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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ soy lecithin, or mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids (E471), might not do much to recommend a product to you. After all, they don’t figure in any home baker’s recipe. Thinking clean label, manufacturers can switch to rice extract made by modifying rice bran with protease enzymes; these perform the same task of binding oil and water in the dough. The word enzyme would not have to appear on the ingredients listing; a more label-friendly ‘rice extract’ would suffice. A further bonus, as the maker of one such rice product says, is that such ingredients ‘can improve a manufacturer’s bottom line by eliminating or reducing many common production problems’. Specifically, ‘the cost saving is immediate by allowing formulations to contain more water, reducing the use of costlier ingredients, improving output and reducing breakage’. However much consumers are preoccupied with trying to keep down their food bills, rest assured, food manufacturers are every bit as keenly focused on reducing theirs.

      Still not sure what you’re going to eat for dinner? Why not backtrack to the ready-meal aisle and pick up something instant and tasty – a chicken noodle dish, perhaps, maybe a pizza. If you noticed that it contained an amino acid, such as L-cysteine E910, your enthusiasm might wane, especially if you were a clued-up vegan who happens to know that this additive can be derived from animal and human hair. L-cysteine has been an extremely useful additive for food manufacturers. In your pizza, it acts as a dough ‘conditioner’ (strengthener). In your chicken noodles, it brings a meaty, savoury flavour to the table. But its presence on a label is something of an embarrassment to processing companies these days, so a range of new-wave yeast extracts is increasingly replacing it. One supplier of such extracts markets its products to food manufacturers as follows:

      This range offers you a variety of pre-composed, ready-to-use products that provide the same intensity as our classical process flavors … but … are labeled as all-natural. Ingredients are available in chicken and beef flavor, with roasted or boiled varieties, as well as white meat and dark roast.

      These hi-tech yeast extracts equip manufacturers with the range of meaty, caramelised, barbecued, brothy, roasted ‘middle block flavours’ they are accustomed to working with. There are quite a few to choose from, depending on the nature of the food in question, and the impact required. A manufacturer can add a little touch of an extract that brings a ‘brothy, white meaty, sweet umami enhancement’, or ramp up the flavour with another that promises ‘natural roast sulphury chicken aroma notes’. Both can be labelled as ‘yeast extract’ without any mention that they are being used as flavourings. That’s quite a boon to manufacturers, because yeast extracts have a healthy image, particularly amongst vegetarians, 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 most shunned additives – is derived. In other words, yeast extract is just another member of the meaty, muscular, flavour-enhancing glutamate clan. A case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, by any chance?

      As you wend your way up and down supermarket aisles these days, it is certainly becoming easier to let your guard drop. Food manufacturers now seem to understand our concerns and increasingly speak to us in a coaxing language we want to hear. They offer us products that appear to be reformed, reconstructed, improved versions of their predecessors. These come plastered with tick lists and upbeat front-of-pack claims, and when we turn them over, their ingredients listings seem relatively short and sweet. Descriptions such as ‘natural’ and ‘additive-free’ get us to suspend our disbelief and keep buying; they trigger a positive why-bother-cooking sentiment in us. As one executive in a leading ingredients supply company put it: ‘Ingredients that give the impression [my emphasis] that they originated in a grandmother’s kitchen and have not been processed too harshly are of great appeal to consumers.’

      Whether the clean label campaign is indeed a heart and soul effort by food manufacturers to respond to our desire for more wholesome, less mucked around with food, or just a self-interested substitution exercise, is a matter of opinion. Additives and ingredients presented as benign one day have a habit of looking less innocent the next as we learn more about the means by which they were created, and how they affect our health. In the meantime, it is worth noting that clean label is not causing assembly lines to grind to a halt, use-by dates to shorten, or production rates to dwindle. Neither is there any evidence that food manufacturers are using greater quantities of the real, natural ingredients that consumers want to eat. Thus far, clean label looks less like a thorough spring clean of factory food than a superficial tidy-up, with the most embarrassing mess stuffed in the cupboard behind a firmly shut door, where hopefully no-one will notice it.

4

       At the food makers’ market

      Where do the companies that manufacture our processed food do their shopping? The European marketplace for this business is an annual trade show called Food Ingredients. Under one roof, over three days, this exhibition hosts the world’s most important gathering of ingredient suppliers, distributors and buyers. Think of it as the food manufacturer’s equivalent of an arms fair.

      At Food Ingredients, the buyers, representatives of companies that make our ready meals and convenience foods, meet sellers with imposing job titles – Global Procurement Ingredients Director, European Lead Buyer and Innovation Partner, R&D Product Developer, Ingredient Specification Technologist, Product and Application Development Manager, Formulation Project Leader – who present them with the ‘personalised solutions they need to grow and nurture their business’.

      Food Ingredients represents the beating heart of the modern food industry, showcasing its very latest innovations and trends, and its dialogue is thoroughly international. In 2011, when it was held in Paris, over 23,000 visitors attended from 154 countries – industry movers and shakers who collectively represented an ingredient buying power of €4 billion.

      Consistent with the industry view that the general public is best given only the sketchiest notion of what goes on behind the scenes of food processing, Food Ingredients events aren’t open to the general public. Anyone who tries to register has to show that they work in food manufacturing but, using a fake ID, I managed to register for Food Ingredients 2013. It was housed in the vast, eerie expanses of Frankfurt’s Blade Runner-like Festhalle Messe, a fitting venue that mirrors the sheer scale of modern food manufacturing.

      For those who love to cook and eat, food trade exhibitions are sometimes alienating, disillusioning experiences, a through-the-keyhole insight into aspects of food production you’d rather not know about, but Food Ingredients had a surreal quality all of its own. I wasn’t greeted by the smell of food, and hardly anything on display much resembled it. While exhibitors at most food exhibitions are often keen for you to taste their products, at Food Ingredients, few of the stand-holders had anything instantly edible to offer. That’s possibly something to do with the fact that their potential customers, while prepared to buy the products on display for manufacturing, don’t much fancy eating them.

      And even the foods at those stands that did want visitors to taste something weren’t all that they seemed. Canapé-style cubes of white cheese dusted with herbs and spices sat under a bistro-style blackboard that nonchalantly read ‘Feta, with Glucono-Delta-Lactone’; the latter ingredient is, apparently, a ‘cyclic ester of gluconic acid’ that acts as an acidifier, thus prolonging shelf life. A pastry chef in gleaming whites was rounding off his live demonstration by offering sample petit fours to the buyers who had gathered. His dainty heart- and diamond-shaped cakes were dead ringers for those neat layers of sponge, glossy fruit jelly, foamy cream and chocolate you’d see in the window of a classy patisserie, but were made entirely without eggs, butter or cream, thanks to the crafty substitution of potato protein isolate. This revolutionary ingredient is ‘tailored to the required functionality: foaming, emulsifying, or gelling’ and provides ‘the volume, texture, stability and mouthfeel’ we look СКАЧАТЬ