Authors: Joanna Blythman
Baking method apart, the product information sheet did indeed provide a comprehensive ingredient listing, which covered some items you’d expect to find (flour, yeast, oil, sugar) and others that you might not (wheat gluten, ascorbic acid, dextrose, soya flour). While a homemade raspberry jam contains only two items – raspberries and sugar – this ‘raspberry jam filling’ was an amalgam of sugar syrup, raspberry purée, pectin, citric acid and calcium chloride E509, a ‘sequestrant’ chemical that acts as a preservative and firming agent. So the red stuff in your M&S doughnut was raspberry jam of sorts, but not jam as the Women’s Institute would know it.
The Bakewell tart, supplied frozen and unbaked, with a freezer life of six months, offered another spin on raspberry jam, with ingredients that echo the jam filling in the doughnut, only this time it also included two different sugar syrups, sucrose syrup and glucose-fructose syrup, the latter a relatively modern formulation that health campaigners in the USA believe is helping to drive the obesity epidemic.
And it was the same story with everything else on sale here – they all contained ingredients you won’t find in any home baker’s larder or, for that matter, in the kitchen of any self-respecting pastry chef. The ingredients in a homemade classic crème pâtissière would be milk, egg yolks, sugar, cornflour and a vanilla pod, or vanilla extract. But the crème pâtissière in the pain aux raisins, yet again supplied pre-prepared and frozen, was made from water, sugar, modified potato starch, dry whey (a milk protein), dried milk, maltodextrin (a starch that helps increase volume to create what food manufacturers refer to as ‘a rich mouthfeel’), xanthan gum (a gluey thickener), a product charmingly called ‘spent vanilla seeds’, as well as flavouring and colouring.
Similarly, the first ingredient in the chocolate-filled muffins was not flour, but sugar; its further ingredients include glycerine, modified maize starch, three different E-numbered emulsifiers, dried whey, dried protein, guar gum (used as a ‘stabiliser’) and flavouring.
A toothsome Danish pastry contained pectin (to provide a smooth, elastic gel structure in the custard), isomalt (a sugar alcohol), whey protein, flavouring, a gelling agent, an acidity regulator, a preservative, and mixed carotenes for colouring. The latter additive is derived either from plants or algae obtained by fermentation of a fungus,
Blakeslea trispora
. Put it this way, it’s not the sort of kit that your average home baker has to hand.
As I photographed the product sheets, the enticing scent of the still warm cinnamon twists was making me feel ravenous, but then I saw its ingredients, which included potato starch, sodium alginate, xanthan gum, and agar (thickeners), enzyme (exact nature and purpose unspecified), calcium carbonate (a type of chalk), and colour, and it suddenly lost its winsome appeal.
Bear in mind though that in ‘baking off’ pre-made frozen breads and pastries, M&S is only doing what all the other supermarket chains do, and because our big grocery chains often use the same third party, industrial bakery product companies, it seems not unreasonable to assume that the ingredients used, while they might vary a little, will not be hugely dissimilar.
Would takeaways be any different, I wondered? So it was off – where else? – to Greggs, Britain’s oldest and largest bakery chain. With more bakery shops than McDonald’s has burger bars, it is beginning to look every bit as much of a national institution as M&S. ‘We’re proud to be keeping the craft of fresh baking alive’, says Greggs. ‘Our bakers bake daily to our own unique recipes.’ Furthermore, Greggs boasts that ‘all the food we make is free from artificial colours, hydrogenated fats, and has no trans fats’, which sounds promising. The bragging doesn’t stop there:
We’re proud to keep the art of the confectioner alive in our bakeries. We insist on using quality ingredients, like the tangy flavouring from Sicilian lemons and rich Belgian chocolate in our gorgeous muffins. Our dedicated confectioners always strive for perfection, many of our sweet treats are finished by hand. Our Yum Yums are hand-twisted and the cream on our cream cakes is piped by hand in true craft bakery style.
Mmm, hand-twisted Yum Yums, now that certainly gets the gastric juices flowing.
