Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman

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СКАЧАТЬ the dire consequences manufacturers face when their production goes wrong, recalls are surprisingly common in the UK. Barely a week goes by without one. Sometimes there are several recalls in one day. Take, for instance, 25 February 2014, when the Food Standards Agency (FSA) issued the following alert:

      Sainsbury’s has recalled its ‘by Sainsbury’s’ Frozen Sticky Toffee Sponge Pudding, because the product may contain small pieces of metal.

      This communication was swiftly followed by another:

      Marks & Spencer has withdrawn its Lightly Dusted Salt and Pepper British Chicken Fillets because a small number of packs contain egg, which is not mentioned on the label. This makes the product a possible health risk for anyone who is allergic or has an intolerance to egg.

      And yet another:

      Sainsbury’s has withdrawn all packs of Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Roasted Chestnut, Toasted Hazelnut & Thyme Stuffing because the product may contain traces of peanut due to cross contamination during manufacturing. This is not mentioned on the label making the product a possible health risk for anyone who is allergic to peanuts.

      Presence of allergens is by far the most common reason for product recalls, but why is this? Obsessed with being cost-effective, many food processors operate the food factory equivalent of hot-desking by redeploying the same plant equipment and assembly line, often in the course of a day, to make several different products. So a factory will be set up to handle a range of foods of one production type. For instance, a factory geared up for continuous production of smooth products with small particles can handle soups, sauces, desserts, baby food purées, fruit and tomato preparations. One with a continuous instant and dehydrated line is custom built to manufacture things like packet soups, gravy granules and stock powders.

      Whatever the factory specialism, every last bit of equipment should be thoroughly cleaned and sanitised between batches of different products so that each new batch starts from a clean slate, but the frequency and regularity of allergen recalls shows that this is not always the case. ‘Nut Trace Contamination’ (NTC) warnings on processed foods that read ‘may contain nuts/nut traces’ or ‘produced in a factory using nuts’, are ostensibly aimed at people who suffer from nut allergies. In extreme cases, they can develop a severe, life-threatening reaction, anaphylaxis. However, the ubiquity of NTC warnings on manufactured products hints at the underlying problem of controlling factory food. Such warnings are an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that because of the sheer complication and complexity of the factory equipment, and the speed of production, manufacturers do not have, and can never have, total control of what ends up in their food. In fact, preventing cross-contamination, be that from peanuts or any other ingredient, is quite beyond them.

      Unless you suffer from nut allergies – in which case it’s a matter of life and death, you may have only been mildly perplexed by the appearance of NTC warnings on products where nuts aren’t listed as an ingredient. Why would there be nuts in your pitta bread, chilli con carne seasoning mix, or your ready-to-heat Thai vegetable soup, after all? When the FSA researched consumers’ views of NTC warnings, people told them in no uncertain terms that they were unclear as to their meaning. ‘The equivocal nature of the phrases had been universally resented by respondents’, the FSA reported. Furthermore, they were ‘seen as an insurance policy for manufacturers’. That conclusion is shrewd. Food manufacturers do spend a lot of time watching their backs and limiting their liability precisely because they are in a high-risk business.

      Whether it’s a case of allergens, contamination with food poisoning bugs, or rotting food, any such ‘production faults’ (as they are known in the industry) will very likely hit several seemingly distinct and separate lines simultaneously. When one such factory supplying Tesco was informed that some rice in packs had become mouldy, for example, the FSA had to issue a product recall information notice on all batches of no less than eight ready meals: chicken jalfrezi, Szechuan chicken, chilli con carne, chicken tikka masala, beef in black bean sauce, sweet and sour chicken, chicken korma and balti vegetable curry. The sheer scale and productivity of the manufacturing enterprise also clocks up risk: a typical factory might be ‘cooking’ 2,000 portions of rice at a time in the same machine. So when a problem arises on the production line, it affects millions of portions of food in no time at all.

      Are these mammoth food factories really just scaled-up versions of a domestic kitchen, as manufacturers would lead us to believe? If consumers of their products had an accurate mental picture of how their products were made, they could arbitrate on this point by casting an informed vote. But in the modern convenience food system, production is strictly out of sight and out of mind. Food retailers prefer us to focus on more attractive things – their adverts, the luscious marketing images on the packaging, the special offers and promotions, anything, in fact, other than what actually happens down on the factory floor. And having gained access to this strange and unsettling world for myself, I’d say that was an extremely wise policy.

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       Clean label

      Food manufacturers have embarked on a major exercise designed to quell our fears about the composition of their products. They were forced into it. Food investigations provide regular editorial meat for the media. Millions of us read books and articles and watch exposés on how the food we eat is produced, setting up nagging worries.

      Sensitised by scare and scandal, more of us now approach processed food with a sceptical eye. We scan labels for E numbers, the European Union’s code for substances used as additives, because we see them as flashing red alerts for nutritionally compromised, low-grade industrial food. As one food industry commentator put it, ‘E numbers have a very high “label-polluting” effect’. We home in on ingredients and additives with long chemical names. What on earth is carboxymethylcellulose, or mono- and diacetyl tartaric esters of mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids, we wonder, and an increasing number of us are deeply suspicious of foods that contain them.

      A growing citizen army wants to eat real food, and seeks out what’s come to be known as the ‘kitchen-cupboard’ guarantee: if you wouldn’t use mystery ingredients X, Y and Z in your own cooking, why on earth would you eat them in ready-made food? As one food processing executive explains: ‘One of the problems we face is people’s confidence in chemicals. Chemicals is [sic] seen as a nasty word.’

      For decades, the chemical industry tried to put a lid on this grassroots revolt by arming food manufacturers and retailers with a pat little keep-calm-and-carry-on script. Here, in the words of the International Food Additives Council, a trade association representing the interests of food additive and ingredient producers, is how it goes:

      With well over 2,300 food additives currently approved for use, it would be staggering to list the components of each of these substances. However, every additive – like every food we consume – no matter what its source or intended purpose, is composed of chemicals. Everything, including the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the foods we eat, even our own bodies, is made up of chemicals.

      The sub-text here, just in case you had missed it, is that those of us who worry about additives and inscrutable industrial ingredients are scientific incompetents, who, if we really understood the science, wouldn’t be in the least bit alarmed. The argument is further elaborated in a dogged attempt to put an end to the persistent, seditious line of thought that processed food is qualitatively different from natural food:

      There is much discussion regarding ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ chemicals. Many of those synthesised in the laboratory are also found naturally occurring in foods. Chemicals are chemicals; the distinction between a ‘natural’ and ‘synthetic’ chemical is itself artificial. The molecular СКАЧАТЬ