Scientist Who Believed Injecting Beef Into Arm and Lettuce
O north a brilliant, cold 24-hour interval in late Nov 2013, I establish myself in the dark, eerie, indoor expanses of Frankfurt's Blade Runner-like Festhalle Messe. I was in that location clandestine, to attend an annual trade testify called Food Ingredients. This three-day exhibition hosts the world's most of import gathering of ingredients suppliers, distributors and buyers. In 2011, when information technology was held in Paris, more than 23,000 visitors attended from 154 countries, collectively representing a buying power of €4bn (£2.97bn). Think of it as the food manufacturers' equivalent of an arms off-white. Information technology is not open up to the public. Anyone who tries to annals has to show that they piece of work in food manufacturing; I used a false ID.
While exhibitors at virtually food exhibitions are often peachy for y'all to sense of taste their products, few standholders here had annihilation instantly edible to offer. Those that did weren't all that they seemed. Canapé-style cubes of white cheese dusted with herbs and spices sat nether a bistro-style blackboard that nonchalantly read "Feta, with Glucono-Delta-Lactone" (a "circadian ester of gluconic acrid" that prolongs shelf life).
A pastry chef in gleaming whites rounded off his alive sit-in past offer sample petits fours to the buyers who had gathered. His dainty heart- and diamond-shaped cakes were dead ringers for those neat layers of sponge, sleeky fruit jelly, foam and chocolate you see in the windows of upmarket patisseries, but were made entirely without eggs, butter or cream, thanks to the substitution of tater protein isolate. This revolutionary ingredient provides the "book, texture, stability and mouthfeel" we look for in cakes baked with traditional ingredients – and information technology just happens to exist cheaper.
This is the goal of the wares on prove, something the marketing messages make clear. The strapline for a product called Butter Buds®, described by its makers as "an enzyme-modified encapsulated butter flavour that has every bit much as 400 times the flavor intensity of butter", sums it up in 6 words: "When technology meets nature, you save."
Exhibitors' stands were arranged like art installations. Gleaming glass shelves were dorsum-lit to show off a rainbow of super-sized phials of liquids so vivid with colouring, they might exist neon. Plates of various powders, shaped into pyramids, were stacked on elegant Perspex stands bearing enigmatic labels – "texturised soy poly peptide: minced ham color," read one.
Manufacturers who need their love apple sauce to be thick enough non to leak out of its plastic carton – and just a little chip glossy, and so that it doesn't expect matt and old after several days in the refrigerator – were sold the advantages of Microlys®, a "cost-constructive" speciality starch that gives "shiny, smooth surface and high viscosity", or Pulpiz™, Tate & Lyle's love apple "pulp extender". Based on modified starch, it gives the aforementioned pulpy visual entreatment equally an all-tomato sauce, while using 25% less tomato plant paste.
The wide business portfolio of the companies exhibiting at Food Ingredients was disconcerting. Omya, based in Hamburg, described itself as "a leading global chemical distributor and producer of industrial minerals", supplying markets in nutrient, pet food, oleochemicals, cosmetics, detergents, cleaners, papers, adhesives, structure, plastics and industrial chemicals. At Frankfurt, Omya was selling granular onion powder, monosodium glutamate and phosphoric acid. For big companies such as this, food processing is just another revenue stream. They experience no cognitive dissonance in providing components non simply for your repast, merely also for your fly spray, scratch-resistant car coating, paint or gum. The conference was the domain of people whose natural environs is the laboratory and the factory, not the kitchen, the farm or the field; people who share the supposition that everything nature can practice, man can practise so much better, and more profitably.
Tired afterward hours of walking round the fair, and, uncharacteristically, not feeling hungry, I sought refuge at a stand displaying cut-up fruits and vegetables; it felt good to see something natural, something instantly recognisable as nutrient. But why did the fruit take dates, several weeks past, beside them? A salesman for Agricoat told me that they had been dipped in ane of its solutions, NatureSeal, which, because it contains citric acid along with other unnamed ingredients, adds 21 days to their shelf life. Treated in this way, carrots don't develop that telltale white that makes them look old, cutting apples don't turn brown, pears don't get translucent, melons don't ooze and kiwis don't collapse into a jellied mush; a dip in NatureSeal leaves salads "appearing fresh and natural".