Because Greggs so clearly takes such a craft pride in its bakery art, surely it would be keen to provide me with further chapter and verse? Once again, its ingredients list seemed the obvious place to start. Walking into one of its town centre shops, which seems to be steadily busy from breakfast through lunch until tea-time, I posed the same question as I had at M&S – where is the ingredient list? – and got the same response. A pleasant woman behind the counter gave me a copy of a customer information leaflet headed ‘From wheat to eat’, with an expansive-looking section headed ‘What goes into your favourite savouries’, but yet again – groundhog day – in amongst the marketing spin, the only hard facts offered were a product-by-product nutritional breakdown: calories, energy value and so on. I reiterated that I was looking for ingredients listings. She shot me a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine look, then pointed to the wall, where unobtrusive next to the chiller cabinets filled with sandwiches and soft drinks, was a terse customer advice notice. This still didn’t give me the full disclosure I was looking for, but it did offer a few hard facts, required by law, such as:
Products sold on these premises contain one or more of the following – additives, antioxidants, sweeteners, colours, flavourings, flavour enhancers, preservatives.
More informative in a specific sort of way was the ‘typical meat contents’ information for savoury products, often described as ‘man snacks’ because of their supposedly sustaining carnivorous contents. This showed, for example, that the pork element in a Greggs jumbo sausage roll accounted for just 19 per cent of the total ingredients – not much in the way of primal food – and that the pork contained natural colour and preservative.
It was a similar story with the chicken bake: the chicken element accounted for only 18 per cent of the ingredients, and the chicken itself contained natural flavour and natural colour. Bridies, Scotch pies, steak bakes, fajita chicken lattices and more, all contained a colour, flavour or preservative, and some contained all three. And there were a few more intriguing flashes of detail. It stated, for instance, that ‘ham used in some of our products is formed from selected cuts of pure pork leg’, which is to say that it wasn’t cut from a whole ham in the traditional sense of that word. It also informed me that the ‘breakfast sausage contains beef protein’, but it didn’t tell me what, exactly, ‘beef protein’ is, as opposed to straight beef as we know it. After all, beef is naturally rich in protein, so why the semantic word play? Had beef protein in some other form been added to pork sausage? This wording didn’t enlighten me.
Nevertheless, the customer notice was rounded off with an upbeat and generous flourish: ‘If you have any queries, do not hesitate to ask the staff in the shop who will be pleased to help you’. Well, I had tried that, but they didn’t seem to know the full story either. So I contacted the public relations company that handles media enquiries for Greggs, and asked for the ingredients listings for their products. ‘We’ll look into this for you’, they promised. In a week, I hadn’t heard a thing, so I followed up my request. Three weeks later, I received this response from the senior manager handling the Greggs account:
Unfortunately whilst nutritional information is available on the Greggs website, ingredient lists are not because Greggs wishes to protect the recipes of its iconic products.
In other words, get lost. We don’t need, by law, to tell you what’s in our products, so we’re not going to. Greggs just wanted me to take it on trust that it puts only the freshest and finest ingredients into its ‘iconic products’. And yet, in the absence of reassuring transparency, I felt unable to do so.
PART TWO
The defining characteristics of processed food
6
Jason Reitman’s black comedy about the dark art of lobbying,
Thank You for Smoking
, starred Aaron Eckhart as a high-earning lobbyist for the tobacco industry. At one point in the film, Eckhart is seen in cynical conversation with fellow professional lobbyists (for the alcohol industry and gun lobby) debating who amongst them has the toughest reason and evidence-denying job. Were he making that film now, Reitman might well put a lobbyist for the sugar industry around the table, because sugar is in big trouble, and needs all the help it can get. Despite their best efforts, sugar companies and sugar-dependent manufacturers find themselves in a deep, defensive silo, as sticky, dark and hard to get out of as treacle. Sugar, as the headlines read, is the new tobacco.
Changed days. When saturated fat was the nutrition establishment’s wicker man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar sneaked in under the radar. The fatwa on fat was a cash cow for sugar refiners, spawning legions of processed products with ramped-up levels of sugar to cover up the inevitable loss of taste that occurs when flavour-centric fat is removed.
So fixated was the dietetic establishment with promoting fat avoidance, that, on occasion, it even ended up promoting sugar because the healthiness of foods was defined by the absence of fat. In 2014 a baffled friend of mine was given a copy of a document known as the Good Hearted Glasgow Diet Sheet by her GP on the grounds that she had high cholesterol. The introduction read: ‘Cutting down on the amount of fat which you eat will help lower the level of cholesterol in your blood.’ This is a highly debatable statement because the putative link between fat consumption and raised cholesterol is based on over-simplistic science, as is the contention that reducing cholesterol improves health outcomes. The vexed question of cholesterol apart, it was alarming to read the diet advice: sugar, jam, marmalade, honey, boiled sweets, pastilles and gums all appeared in the ‘recommended foods’ column.
