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

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СКАЧАТЬ out which bits of the production process I wasn’t being shown.

      As far as general research went, using all the resources the internet has to offer, materially enlightening information was equally hard to come by. All the companies that supply ingredients to the food and drink manufacturing arena have a public or media website, accessible to anyone who bothers to look. These typically consist of a mixture of old press releases, business statistics – how many people we employ in how many countries, and so on – and Frequently Asked Questions. These public sites are conspicuously devoid of tangible facts. Their creators have clearly mastered the art of saying nothing much, at great length. All are designed to cast the company’s activities in a flattering light.

      Then there are separate sites, or subscriber-only areas of company sites, that share product knowledge and developments amongst industry insiders. These facilitate a deeper level of dialogue that is internal to the food manufacturing business; the trade talking to the trade. In particular, they allow the chemical industry to tell food manufacturers how our food can be shaped, engineered and redesigned. They offer practical case studies of how innovative modern ingredients, such as enzymes, nanoparticles, protein isolates, acidulants, permeates, cyclodextrins and sugar alcohols can revolutionise production, and offer technical ‘solutions’ to commonly encountered problems. Even then, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of what an ingredient, additive or process actually involves or does in a specific food or drink context, manufacturers are almost invariably urged to contact the company direct to discover what technical ‘applications’ the product in question might have for their business.

      Such sites are very definitely do-not-disturb zones for industry outsiders. In fact, you need to pass through various hurdles to be allowed into the club. For instance, when I tried to subscribe to Innovadex, formerly known as Chemidex, the biggest online ingredient search engine for food and drink manufacturers, I received the following reply:

      Thank you for completing your registration with Innovadex. Access is not immediate and is dependent upon approval. Notification of your access will be sent within one business day. Innovadex.com is an internet-based resource designed specifically for use by chemists and formulators. Membership is restricted to validated institutional users of product information who are involved in the purchase and use of raw materials and ingredients.

      Needless to say, my Innovadex subscription was not forthcoming, and it was the same story with the registered users-only sites of companies supplying our food manufacturers. Here you have to fill in a series of subscription application questions to establish your suitability. What is the name of your company? What is your company website? What sector are you in (meat, dairy, bakery, etc.)? Are you a manufacturer or retailer? What is your position and job title in the company (product developer, buyer, processor, etc.)? How many employees do you employ? What band does your annual turnover fall into? What school did you last attend? I’m joking about this last one, but unless you fit searching criteria, your subscription application goes no further.

      What about dropping in on some of the global summits where food manufacturers network with ‘visionary researchers’, ‘thought leaders’ and ‘horizon scanners’ from leading ingredient suppliers? The same restrictions apply. You must be an approved industry insider of the vetted sort, and even if you are, the fee for attendance is pitched at a level (several hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds) that only deep corporate pockets can contemplate. In food manufacturing, no one seems to blink at stumping up £1,999 for a conference pass, or paying £399 upwards for a workshop; and that’s before VAT.

      Just supposing you were enough of an anorak to want to read and digest meaty technical documents that would help cast light on what goes on behind the scenes of food manufacturing, you would have to pay handsomely for the privilege. For instance, a publication, such as ‘Food Flavours & Flavour Enhancers: Market, Technical & Regulatory Insights’, published by market researchers, Mintel, and Leatherhead Food Research, a leading food and drink industry research and development body, might fill us in on how these additives are used, and give us a steer on how much of them we all consume. But at £2,600 plus VAT, just like a Rolex, that’s a rather exclusive purchase. In many different ways, food manufacturers and the global ingredients companies that supply them, operate a very effective apartheid system that bars anyone who doesn’t belong. Glasnost is not a core operating principle of the factory food industry.

      Fortunately for consumers, the food and drink industry is not a monolith, and not all companies believe that the public is best left in the dark. A couple of them very kindly provided me with a ‘cover’ that allowed me to pass through the security vetting and gain unprecedented access to material that has not previously been in the public realm. They helped me get closer to the beating heart of modern factory food production. This book is all about what I found there, and even to me, as a seasoned food journalist, it was an eye-opener.

      In the first part, I have tried to set the scene of how the world of food and drink manufacturing operates, from the factory floor, to the supermarket sales floor, and at a cutting edge industry event. In the second part, I have laid out before you what, after all my research, I now consider to be the defining characteristics of this industry’s products: food and drink that is sweet, oily, old, flavoured, coloured, watery, starchy, tricky and packed. Where possible, I have allowed the industry to speak for itself. Quotes are revealing. When a company offers manufacturers ‘customised masking solutions for tastes you want to hide’, or promises shelf life extension products that give foods a ‘fresh-like’ quality for several weeks, this gives you a clue to some of this industry’s paramount concerns.

      In as much as we are encouraged to think about the nitty-gritty of manufacturing, that is, not at all, we are led to believe that what goes on in food factories is essentially the same as home cooking, only scaled-up. Any such perception is self-serving, coy and to my mind, misleading. What you might see, after dipping into this book, is how radically different food manufacturing is in its concepts, goals, behaviours and ethos from any form of domestic food preparation. Unlike home cooks, food manufacturers are driven by innovation and novelty. They work not from a framework of time-honoured principles, but with a blank sheet. Each new product is, in industry-speak, a ‘matrix’, a never-ending jigsaw puzzle of possible elements, either chiselled out from natural ingredients, or entirely man-made, that can be arranged and rearranged, right down to the molecular level if necessary, then stuck together in various ways, and in numerous forms, to meet certain overriding goals. For product developers and food technologists, the professionals who design and create a never-ending stream of products, whole, raw, unprocessed foods present a shopping trolley of components to play around with.

      So when the home cook decides to make a Bakewell tart, for instance, she or he looks out a recipe, puts together a line-up of well-established ingredients – raspberry jam, flour, butter, whole eggs, almonds, butter and sugar – and then bakes it in a tried-and-tested way. The factory food technologist, on the other hand, approaches this venerable confection from a totally different angle. What alternative ingredients can we use to create a Bakewell tart-style product, while replacing or reducing expensive ingredients – those costly nuts, butter and berries? How can we cut the amount of butter, yet boost that buttery flavour, while disguising the addition of cheaper fats with an inferior taste profile? What sweeteners can we add to lower the tart’s blatant sugar content and justify a ‘reduced calorie’ label? How many times can we re-use the pastry left over from each production run in subsequent ones? What antioxidants could we throw into the mix to prolong the tart’s shelf life? Which enzyme would keep the almond sponge layer moist for longer? Might we use a long-life raspberry purée and gel mixture instead of conventional jam? What about coating the almond sponge layer with an invisible edible film that would keep the almonds crunchy for weeks? Could we substitute some starch for a proportion of the flour to give a more voluminously risen result? Would powdered, rather than pasteurised liquid egg, stick less to the equipment on the production line? Could we use a modified protein to do away with the eggs altogether, or to mimic fat? And so on.

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