For the salesman, this grooming was a technical triumph, a benefaction to caterers who would otherwise waste unsold food. At that place was a further benefit: NatureSeal is classed every bit a processing aid, not an ingredient, so there'south no need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their "fresh" fruit salad is weeks old.
Somehow, I couldn't share the salesman's enthusiasm. Had I eaten "fresh" fruit salads treated in this fashion? Mayhap I had bought a tub on a station platform or at a hotel buffet breakfast? It dawned on me that, while I never knowingly eat nutrient with ingredients I don't recognise, I had probably consumed many of the "wonder products" on prove here. Over recent years, they take been introduced slowly and artfully into foods that many of us eat every twenty-four hours – in canteens, cafeterias, pubs, hotels, restaurants and takeaways.
You might find it all besides like shooting fish in a barrel to resist the lure of a turkey drummer, a prepare meal, a "fruit" drink or a pappy loaf of standard white bread. You lot might check labels for E numbers and strange-sounding ingredients, boycotting the near obvious forms of candy food. And yet you lot will withal find it hard to avoid the half dozen,000 food additives – flavourings, glazing agents, improvers, bleaching agents and more – that are routinely employed behind the scenes of contemporary food manufacture. That upmarket cured ham and salami, that "artisan" sourdough loaf, that "traditional" actress-mature cheddar, those luxurious Belgian chocolates, those speciality coffees and miraculous probiotic drinks, those apparently inoffensive bottles of cooking oil: many have had a more intimate human relationship with food manufacturing than we capeesh.
When you try to dig deeper, you hitting a wall of secrecy. For at least the past decade, the big manufacturing companies take kept a low contour, hiding behind the creed of commercial confidentiality, claiming they can't reveal their recipes because of competition. Instead, they leave it to retailers to field whatsoever searching questions from journalists or consumers. In turn, retailers drown you in superfluous, mainly irrelevant textile. The most persistent inquirers may be treated to an off-the-peg client reply from corporate HQ, a bland, non-specific reassurance such as, "Every ingredient in this product conforms to quality assurance standards, European union regulations, additional protocols based on the tightest international requirements, and our own demanding specification standards."
I spent years knocking on closed doors, and became frustrated past how trivial I knew almost contemporary nutrient production. What happens on the farm and out in the fields is passably well-policed and transparent. Abattoirs undergo regular inspections, including from the occasional undercover reporter from a vigilante animal welfare group, armed with a video photographic camera. My growing preoccupation was instead simply how little we really know about the food that sits on our supermarket shelves, in boxes, cartons and bottles – nutrient that has had something washed to it to make information technology more convenient and gear up to eat.
Eventually, contacts inside the industry provided me with a embrace that allowed me to gain unprecedented access to manufacturing facilities, as well as to subscriber-simply areas of company sites, individual spaces where the chemical industry tells manufacturers how our food can exist engineered. Even with 25 years of nutrient chain investigations under my chugalug, it was an eye-opener.
Annihilation that comes in a box, tin, bag, carton or bottle has to carry a label listing its contents, and many of us accept become experts at reading these labels. But many of the additives and ingredients that once jumped out as faux and unfathomable take quietly disappeared. Does this mean that their contents take improved? In some cases, yep, only there is an alternative explanation. Over the by few years, the food manufacture has embarked on an operation it dubs "clean characterization", with the goal of removing the most glaring industrial ingredients and additives, replacing them with substitutes that sound altogether more benign. Some companies have reformulated their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients with substitutes that are less problematic. Others, unconvinced that they can pass the price on to retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of cheaper substances that allow them to present a scrubbed and rosy face up to the public.
Imagine you are standing in the supermarket. Mayhap you usually buy some cured meat for an antipasti. Picking up a salami, even the nearly guarded shopper might relax when they see rosemary extract on the ingredients list – but rosemary extracts are really "clean-label" substitutes for the erstwhile guard of techie-sounding antioxidants (E300-21), such every bit butylhydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylhydroxytoluene (BHT). Nutrient manufacturers employ them to tiresome downwards the rate at which foods go rancid, and then extending their shelf life.
