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

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СКАЧАТЬ like modified starches, are based on highly processed, altered starch designed to withstand high-volume, high-temperature, high-pressure manufacturing, but because they are obligingly classified by food regulators as a ‘functional native starch’, they can be labelled simply as ‘starch’, with no troublesome E number at the end.

      So, out come two additives and one ingredient that many people avoid, to be replaced by a single new generation ingredient, one that is opaque in its formulation – proprietary secrets, and all that – but which won’t trigger consumer alarm.

      With the chocolate dessert in your trolley, you find yourself at the deli counter. Fancy a dip for dunking your nachos? Possibly not, if you noticed that they contained an old-school preservative with an E number after its incomprehensible name, something such as sodium benzoate, or sorbate, nitrites, nitrates and sulfites. Not only do these sound like science lab chemicals, you might also have heard that several of them have been linked to ADD, allergies and cancer. But food manufacturers can get round your resistance by using instead a label-friendly preservative, made by fermenting corn or cane sugar with specific cultures that form organic acids and fermentation products; these have a similar bacteria-inhibiting effect. The boon here for the manufacturer is that they can be labelled as ‘cultured cane/corn syrup’, or ‘cultured vinegar’, and that sounds positively classy.

      Maybe you usually buy some cold cooked meat, turkey perhaps, or ham? It’s always useful for sandwiches and easy meals. Food-wise shoppers tend to be doubly vigilant while shopping in this category. Hanky-panky in the meat department always has potential to trigger a yuck reaction, and the presence of phosphates on a label is widely interpreted as an ominous sign. It provides evidence of meat that has been swollen by injecting it, or ‘tumbling’ it in a drum, with bulking chemicals and water. So processed meat manufacturers are increasingly turning to clean label ‘phosphate replacers’, sticky, binding substances derived from tapioca and other starchy foods, that do the job of retaining added water, but allow a chemical-free label. Observant shoppers might notice the presence of tapioca starch on the ingredients list, and wonder vaguely how a tropical tuber got into their sliced ham, but it sounds a whole lot more cuddly than sodium/potassium/calcium/ammonium polyphosphate E452.

      Picking up some rustic-looking salami, even the most guarded shoppers might relax when they notice rosemary extract on the ingredients list. We’d love to believe that this cured meat has been lovingly aromatised with fragrant herbs. Actually, rosemary extracts are clean label substitutes for the old guard of techie-sounding antioxidants (E300-21), such as butylhydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylhydroxytoluene (BHT). Food manufacturers use them to slow down the rate at which foods go rancid, so extending their shelf life; basically, they act as preservatives.

      Rosemary extracts do have an E number (E392) but manufacturers prefer to label them more poetically as ‘extract of rosemary’, and lose the offending E, because that way they sound like lovingly made Slow Food ingredients, especially if they are also labelled as natural or organic. Never believe for a moment that this antioxidant in your salami is there to provide an aromatic herbiness: its role is to stop the meat discolouring in air so that it retains that desirable fresh appearance for weeks.

      Rosemary extracts do, at one stage of their production process, have something to do with the eponymous herb, albeit usually in its dried, rather than fresh, form. However, the herb’s antioxidant chemicals (phenolic diterpenes called carnosol and carnosic acid) are isolated in an extraction procedure that ‘deodorises’ them, that is to say, removes any rosemary taste and smell. Extraction is done either by the supercritical fluid-extraction method, which uses carbon dioxide, or using chemical solvents. The solvents in question are hexane (derived from the fractional distillation of petroleum), ethanol (a petrol replacer from the fermentation of sugar and starch), and acetone (the flammable pungent fluid that dissolves nail varnish). Neutral-tasting rosemary extract is then sold to manufacturers, usually in the form of a brownish powder. In short, the connection that rosemary extract has with the freshly cut, green and pungent herb we know and love is considerably more remote than we might like to think.

      As you make your way up and down the aisles, note how that word ‘extract’ increasingly features on ingredient listings; not just rosemary either, but carrot, paprika, beetroot and more. What, exactly, are they doing in your breakfast cereals, your lunchtime sandwich and your evening ready meal? Unlike rosemary, they are used as clean label colourings. Carrot extract, for instance, is popular in food manufacturing because it lends a golden hue to everything from ready-made custard and cakes to salad dressings and yogurts. Food manufacturers can buy it in various shades, such as ‘warm orange’ or ‘shining yellow’. The process of obtaining it starts with real carrots in some form, not necessarily fresh or whole. The natural orange colour, carotene, is extracted in a similar process to rosemary extract. If manufacturers want a dash of red colour to make their yogurt look fruitier and more berried, they can use extract of beetroot (betanin), or grapes (anthocyanins). For a brownish-red, safflower extract will do the job, or if you’re after more of a cool, cosmopolitan cappuccino, there’s malt extract.

      Extracts sound so much nicer than that abrasive word ‘colouring’, and they play well with the health-conscious shopper who has picked up a few key words, such as anthocyanins, from the health pages of magazines. They come over a bit like added-value, vitality-boosting superfood compounds, something you might buy as a food supplement from a health food store, and hold a particularly strong appeal for the mother who frets about what’s in her toddler’s snack pack. Sometimes carrot or paprika extract is labelled as ‘mixed carotenes’, and that term has a glowing halo of health. After all, it has something to do with carrots, hasn’t it? And we all know that vegetables are good for us. Maybe beetroot extract is actually a nifty idea from food manufacturers to help parents con their children into eating nutritious vegetables without them knowing it? Actually, that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. No extract has a nutritional profile that comes anywhere close to that of the source vegetable or fruit in its whole, raw state, because the extraction process ruins it. Furthermore, extracts are supplied to manufacturers in different forms – powder, liquid, oil, and emulsion – with other additives in the mix, such as maltodextrin and modified starch as carriers and emulsifiers, or the preservative potassium sorbate, or in a handy sugar syrup with propylene glycol, a solvent, better known for its anti-freeze effect. Nice idea though it is, extracts make absolutely no contribution to your five-a-day.

      If extracts won’t do the trick, another handy new form of colouring that doesn’t sound like colouring sneaks on to the label in the form of micronised powders. These are plant foods dried and pulverised into particles that are only a few microns in diameter. Broccoli powder provides green, cranberry powder provides red and, as with extracts, the mention of healthy fruit or vegetables will help make even a packet of sweets look as if it is positively brimming with goodness.

      As clean label extracts and powders colonise product labels, one additive with bad PR that is less and less to be seen is E150 caramel, formerly food manufacturers’ go-to prop for imbuing products with sweet flavour and brown colour. It is being replaced with clean label ‘burnt caramelised sugar’, ‘caramelised sugar syrup’, ‘burnt sugar syrup’ and ‘caramelised sugar’. Although these substances give a similar effect to unpopular old E150, they aren’t classed as food additives, but as ingredients, so no E number is required. Even when they are being used purely for food colouring purposes, they need only be declared as ‘plain caramel’, words that evoke the image of something you’d make at home for a toothsome crème caramel. As one supplier explains:

      Our caramelised sugar syrups offer a range of sweet to burnt notes, compatibility with caramel colors, high-alcohol solubility in spirits and liqueurs, processing stability in salt, flavor enhancer capabilities, natural products opportunities, clean-label benefits; may be labeled as ‘sugar’. Caramelised sugar syrups provide both flavor and color in one blend.

      Weighing up the products on sale in the bakery department – will it be this loaf or those rolls? – the mention of emulsifiers СКАЧАТЬ