Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman
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Название: Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets
Автор: Joanna Blythman
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Кулинария
isbn: 9780007548347
isbn:
Walls were given over to geometric displays of powdery substances, from white, through beige and brown to orange in hue, each bearing an alphanumeric code, and glowing white, yet cryptic captions that read ‘pork skin products’, ‘beef products’, or similar. One porthole-sized convex glass round housed a liquid that captured the hue of harbour water on a dark night, another framed a solitary blueberry muffin. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t some art college end-of-term show though, because these intriguing objects were, according to the explanatory signage, ‘solutions for coating, glazing, polishing, releasing, emulsifying’. Still unsure what, exactly, I was looking at, the further information ‘flavour vehicles’, ‘MCT oils’ and ‘pan oil’ didn’t hugely enlighten me.
Seeing a plate of puce-striped, chocolate-coated granola bars centre stage in a glass case, my initial reaction was that some avant-garde artist was making an ironic comment on modern life, like Carl André’s controversial floor of bricks at the Tate Gallery. But then I read the notice: ‘cereal bar with compound coating: oil-dispersible technology of ‘plain’ caramel colour and beetroot red’, and realised that everyone else was taking them deadly seriously.
Perhaps the most beautifully curated artefacts on display were vases containing glowing orange liquids – some cloudy, some crystal clear – for colouring fruit juices. One looked particularly spectacular, like a lava lamp with ghostly threads of gossamer-like material suspended evenly in it. These were ‘orange cells’: they come in handy, apparently, for making those cartons of juice composed of pasteurised orange concentrate and water look as though they contain some freshly squeezed juice.
In the absence of any sight or smell to whet the appetite, a lay visitor to Food Ingredients, one who was not part of the food manufacturing fraternity, might feel the need to double check that they were indeed at a food exhibition. For Food Ingredients is so clearly the domain of a technocracy of engineers and scientists, people whose natural environment is the laboratory and the factory, not the kitchen, the farm or the field, people who share the assumption that everything nature can do, man can do so much better, and more profitably.
The broad business interest portfolio of the companies exhibiting at Food Ingredients was disconcerting. For instance, the Swiss company DKSH, whose sales pitch is ‘performance materials, concepts and ingredients for the confectionery and bakery industry’, described itself as ‘a leading speciality chemicals and ingredients supplier’. Its business interests span ‘speciality chemicals, food and beverage industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the personal care industry’.
Omya, which seemed proud to be based in Hamburg because it is ‘the largest chemical trading place in the world’, announced itself as ‘a leading global chemical distributor and producer of industrial minerals’. The company reeled off its list of markets as food, pet food, oleochemicals, cosmetics, personal care, detergents, cleaners, papers, adhesives, construction, plastics, and industrial chemicals. Omya was at Food Ingredients selling products as diverse as granular onion powder, monosodium glutamate and phosphoric acid.
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