Rosemary extracts don't always accept to carry an E number (E392), simply the more poetic addition of "excerpt of rosemary" makes it sound like a lovingly made ingredient – especially if that salami is likewise labelled as natural or organic. And the extract does have something to do with the herb, usually in its stale form. The herb'southward antioxidant chemicals are isolated in an extraction process that "deodorises" them, removing any rosemary taste and smell. Extraction is done by using either carbon dioxide or chemical solvents – hexane (derived from the partial distillation of petroleum), ethanol and acetone. Neutral-tasting rosemary extract is then sold to manufacturers, usually in the form of a brownish powder. Its connection with the freshly cutting, light-green and pungent herb we know and love is fairly remote.
Not sure what to have for dinner? How about a chicken noodle dish? If you noticed that information technology independent an amino acid such as L-cysteine E910, your enthusiasm might wane, especially if you happen to know that this additive tin be derived from beast and human hair. Only a range of new-moving ridge yeast extracts is increasingly replacing E910. Ane supplier markets its wares as "a variety of pre-composed, ready-to-use products that provide the same intensity equally our classical procedure flavours but are labelled as all-natural. Ingredients are available in chicken and beefiness flavour, with roasted or boiled varieties, as well as white meat and dark roast." All tin can be labelled as "yeast extract" – a boon for manufacturers, considering yeast extracts have a healthy epitome as a rich source of B vitamins. Less well known is the fact that yeast extract has a high concentration of the amino acid glutamate, from which monosodium glutamate – better known as MSG, one of the near shunned additives – is derived.
What else is in your handbasket? Suppose you are eyeing upward a pot of something temptingly called a "chocolate cream dessert". You read the ingredients: whole milk, sugar (well, there had to be some), cream, cocoa powder and dark chocolate. It all sounds quite upmarket, but so your urge to purchase falters equally you notice 3 feel-bad ingredients.
The first is carrageenan (E407), a setting agent derived from seaweed that has been linked with ulcers and gastrointestinal cancer. 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 total chemical name, acetylated distarch adipate. It started off as a unproblematic starch, just has been chemically altered to increase its water-holding capacity and tolerance for the extreme temperatures and physical pressures of industrial-scale processing. The third problematic ingredient is gelatine. This is anathema to observant Muslims, Jews and vegetarians, and fifty-fifty secular omnivores may be wondering what this by-production of hog skin is doing in their pudding.
Fortunately for the manufacturers of your chocolate cream dessert, there is a Program B. They can remove all iii offending items, and replace them with a more sophisticated type of "functional flour", hydrothermally extracted from cereals, that will do the same chore, only without the need for E numbers.
Some other possibility for cleaning up this dessert would be to use a "co-texturiser", something that would toll-effectively deliver the necessary thick and creamy indulgence gene. Texturisers, but like modified starches, are based on highly processed, altered starch designed to withstand high-pressure manufacturing – only because they are obligingly classified by food regulators as a "functional native starch", they tin be labelled but as "starch". Again, no Eastward numbers. So, out come two additives and ane ingredient that many people avert, to be replaced by a unmarried new-generation ingredient, one that is opaque in its conception (proprietary secrets and all that) but which won't trigger consumer alarm.
The history of food processing is littered with ingredients that were initially presented as safer and more desirable, notwithstanding subsequently outed every bit the reverse. Hydrogenated vegetable oils, or margarine, were actively promoted as healthier than the natural saturated fats in butter. High fructose corn syrup, once marketed as preferable to sugar, has now been identified as a primal commuter of the obesity epidemic in the US.
Is the clean-label entrada a centre-and-soul effort by manufacturers to respond to our desire for more than wholesome nutrient? Or just a cocky-interested substitution exercise? The lines are deliberately blurred: as one executive in a leading supply company put it, "Ingredients that give the impression that they originated in a grandmother'due south kitchen and have non been candy too harshly are of great entreatment to consumers." Meanwhile, there is no testify that manufacturers are using greater quantities of the real, natural ingredients consumers want. Clean labelling looks less like a thorough leap clean of factory food than a superficial tidy-up, with the most embarrassing mess stuffed in the closet behind a firmly shut door – where, hopefully, no one volition detect.
