Swallow This

Serving Up the Food Industry's Darkest Secrets

Joanna Blythman

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780008157852
• eBook ISBN: 9780007548347
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nutrition, Dietics & Bariatrics

From the author of What to Eat and Shopped, a revelatory investigation into what really goes into the food we eat.

PART ONE

How the processed food system works

1

Why it all tastes the same

I am not a fan of convenience food, a sentiment rooted in a formative early experience. As a small child in the 1960s, I was captivated by the TV advert for one of the first generation of ready meals: the Vesta chicken curry. I seem to remember that it had beautiful sari-clad dancing girls, and all the thousand-and-one-nights exoticism so sumptuously on show in Alexander Korda’s spectacular film, The Thief of Bagdad. Revisiting the Vesta advert now, with a more cynical adult eye, it would doubtless look laughably lame, but at the time, it had me spellbound.

In my home we ate almost no convenience food. Either my mother or grandmother cooked, more or less from scratch; this was the way most people ate until the 1970s. So I waged a long, attritional campaign to buy Vesta chicken curry, exercising what food advertisers now call ‘pester power’. Neither the adults in the household, nor my older, wiser sister, shared my enthusiasm. I pleaded persistently with my mother who repeatedly blocked my requests. ‘If you got it, you wouldn’t like it really’ she tried to convince me, to no avail. Then one night – bingo! – my parents were going out, and by way of compensation and a Saturday night treat, I was allowed to choose my own meal. My mother was worn down, and caved in. At last, I would get to taste the much longed-for Vesta curry! What’s more, I’d even get to eat it on my lap while watching telly! In a household where we all sat down together for breakfast and evening meal, with the TV switched off, this departure from custom felt thrillingly subversive.

I’ll never forget the crushing disillusionment I felt at the gulf between the TV advert, the imagery on the packaging, and the reality. The box showed an almond-eyed, bejewelled beauty bearing a generous plateful of something that looked enticingly glossy and brown, set on a bed of pearly white rice. But what I had on my lap was about half as much in quantity as I had expected, and the curry bit looked pretty much like dog food, or worse, something you’d been taught to step around if you saw it lying on the pavement.

I had to tough it out though. Maybe it would taste better than it looked; I didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to say ‘We told you so’. But after a couple of mouthfuls, I was defeated, and had to admit that I just couldn’t eat it. Fortunately, my grandmother was hovering around, with the comforting Plan B of cheese on toast already in mind.

I should point out that I was, perhaps, a rather unusual six-year-old: I had eaten curry and enjoyed spicy food. A family friend had once been in Pakistan and he had learned to make ‘Indian’ food that actually tasted like something you’d eat on the subcontinent, or so he said. In retrospect, since this was decades before the painstaking Madhur Jaffrey and Rick Stein age of grinding your own spices, I imagine he used the then ubiquitous ready-made Vencat curry powder, but what he cooked for us did, nevertheless, give us a hint of what home-cooked Indian food might taste like, enough for me to see instantly that Vesta curry, with its brown Windsor soup-like gloop, was something else entirely.

To backtrack here, Vesta, the pioneering ready meal brand, was already pushing a sales pitch that was to become all too familiar to British consumers. Its ‘lavish’ chicken curry came ‘complete with an authentic curry sauce’. It was ‘ready prepared by Vesta for you to cook’ by ‘expert chefs who have done the hard work for you’. OK, it was a slowcoach of a product by today’s ping-of-a-microwave standards, taking 20 minutes to reheat, but that seductive labour-saving promise, combined with prominent claims of authenticity and the skill of a professional chef, is still the central plank in processed food marketing today. The ready meals entrepreneur, Sir Gulam Noon, summed up the industry’s vision of itself when he told the Financial Times that he ‘changed the palate of the nation, and broke the housewife’s shackles from the kitchen’.

These days, convenience foods have certainly moved on from the Vesta days, both in terms of their technical sophistication and the claims advanced for their ‘realness’. In the ready meal category, lasagne and chicken tikka are now the two best sellers. But I have yet to encounter a ready meal that tastes a lot, or even a little, like homemade food. They have improved from the Vesta days, but freed from their packaging and reheated, they generally remind me of the dispiriting hot meals dished up by budget airlines. That sticky brownness, that larger-than-life tinned tomato soup aroma, those uniform textures and consistencies, those starch-stiff ecru sauces, the predictable high tone twinning of sweet with salty, and the consequent thirst that surely follows; for me, ready meals are a sorry apology for real food.

