Authors: Joanna Blythman
As far as general research went, using all the resources the internet has to offer, materially enlightening information was equally hard to come by. All the companies that supply ingredients to the food and drink manufacturing arena have a public or media website, accessible to anyone who bothers to look. These typically consist of a mixture of old press releases, business statistics – how many people we employ in how many countries, and so on – and Frequently Asked Questions. These public sites are conspicuously devoid of tangible facts. Their creators have clearly mastered the art of saying nothing much, at great length. All are designed to cast the company’s activities in a flattering light.
Then there are separate sites, or subscriber-only areas of company sites, that share product knowledge and developments amongst industry insiders. These facilitate a deeper level of dialogue that is internal to the food manufacturing business; the trade talking to the trade. In particular, they allow the chemical industry to tell food manufacturers how our food can be shaped, engineered and redesigned. They offer practical case studies of how innovative modern ingredients, such as enzymes, nanoparticles, protein isolates, acidulants, permeates, cyclodextrins and sugar alcohols can revolutionise production, and offer technical ‘solutions’ to commonly encountered problems. Even then, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of what an ingredient, additive or process actually involves or does in a specific food or drink context, manufacturers are almost invariably urged to contact the company direct to discover what technical ‘applications’ the product in question might have for their business.
Such sites are very definitely do-not-disturb zones for industry outsiders. In fact, you need to pass through various hurdles to be allowed into the club. For instance, when I tried to subscribe to Innovadex, formerly known as Chemidex, the biggest online ingredient search engine for food and drink manufacturers, I received the following reply:
Thank you for completing your registration with Innovadex. Access is not immediate and is dependent upon approval. Notification of your access will be sent within one business day.
Innovadex.com
is an internet-based resource designed specifically for use by chemists and formulators. Membership is restricted to validated institutional users of product information who are involved in the purchase and use of raw materials and ingredients.
Needless to say, my Innovadex subscription was not forthcoming, and it was the same story with the registered users-only sites of companies supplying our food manufacturers. Here you have to fill in a series of subscription application questions to establish your suitability. What is the name of your company? What is your company website? What sector are you in (meat, dairy, bakery, etc.)? Are you a manufacturer or retailer? What is your position and job title in the company (product developer, buyer, processor, etc.)? How many employees do you employ? What band does your annual turnover fall into? What school did you last attend? I’m joking about this last one, but unless you fit searching criteria, your subscription application goes no further.
What about dropping in on some of the global summits where food manufacturers network with ‘visionary researchers’, ‘thought leaders’ and ‘horizon scanners’ from leading ingredient suppliers? The same restrictions apply. You must be an approved industry insider of the vetted sort, and even if you are, the fee for attendance is pitched at a level (several hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds) that only deep corporate pockets can contemplate. In food manufacturing, no one seems to blink at stumping up £1,999 for a conference pass, or paying £399 upwards for a workshop; and that’s before VAT.
Just supposing you were enough of an anorak to want to read and digest meaty technical documents that would help cast light on what goes on behind the scenes of food manufacturing, you would have to pay handsomely for the privilege. For instance, a publication, such as ‘Food Flavours & Flavour Enhancers: Market, Technical & Regulatory Insights’, published by market researchers, Mintel, and Leatherhead Food Research, a leading food and drink industry research and development body, might fill us in on how these additives are used, and give us a steer on how much of them we all consume. But at £2,600 plus VAT, just like a Rolex, that’s a rather exclusive purchase. In many different ways, food manufacturers and the global ingredients companies that supply them, operate a very effective apartheid system that bars anyone who doesn’t belong. Glasnost is not a core operating principle of the factory food industry.
Fortunately for consumers, the food and drink industry is not a monolith, and not all companies believe that the public is best left in the dark. A couple of them very kindly provided me with a ‘cover’ that allowed me to pass through the security vetting and gain unprecedented access to material that has not previously been in the public realm. They helped me get closer to the beating heart of modern factory food production. This book is all about what I found there, and even to me, as a seasoned food journalist, it was an eye-opener.