From water-injected poultry and powdered coagulated egg, to ultra-adhesive batters and pre-mixed marinades, the raw materials in industrial food manufacturing are rarely straightforward. In fact, they normally share quite complicated back stories of processing and intervention that their labels don't reveal.
In the same manner that you will never see a stray onion skin lying around a ready-meals factory, you're extremely unlikely to see an eggshell, either. Eggs are supplied to food manufacturers in powders, with added sugar, for instance, or equally albumen-simply special "loftier gel" products for whipping. Liquid eggs will exist pasteurised, yolk just, whites only, frozen or chilled, or with "extended shelf life" (1 month) – whichever is easiest. They may be liquid, concentrated, dried, crystallised, frozen, quick frozen or coagulated. Manufacturers can too buy in handy pre-cooked, set up-shelled eggs for manufacturing products such every bit Scotch eggs and egg mayonnaise, or eggs pre-formed into 300g cylinders or tubes, so that each egg slice is identical and there are no rounded ends.
These hard-boiled, tubular eggs are snapped up past sandwich-making companies. Manufacturers can besides accept their pick from bespoke egg mixes, which are ready to apply in everything from quiches and croissants to sleeky golden pastry glazes and voluminous meringues. And there is always the cheaper option of using "egg replacers" made from fractionated whey proteins (from milk). No hurry to use them upwardly: they have a shelf life of 18 months.
Food engineers can now create a "natural" mature cheese flavouring past blending young, immature cheese with enzymes (lipases or proteases) that intensify the cheese flavour until it reaches "maturity" – inside 24 to 72 hours. This mature cheese flavouring is and then rut-treated to halt enzymatic activeness. Hey, presto: mature-tasting cheese in days rather than months. (Traditional cheddar is non considered truly mature until information technology has spent between nine and 24 months in the maturing room.)
A mill pantry looks naught like yours. When the home cook decides to make a Bakewell tart, she or he puts together a lineup of familiar ingredients: raspberry jam, flour, butter, whole eggs, almonds, butter and sugar. The factory food technologist, on the other hand, approaches the tart from a totally unlike angle: what culling ingredients can we use to create a Bakewell tart-style product, while replacing or reducing expensive ingredients – those costly basics, butter and berries? How tin we cut the amount of butter, notwithstanding boost that buttery flavour, while disguising the addition of cheaper fats? What sweeteners can nosotros add to lower the tart's breathy carbohydrate content and justify a "reduced calorie" label? How many times tin can we reuse 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 go on 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? And so on.
We all eat prepared foods fabricated using country-of-the-art technology, mostly unwittingly, either because the ingredients don't have to exist listed on the characterization, or because weasel words such as "flour" and "protein", brindled with liberal use of the describing word "natural", disguise their production method. And we don't know what this novel diet might be doing to u.s..
A disturbing 60% of the Uk population is overweight; a quarter of us are obese. Are we leaping to an unjustified determination when nosotros lay a significant part of the blame for obesity, chronic disease and the dramatic rising in reported food allergies at the door of processed nutrient? There are several grounds for examining this connection.
Nutrient manufacturers combine ingredients that do not occur in natural food, notably the trilogy of sugar, processed fatty and salt, in their most quickly digested, highly refined, food-depleted forms. The official line – that the chemicals involved pose no risk to human wellness when ingested in small quantities – is scarcely reassuring. Rubber limits for consumption of these agents are based on statistical assumptions, often provided by companies who make the additives.