Simmering away in the background, of course, there has long been a persistent narrative on sugar and its capacity to damage our health. Back in 1972, physiologist John Yudkin published his book,
Sweet and Dangerous
, subsequently retitled more explicitly in further editions as
Pure, White, and Deadly: How Sugar Is Killing Us and What We Can Do to Stop It
. If that message isn’t clear enough, what is? But for many years, the sugar lobby suppressed such explicit attack, using a two-pronged strategy.
The first tactic was to neutralise any embedded concerns about sugar we might have by creating a spurious positive association with health. The aim here is to create a feel-good message that clashes with, and hopefully overrides, any negative perception. (This is a classic damage-limitation manoeuvre used by potentially unpopular companies, the reason why polluting oil companies often sponsor wildlife projects, for example.)
In the case of companies whose products are loaded with sugar, the easiest response was to link their products to sport, athleticism and physical activity. So Coca-Cola was all too happy to be the official soft drinks provider for the London 2012 Olympic Games as this enabled it to demonstrate its strong commitment to the ‘Olympic values – participation, friendship, excellence and respect’, and ‘build deeper relationships with the people who enjoy our products’. Isn’t that nice? Irn-Bru, the amber-coloured, sweet fizzy drink ‘made in Scotland from girders’ by A.G. Barr, was declared the ‘Official Soft Drink of Glasgow’ for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Bear in mind that Glasgow is the city with the lowest life expectancy in the UK, in the country (Scotland) that has the worst health record in Europe. ‘Retailers will be able to generate excellent visibility in-store with the point of sale [material] we are providing and capitalise on the unrivalled opportunity to drive soft drinks’ sales before, during and after Glasgow 2014’, the company’s head of marketing purred. However much purveyors of sweet products appear to encourage physical exercise, it’s clear that upping sales is their overriding preoccupation.
The sugar lobby’s second tactic was not on show in any public sports arena, but highly effective behind the scenes: it dismissed its critics as mavericks and heretics on the fringes of scientific consensus. In the case of John Yudkin, who first blew the whistle on sugar, his stance cost him dearly. Jobs and research grants that might otherwise have come Yudkin’s way did not materialise, and attacks on him included the abrupt cancellation of conferences where he might advance the anti-sugar case. The sugar lobby dismissed
Pure, White, and Deadly
as a work of fiction, and continued for decades to bullishly pursue anyone who dared to disseminate any anti-sugar views.
I have first-hand experience of this. In 2009, a representative of the UK sugar lobby, then known as the Sugar Bureau, a body that has since changed its name to the less partisan and more scientific-sounding Sugar Nutrition UK, wrote to my editor at a popular magazine, demanding that I provide scientific evidence to justify every reference I had made about the negative impact of sugar on health in an article. He even asked, without any hint of irony, that I back up my assertion that sugar can cause tooth decay, a statement that had been uncontroversial for decades. Nevertheless, all this I duly did, at some length, and in time-consuming detail.
Not satisfied with my response, the pugnacious sugar lobby representative referred the matter back to my editor. She batted the complaint upstairs to the department that deals with legal affairs. It was already well acquainted with sugar lobby complaints as a result of its habit of stamping on any journalist, editor or broadcaster who dared to let it be said that sugar might be anything other than good for us. In my case, the sugar lobby eventually gave up, but for years this general strategy paid off. It effectively silenced critics by keeping them tied up in lengthy, work-intensive exchanges of letters, constantly refusing to accept their very credible sources and demanding that letters ‘correcting’ the ‘misleading’ and outlandish notion that sugar isn’t good for you, be printed. Knowing how combative and demanding the sugar lobby was, editors and journalists tended to self-censor, by avoiding the subject, or writing about it in a softly-softly, inoffensive way. To do otherwise would probably mean getting caught up in a protracted, seemingly interminable dialogue. The media soon got the message: ‘Don’t say anything negative about sugar unless you’re up for a lorry load of hassle.’