In the first part, I have tried to set the scene of how the world of food and drink manufacturing operates, from the factory floor, to the supermarket sales floor, and at a cutting edge industry event. In the second part, I have laid out before you what, after all my research, I now consider to be the defining characteristics of this industry’s products: food and drink that is sweet, oily, old, flavoured, coloured, watery, starchy, tricky and packed. Where possible, I have allowed the industry to speak for itself. Quotes are revealing. When a company offers manufacturers ‘customised masking solutions for tastes you want to hide’, or promises shelf life extension products that give foods a ‘fresh-like’ quality for several weeks, this gives you a clue to some of this industry’s paramount concerns.
In as much as we are encouraged to think about the nitty-gritty of manufacturing, that is, not at all, we are led to believe that what goes on in food factories is essentially the same as home cooking, only scaled-up. Any such perception is self-serving, coy and to my mind, misleading. What you might see, after dipping into this book, is how radically different food manufacturing is in its concepts, goals, behaviours and ethos from any form of domestic food preparation. Unlike home cooks, food manufacturers are driven by innovation and novelty. They work not from a framework of time-honoured principles, but with a blank sheet. Each new product is, in industry-speak, a ‘matrix’, a never-ending jigsaw puzzle of possible elements, either chiselled out from natural ingredients, or entirely man-made, that can be arranged and rearranged, right down to the molecular level if necessary, then stuck together in various ways, and in numerous forms, to meet certain overriding goals. For product developers and food technologists, the professionals who design and create a never-ending stream of products, whole, raw, unprocessed foods present a shopping trolley of components to play around with.
So when the home cook decides to make a Bakewell tart, for instance, she or he looks out a recipe, puts together a line-up of well-established ingredients – raspberry jam, flour, butter, whole eggs, almonds, butter and sugar – and then bakes it in a tried-and-tested way. The factory food technologist, on the other hand, approaches this venerable confection from a totally different angle. What alternative ingredients can we use to create a Bakewell tart-
style
product, while replacing or reducing expensive ingredients – those costly nuts, butter and berries? How can we cut the amount of butter, yet boost that buttery flavour, while disguising the addition of cheaper fats with an inferior taste profile? What sweeteners can we add to lower the tart’s blatant sugar content and justify a ‘reduced calorie’ label? How many times can we re-use the pastry left over from each production run in subsequent ones? What antioxidants could we throw into the mix to prolong the tart’s shelf life? Which enzyme would keep the almond sponge layer moist for longer? Might we use a long-life raspberry purée and gel mixture instead of conventional jam? What about coating the almond sponge layer with an invisible edible film that would keep the almonds crunchy for weeks? Could we substitute some starch for a proportion of the flour to give a more voluminously risen result? Would powdered, rather than pasteurised liquid egg, stick less to the equipment on the production line? Could we use a modified protein to do away with the eggs altogether, or to mimic fat? And so on.
According to the Food and Drink Federation, a body that promotes the interests of companies active in the field, food and drink manufacturing is ‘a great British success story’. Thanks to the steady stream of pre-prepared, convenience food it puts on our plates, the average proportion of household income spent on food has dropped from 50 per cent in 1914 to around 10 per cent in 2014. In fact, the UK now spends less on food than any country in the world, bar the USA.
We have been striding purposefully down this Anglo-American food path for decades. George Orwell clocked the trend back in 1937 in his book,
The Road to Wigan Pier
. ‘The English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year’, he wrote. He noted that in England at that time, a man over six feet was usually ‘skin and bone and not much else’, attributing this largely to ‘the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything’. He warned in no uncertain terms where the move away from home-cooked, real food might lead us: ‘We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun’.
How prescient Orwell was. Nowadays, the expression of our ongoing embrace of factory food in its myriad processed forms is rather different than in the 1930s, with an irony that would not be lost on him. A growing number of us are simultaneously overfed and undernourished, a crazy consequence of our reliance on food manufactured in an industrial setting. Whereas Orwell linked processed food consumption with excessive skinniness, today’s six-foot-tall man, like most other citizens, will most likely be carrying a good few kilos of excess weight. These days, a disturbing 60 per cent of the UK population is overweight; a quarter of us are obese.
