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

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СКАЧАТЬ by enzymatic fermentation, is the same naturally occurring chemical that makes lemons tart. To say one chemical is safer than another because of its origin simply does not make sense.

      Note the implication in that final phrase: anyone who is suspicious of processed food is an irrational, confused hysteric.

      How disappointing it must be for the companies that have invested so much time and effort in disseminating this message to see that it simply hasn’t been believed. Despite their concerted efforts to rubbish public concerns about the additives in processed food, they just won’t go away. Realists in the food industry now accept this is the case, as this industry spokesman explains:

      We know that consumers want a return to familiar ingredients and in recent years, terms such as ‘natural’, ‘authentic’, ‘preservative-free’ and ‘additive-free’ have proliferated on the packaging of food products in Europe. These clearly portray the consumer’s desire to return to simple, less-processed ingredients which are familiar to everyone, and the rejection of additives. For agri-food companies, claiming 100% natural products, and crusading against additives, leads to success in Europe.

      It’s the same story worldwide. When the US Whole Foods Market chain issued a roll call of ingredients that it would not permit in any of the products it sold, this ‘Unacceptable Ingredients for Food’ list sent shock waves through the global food industry. This list currently runs to over 70 additives and obscure industrial ingredients, from acesulfame K, ammonium chloride and azodicarbonamide, to tert-butylhydroquinone, tetrasodium EDTA and vanillin, and it is added to from time to time as controversial ingredients shoot up the public agenda. In the case of high fructose corn syrup, for instance, a sweetener that is increasingly in the frame as a key driver of the US obesity epidemic, Whole Foods Market gave its suppliers until the end of 2010 to reformulate and remove it from all products destined for its stores.

      Whole Foods Market, of course, is often stereotyped as catering for the worried wealthy, but every other food retailer now knows that perceived naturalness is a very effective shortcut to what’s known as ‘premiumisation’, that is, getting your customers to believe that your products are good quality. As one observer of food industry trends explains, ‘many [product] formulators do turn to the list of unacceptable ingredients published by Whole Foods’.

      Now that once stalwart additives and ingredients have their names up there in flashing red lights, food manufacturers have a major headache. They have come to rely on flavourings and obscure sweeteners to replace the natural tastes in food that industrial processing destroys. They have depended on fake colours to make over-processed, degraded beige-brown food look more appealing. They have needed preservatives and antioxidants to extend shelf life. Without these, and all the other weapons in its trusty armoury – emulsifiers, stabilisers, sequestrants, gelling agents, thickeners, anti-foaming agents, bulking agents, carriers and carrier solvents, emulsifying salts, firming agents, flavour enhancers, flour-treatment agents, foaming agents, glazing agents, humectants, propellants, raising agents, flavour carriers and binders – the modern processed food industry is drained of its life blood.

      So under pressure to clean up their act, many food manufacturers have latched on to the emerging concept of ‘clean label’. In the last decade, this is the big idea that has moved from the health-store margins of the food industry to grip the mainstream. The term has no legal definition, but in the industry, ‘clean label’ is widely taken to mean that the ancien régime of food additives, with all its negative connotations, has been replaced or removed, that the ingredient listing is simple, that is, made up of recognisable ingredients that do not sound chemical or artificial, and that the product has been processed ‘using traditional techniques that are understood by consumers and not perceived as being artificial’. As the director of one market research company put it, the word ‘natural’ ‘works as a heuristic to shoppers, a shortcut to a product being good for them, something they’d be happy to give their children’.

      Some companies have taken up the clean label concept to reformulate their products in a genuine, wholehearted way, replacing ingredients and additives that raise health or quality concerns with substitutes that are generally thought to be less problematic. Other companies, however, unconvinced that they can pass on the cost of radical reformulation to food retailers and consumers, have turned to a novel range of substances that allow them to present a much more scrubbed and rosy face to the public, without incurring excessive cost. In their hands, clean labelling has become an exercise that dispenses with the services of the food industry’s dirty dozens, and introduces us to an initially more wholesome and healthy-looking bunch of new friends.

      The challenge faced by companies under pressure to reformulate products has been to find alternative ingredients that can perform the same functions as the old ‘nasties’ – that is, they must cost less than the natural equivalent, have a good shelf life and be easy to process – but can be described in a much more appetising way. In this endeavour, food manufacturers look to a plethora of global ingredient supply companies that understand their technical needs and provide clean label solutions to the food manufacturer’s dirty little label problems. In the industry’s own terminology, these solutions aim to square the consumer’s yearning for naturalness with the manufacturer’s need for ‘functionality’. In practical terms, what this means is that even if you are a thoughtful eater, someone who diligently inspects product labels, food manufacturers are always one step ahead of you. In fact, if you are still fretting about E numbers, you are way behind the curve. That was food awareness reading book number one; now we are on to reading book number two.

      Supposing, for example, you were standing in the supermarket eyeing up a pot of something temptingly called a ‘chocolate cream dessert’. You read the ingredients: whole milk, sugar (well, there has to be some in there), cream, cocoa powder and dark chocolate (they all sound quite up-market), but then your urge to buy falters as you notice three feel-bad ingredients. The first of these is carrageenan (E407). You may or may not have read headlines reporting that this setting agent, derived from seaweed, has been linked with ulcers and gastrointestinal cancer, but even if you haven’t, there’s a good chance that the E number will put you off anyway. Carrageenan belongs to a group of gummy substances, including guar, agar, konjac, inulin, locust bean, acacia, xanthan, cellulose and pectin, known as hydrocolloids. 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 full chemical name, acetylated distarch adipate. It started off its life as a simple starch, of the kind you’d find naturally in potatoes or rice, but it has been chemically altered to increase its water-holding capacity and tolerance for the extreme temperatures and physical pressures of industrial-scale processing. Spot this, and chances are that the term ‘modified’ will put you off, and if it doesn’t, then the bothersome E number most likely will.

      The third problematical ingredient is gelatine. It’s anathema to observant Muslims, Jews and vegetarians, and even secular omnivores may be wondering what this by-product of porcine hides is doing in their pudding.

      Fortunately for the manufacturers of your chocolate cream dessert, there is a Plan B. They can remove all three offending items, and replace them with a more sophisticated type of ‘functional flour’ hydrothermally extracted from cereals, that will do the same job, but without the need for E numbers. ‘Because they are flours’ explains the sales pitch for one such product, ‘all our ingredients produce home-made and additive-free textures with a touch of authenticity to make products stand out from the crowd … Our functional flours have a reassuring declaration as ‘wheat’, ‘corn’ or ‘rice’ flour – simple ingredients familiar to everyone.’

      Another possibility for cleaning up this dessert would be to use a ‘co-texturiser’ that would cost-effectively deliver the necessary thick and creamy indulgence factor. As the supplier of one such product puts it: ‘They bring out the more subtle differences СКАЧАТЬ