Manufactured foods often incorporate chemicals with known toxic properties – although, again, we are reassured that, at low levels, this is not a cause for concern. This comforting conclusion is the foundation of modern toxicology, and is drawn from the 16th-century Swiss physician, Paracelsus, whose theory "the dose makes the toxicant" (ie, a minor amount of a poison does you no damage) is nonetheless the dogma of contemporary chemical testing. Simply when Paracelsus sat down to eat, his nutrition wasn't composed of takeaways and supermarket reheats; he didn't quench his thirst with canned soft drinks. Nor was he exposed to synthetic chemicals as we are now, in traffic fumes, in pesticides, in furnishings and much more. Real world levels of exposure to toxic chemicals are not what they were during the Renaissance. The processed nutrient manufacture has an ignoble history of actively defending its utilize of controversial ingredients long after well-documented, after validated, suspicions have been aired.
The precautionary principle doesn't seem to effigy prominently in the industry's calculations, nor – such is their lobbying ability – does it loom large in the deliberations of food regulators. If it did, then steering articulate of manufactured products would be a lot easier.
The footstep of food engineering innovation means that more than circuitous creations with ever more opaque modes of production are streaming on to the market every day. Simply terminal month, a dossier for a new line of dairy proteins dropped into my mailbox. Alongside a photo of a rustic-looking, golden pan loaf, the caption read: "Many bakers are now turning to permeates, a rather new ingredient in the nutrient ingredients market. Permeate is a co-product of the production of whey protein concentrate (WPC), whey protein isolate (WPI), ultrafiltered milk, milk protein concentrate (MPC), or milk protein isolate (MPI)."
Permeate, apparently, "contributes to the browning of baked appurtenances" and produces bread that "retains its softness for a longer period of fourth dimension and extends shelf life". How clever. But I would adopt that my staff of life was browned solely from the awarding of estrus. I'k prepared to accept that it will stale over time, rather than swallow something that owes its existence to ingredients and technologies to which I am not privy, cannot interrogate and so can never truly understand. Am I almost to hand over all control of bread, or anything else I eat, to the chemical industry's food engineers? Not without a fight.
What your nutrient label really means
Added vitamins 1-dimensional manufacturing plant versions of natural vitamins constitute in whole foods: ascorbic acrid (human being-made vitamin C) is commonly synthesised from the fermentation of GM corn, while artificial vitamin Eastward is commonly derived from petrol.
Soluble fibre A healthier-sounding term for modified starch, which is widely used to reduce the quantity of more nutritious ingredients in processed foods, and keep downward manufacturers' costs.
'Natural' colourings The merely departure between these and artificial ones is that they kickoff with pigments that occur in nature. Otherwise, they are fabricated using the same highly chemical industrial processes, including extraction using harsh solvents.
Bogus 'diet" sweeteners Several large-scale studies have constitute a correlation between artificial sweetener consumption and weight proceeds. Accumulating evidence suggests that they may also increase our risk of Blazon 2 diabetes.
Enzymes Used to brand breadstuff stay soft longer; injected into depression-value livestock before slaughter, to tenderise their meat; and used in fruit juice processing to create a cloudier, more natural appearance.
'Packaged in a protective atmosphere' Food that has been "gassed" in modified air to extend its shelf life. It delays what food manufacturers call "warmed over flavour", an off-taste that occurs in factory food.
Beefiness/pork/poultry protein Collagen extracted from butchered carcasses, processed into a powder and added to depression-class meats. Information technology adds bounce, increases the protein content on the nutrition label and, combined with water, is a substitute for meat.
Done and ready-to-swallow salads "Cleaned" by sloshing around in tap water dosed with chlorine, oftentimes with powdered or liquid fruit acids to inhibit bacterial growth. The aforementioned tank of treated water is oftentimes used for 8 hours at a time.
'Pure' vegetable oil Industrially refined, bleached, deodorised oils. Food processors oftentimes add chemicals to extend their "fry life".
'Natural' flavourings Even the flavour industry concedes that "at that place isn't much difference in the chemical compositions of natural and artificial flavourings". They are made using the same physical, enzymatic, and microbiological processes.
This is an edited extract from Eat This: Serving Up The Food Manufacture'southward Darkest Secrets, past Joanna Blythman; published side by side week by 4th Estate, at £14.99. To buy a copy for £11.99, get to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.
Joanna Blythman volition exist doing a alive online Q&A on Th 26 February – go hither to join in.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/21/a-feast-of-engineering-whats-really-in-your-food
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