I am forced to revisit this prejudice at regular intervals, however, when newspapers ask me to investigate a particular convenience food category – value, low-calorie, children’s, free-from, for instance – and the claims made on their packaging. And trust me, there are legions of products to investigate. Looking at the chilled category alone, by 2013, UK-based food companies were manufacturing over 12,000 different chilled food recipes. This is a big business – over £10 billion a year – which represents some 13% of the UK’s total retail food market. Within this grand total, ready meals are by far the largest sales category. The UK ate its way through 3 billion of them in 2012.

The only way to investigate ready meals properly is to buy a batch of comparable products from a variety of different retailers, and take them home to study in depth; it’s not something that you can do easily in the supermarket aisle. The ingredients listing is obviously the first port of call, and these days, because processed foods such as ready meals are often complex, multi-ingredient products, these lists can run to several paragraphs of tiny print that’s more or less impossible to read without some sort of magnification; unless, that is, you happen to have 20/20 vision.

Editors often want a description of how each product looks and tastes, so I remove them from their packaging and reheat them in the oven or pot. Now, perhaps if you eat them regularly, the sight and smell of warm, bubbling convenience meals will set your gastric juices flowing, but for people like me who aren’t, they are strikingly different from the home-prepared equivalent. For starters, they often have a quite powerful odour, one that tends to hang around in the bin, sink and dishwasher long after the contents are gone.

Of course all food, including home-prepared food, makes itself known to the nasal passages to a greater or lesser extent, but usually in a pleasant, appealing way. Yet when you compare a selection of processed foods, you start noticing that they have particularly distinctive smells, or rather, a curiously similar portfolio of smells.

Now, according to Greencore, one of the largest chilled food manufacturers, the UK chilled food industry is ‘the most advanced in the world because of its high standards, rigorous safety and management systems and the sheer quantity of exciting new recipes which it develops constantly’. That would make you think that there is a rich diversity amongst all the convenience foods on our shelves. But when I opened them in my kitchen, I found that I could easily classify my ready meals into odiferous families, a bit like houses of cards: aces, spades and so on. First there’s the ‘red’ family, that’s the hot tomato/pizza/lasagne/tomato and basil soup/‘med’ veg bunch. Next up, there’s the ‘brown’ family, think of cottage pie/steak and kidney/casserole/stew/Peking duck, chow mein noodles and everything sold with a barbecue label. In the ‘beige’ family, variously labelled breadcrumbed/battered products share a strong resemblance, a particularly haunting, almost acrid oily aroma that soon impregnates the oven and lingers thereafter, irrespective of whether they are fish, meat or vegetable-based. The all-out attention-grabbers are the Indian-themed dishes, whose spices give them just enough personality to distinguish them from the others, although they otherwise share many similar characteristics.

When it comes to tasting ready meals, the flavour profiles are every bit as monotone as the smells. Tasted blind and mashed up to disguise any tell-tale texture, one might easily mix up a sausage casserole with barbecue spare ribs, or confuse Mexican chicken fajitas with sweet and sour chicken. Why is this?

It all began to fall into place when I was in the test kitchen of a ready meals factory, where food technologists check the taste and ‘visuals’ (appearance) of the day’s output to ensure that they conform to a tight specification. ‘The objective’, one executive explained. ‘is to see that the consumer gets the same taste experience every time’. Now this explained a lot. When you stop to think about it, home-cooked food varies all the time. For a kick-off, it reflects the cook’s mood. Anyone who cooks can testify to how an oft-made recipe can turn out differently, depending on your mental state; harassed and rushed perhaps, serene and calm maybe, or even distracted and not fully engaged. Patiently caramelised onions one day can be burnt threads the next. There’s a fine line between a custard sauce that obligingly coats the back of the spoon, and a bowlful of curdled egg.

The ingredients for home cooking also vary in subtle but palpable ways. One brand of tinned tomatoes doesn’t give quite the same result as another. Lemons yield variable amounts of juice. Some bunches of herbs can be more aromatic than others, some spices fresher. Seasons make their presence felt too. Fresh summer garlic is sweet and subtle; the same bulb, stale, overwintered and used in March, can have a blunderbuss effect on a dish. Stewing beef bought from the supermarket, and encased in plastic with gases to keep it looking ruby red, will cook differently from the same cut, simply wrapped in waxed and brown paper, purchased from an independent butcher.

You may be a huge fan of your mum’s homemade steak pie but have to admit that, this week, it didn’t taste quite as great as usual. Or the opposite might be the case. One night, for no apparent reason, a familiar stir-fry suddenly seems to have acquired a mystery X factor. Was it that the peppers were less watery? Was the oil hotter because of that phone call? Was it down to the noticeable freshness and lack of fibre in that particularly good-looking root ginger?

