups, called New England and Manhattan Clam Chowders, were a big hit in taste tests and sold very well. In fact, the soups sold so well that the clam company, after the food technologists were finished with their little experiment, bottled the water it used to clean the clams and sold it as clam juice for $8 a bottle.
The fake-food business is so big that even the Riverfront State Prison in Camden, New Jersey has a program in which inmates produce “restructured beef,” which turns beef chuck into pieces looking like strip steak, chuck roast, and other cuts. The inmates process fifty tons of meat a month.
How successful are these fake foods? Japanese manufacturers claim that consumers are convinced they are eating the real thing. There may be some truth to this claim, since fake crab exports to the United States went from over twenty-two hundred tons in 1981 to more than forty-five thousand tons in 1986. Fake crab and other fake foods are used by U.S. restaurants in salads, sandwiches,