Are we leaping to an unjustified conclusion when we lay a significant part of the blame for obesity, chronic disease and the dramatic rise in reported food allergies, at the door of processed food? There are several a priori grounds for seriously examining this possibility. Firstly, food manufacturers combine ingredients that do not occur in natural food, notably the trilogy of sugar, processed fat and salt, in their most quickly digested, highly refined, nutrient-depleted forms. Might these modern constructions be addictive? That proposition is gaining airtime. Secondly, manufactured foods often contain chemicals with known toxic properties – although we are reassured that at low levels, this is not a cause for concern. Thirdly, the processed food industry has an ignoble history of actively defending its use of controversial ingredients, such as partially hydrogenated oils, long after well-documented, subsequently validated, suspicions have been aired.
The precautionary principle doesn’t seem to figure prominently in the convenience food industry’s calculations, and such is the lobbying power of this influential sector, it does not loom large in the deliberations of our would-be regulators either. If it did, then steering clear of manufactured products that are very likely to prejudice your health would be a lot easier. All through this book, you will read examples of potentially harmful ingredients and processes being used in food and drink manufacturing, yet statutory bodies fail to restrict them because they do not yet have full, incontestable certainty of damage.
I would like to be able to report that the powers-that-be are working away in the best interests of the population to curb the processed food industry’s worst excesses. I would be delighted if the concerns I raise in this book could be swept away by strategic government action: better labelling, taxes on miscreant foods, and tighter industry surveillance. But I believe that hell will freeze over before the state takes radical action to protect us from the damage caused by processed food. Why? This industry is just so damn profitable.
The bottom line here is that there are already reasonable grounds to infer that a diet heavy in processed food is bad for us. We can wait for that contention to be ‘proven’, and the activities of the companies that sell unhealthy food to be restricted, or we can start operating our own personal precautionary principle by eating less of it, and cooking more of our own food from scratch.
This is not to say that there is no such thing as a healthy, wholesome manufactured food. I happily use many processed ingredients. Realistically, I am not likely to keep a house cow for milk, or make my own butter and cheese. Nor do I intend to grow my own grain and mill it into flour; although I know some inspiring people who do, and very much admire their commitment. I am a purchaser of bread, not a baker. I might, in a flush of enthusiasm for a new recipe, make some egg pasta from scratch, but usually, I’ll buy it in a packet. I don’t lie awake at night worrying about what effect canning might have on my anchovies or pilchards. I often grind my spices for a special dish because they are fresher and more aromatic that way, but pre-ground spices also sit usefully in my larder alongside other processed foods such as tomato paste, soy sauce, sesame oil, rosewater, olives, gherkins, oatcakes, mustard. When my mother no longer has any of her homemade marmalade or jam to give me, I’ll gladly buy some. My salads contain seeds that have been sprouted by someone other than me. Although I am intellectually enthused by the fashion for fermentation, I remain a more likely candidate for buying sauerkraut than making it. While I fully appreciate that it is possible to cure your own bacon, I’m just too lazy to try it.
In short, I have absolutely no intention of becoming a food neurotic, or living in splendid isolation as a Trappist monk. Like most of us, I am not always in control of what I eat, so I have to settle for the best option in the circumstances. Sometimes, I might be organised enough to bring my own food on a long journey, knowing that in quality terms, it will be streets ahead of anything I can buy, not to mention cheaper. But other times I still have to pick up lunch from a takeaway, trust my local delicatessen to make a reasonable quiche or sandwich, or politely eat a meal that I would never choose. I am also a restaurant critic, reviewing everything from chains to fine dining establishments on a weekly basis. Doing this job would be impossible if I was a purist, someone who took the attitude that my body is a temple that can never be sullied by processed food in any shape or form. I do not beat myself up if I can’t meet my highest aspirations for eating good food on a daily basis. I am a pragmatist. Food is my love, not my enemy. I will not allow my professional knowledge of how it is produced to spoil my appetite for it.