It’s the intrinsic variation that makes home-cooked food eternally interesting, but variation is the sworn enemy in industrial food processing. Indeed, all the systems put in place by manufacturers of ready meals and other convenience food lines are geared to eliminating it. The whole purpose of the endeavour is to iron out every possible high and low, and produce a totally standard product that always looks and tastes identical, 365 days of the year. As one government food safety manual puts it: ‘To achieve a consistent product with the same appearance, flavour, shelf life, etc., it is important that the ingredient quantities, quality and the processing steps are always the same’.

The lengthy process of achieving this begins with the food manufacturer’s shopping list. The aim here is to have maximum control over ingredients, to ensure that they are always identical. On an industrial scale, this means buying in ingredients to a very tight specification from specialised companies. Surprising though it might sound to the home cook for whom ingredient preparation is probably the largest component of the cooking effort, food manufacturers carry out little or no preparation of raw ingredients. Instead they buy them in substantially pre-prepared. So, contrary to the notion that ready meals and other convenience foods are brought to you by a company that does all the hard work, it would be more accurate to say that they come from a company that ‘cooks’ products made with a list (often long) of ingredients and sundry additives that have already undergone some form of preparation by several other companies. In other words, the company that appears to be saving you work (usually a supermarket), is devolving that work to another company (a food manufacturer), which in turn gets other companies (food processors) to do the prep for it. These processors, in turn, may be quite remote from the primary food producers: farmers and growers.

The convenience food chain that supplies the consumer is made up of many links, links that often cross continents. In food manufacturing logic, this elongated chain is not at all crazy, quite the opposite. After all, the basis of any automated industrial manufacturing, be it cars or chicken tikka, is breaking down all the necessary production stages into component parts that can be carried out by separate teams on the assembly line.

The Chilled Food Association presents its industry’s products as ‘local’ because ‘virtually all chilled prepared foods are made in the UK’, but the ingredients used to make the finished products are often anything but. It quotes one development chef as saying: ‘Food should be simple, well cooked and flavoursome, with minimal amount of handling. It is also essential to use the best available ingredients to hand and promote local produce wherever possible.’ A statement somewhat at odds with industry recruitment literature, which describes ‘sourcing fresh ingredients globally from carefully chosen suppliers’ as a key part of the job.

In fact, the food manufacturer’s shopping list is thoroughly international. When an ITV Tonight investigation, Food Facts and Fiction, commissioned a UK food technologist with extensive experience of food manufacturing to make a very traditional British-sounding lamb hotpot ready meal of the type commonly sold by supermarkets, he came up with a product made from 16 ingredients, sourced from ten different countries, including New Zealand lamb, Israeli carrots, Argentinian beef bones and Majorcan potatoes.

Irrespective of which country they are buying from, if food manufacturers can buy an ingredient in frozen form, they will. That may seem surprising, even counterintuitive, given that they often go on to sell them chilled as ‘fresh’, but freezing is seen by food processors, quite correctly, as the safest way of storing ingredients to protect them against any food poisoning risk. Frozen ingredients are also easy for industrial food manufacturers to handle. They don’t arrive at the delivery bay with a stopwatch ticking, needing to be cooked promptly. Instead they can be, and are, stored for months, even years, and brought out as and when they are needed. So most of the meat, fish and vegetables arrive at the factory gate in a frozen state, already months, possibly years, old.

By buying in frozen food, manufacturers liberate their purchasing from the vagaries of the seasons and price fluctuations, and benefit from buying ingredients in frozen bulk on a global market. So, unless the label specifies otherwise, it’s highly probable, for instance, that the chicken in your ready meal was purchased frozen from either Thailand or Brazil. Around 40 per cent of the chicken we eat in the UK is imported, almost all of it destined for food processing or catering. If required, large chicken exporters in these countries will also obligingly supply that frozen chicken pre-cooked, and/or ‘marinated’: injected with water, cornflour, salt, and even other flavourings. Few consumers notice the tell-tale label description (‘cooked marinated chicken breast’) not unreasonably assuming that when a product contains chicken, that means 100 per cent chicken, probably British, the sort you’d cook at home, with nothing else added.

It’s an eye-opener to see the ingredient storage zones of food factories. In a typical operation, almost all the meat, be it chicken, lamb, pork or beef, is bought in frozen. So before it can be used it has to be defrosted for five to six minutes. Don’t for a second imagine that in big food manufacturing plants there are lines of people patiently peeling mounds of carrots and potatoes. In your typical industrial-scale factory, 80–90 per cent of all fresh vegetables are purchased in frozen form.

As anyone who cooks from scratch knows, many savoury recipes begin with chopping onions and finely mincing garlic, but food manufacturers do away with all that fuss. Instead they typically use pre-peeled frozen onions. These are purchased, usually from Poland (which seems to have captured the EU market in onion peeling) and despatched to another factory to be defrosted, chopped into 10 millimetre dice, or sliced, frozen once more, then re-supplied ready for use, wrapped in a plastic sleeve inside cardboard boxes. You’ll never see a bulb or clove of garlic in a food manufacturing factory either, as it is commonly sourced (sometimes from Europe, usually from China) pre-chopped and frozen, or in a processed purée form.

Potatoes – now there’s another labour-intensive vegetable – similarly arrive at the factory frozen and pre-sliced to a specified thickness, or cut into neat 20 millimetre cubes. While chefs and home cooks routinely stump up for fresh leafy herbs, appreciating the fragrance and vitality they bring to a dish, food manufacturers like a shortcut. A stroll through the food manufacturer’s ‘fridge’ will show you boxes of frozen ones, pre-chopped by some other food processor in a distant factory. And guess what, they are nothing like the fresh equivalent. So why use them? ‘Frozen herbs have a better kick, or flavour profile’, one manufacturing executive told me, but no self-respecting chef or home cook would put up with the ready-to-use herbs (from Germany) that I saw. They looked grey-green and even the coriander had none of the fragrance that this herb so reliably brings to a dish; in fact, it smelt of nothing. But food manufacturers like prepped ingredients like these because, from their point of view, buying in prepared ingredients is actually ultra-responsible because they come from factories specially geared up to handle them, where the skills needed, and the risks posed, are quite different from those in their own process.

Food manufacturers apply the same logic to cooking fruits and vegetables. Why would they bother with time-consuming, laborious preparation, after all, when they can buy them in frozen and ready to use? They only need to place an order, and pallet-loads of pre-fried or grilled aubergines, peppers and courgettes, sliced to the ideal dimensions for your roasted Mediterranean vegetable pizza, will be delivered to the loading bay. Why would they muck around setting up a factory line for the scratch preparation of fresh aromatics for your Thai curry when they can source ginger already sliced into julienne strips, lime leaves already ‘milled’ into specks, and ‘nuggets’ of pulped chilli – all frozen? In food manufacturing terms, it is economic lunacy to pay someone in the UK to remove the zest from real fruits for a cheesecake, when you can buy in frozen lemon, orange and lime zest that has been mechanically removed, in a dedicated citrus processing plant, in another country. But this remorseless logic also helps explain why the resulting pizza, curry and cheesecake retain only a faint, blurry memory of the freshly prepared equivalent. These pre-processed labour-saving ingredients are simply not fresh, and storage has robbed them of their initial sparkle.

In the food manufacturer’s ingredient store, you get a further insight into why processed convenience foods don’t taste convincingly like their home-cooked equivalent. In the same way that you will never see a stray onion skin lying around a ready meals factory, you’re extremely unlikely to see an eggshell either. Eggs are supplied to food manufacturers in many forms, but almost never in their original packaging. Instead, they come in powders, with added sugar, for instance, or as albumen-only special ‘high gel’ products for whipping. Liquid eggs will be pasteurised, yolk only, whites only, frozen or chilled, or with ‘extended shelf life’ (one month), whatever is easiest. They may be liquid, concentrated, dried, crystallised, frozen, quick frozen or coagulated. Manufacturers can also buy in handy pre-cooked, ready-shelled eggs for manufacturing products like Scotch eggs and egg mayonnaise, or eggs pre-formed into 300-gram cylinders or tubes, so that each egg slice is identical and there are no rounded ends. These hardboiled, tubular eggs are snapped up by companies that make sandwiches. Manufacturers can also take their pick from bespoke egg mixes, ready to use in everything from quiches and croissants to glossy golden pastry glazes and voluminous meringues. And there is always the cheaper option of using ‘egg replacers’ made from fractionated whey proteins (from milk). No hurry to use them up either; they have a shelf-life of 18 months.

Some ingredients used by food manufacturers are recognisable to home cooks: products such as aseptic tomato paste, a cooked tomato liquid, aren’t so different from cartons of passata you might keep at home, for example. True, they come in shuddering foil packs with the dimensions of a clothes dryer in a launderette, yet the contents aren’t dissimilar. But alongside these scaled-up items is a collection of ingredients that you won’t find in any domestic larder. Instead, you’ll find products designed for particular factory purposes. If, for instance, you nee...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE: How the processed food system works
• 1: Why it all tastes the same
• 2: On the factory floor
• 3: Clean label
• 4: At the food makers’ market
• 5: Fresh in store
• PART TWO: The defining characteristics of processed food
• 6: Sweet
• 7: Oily
• 8: Flavoured
• 9: Coloured
• 10: Watery
• 11: Starchy
• 12: Tricky
• 13: Old
• 14: Packed
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• By the same author
• About the publisher