Pandora's Lunchbox

How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal

Melanie Warner

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781451666755
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique publique en matière d'agriculture

In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma comes an "indispensable, " (New York Newsday ) fascinating, and cutting-edge look from the author of The Magic Feather Effect at the scary truth about what really goes into our food. If a piece of individually wrapped cheese can retain its shape, color, and texture for years, what does it say about the food we eat and feed to our children?Former New York Times business reporter and mother Melanie Warner decided to explore that question when she observed the phenomenon of the indestructible cheese. She began an investigative journey that took her to research labs, university food science departments, and factories around the country. What she discovered provides a rare, eye-opening—and sometimes disturbing—account of what we're really eating. Warner looks at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive, and most nutritionally inferior food in the world, and she uncovers startling evidence about the profound health implications of the packaged and fast foods that we eat on a daily basis.Combining meticulous research, vivid writing, and cultural analysis, Warner blows the lid off the largely undocumented—and lightly regulated—world of chemically treated and processed foods and lays bare the potential price we may pay for consuming even so-called healthy foods.

1

Weird Science

Eight percent of U.S. kids have food allergies. Luckily very little of what they eat is technically food.

—Stephen Colbert

On a swampy day in New Orleans, 15,000 people streamed into the Morial Convention Center, an immense structure on the banks of the Mississippi. Food scientists, chemists, research and development chiefs, marketing executives, salespeople, professors, and students, they wore badges attached to ribbons strung around their necks and hauled around thick packets of information in free shoulder bags festooned with company logos. Old acquaintances greeted one another with backslaps and squeals of delight. For three days in mid-June, the convention center, just upriver from the elegant plantation homes and leafy throughways of the Garden District, hummed with a low roar of chatter.

An annual event since 1940, the Institute of Food Technologists’ yearly meeting, known as IFT, is the country’s largest and most anticipated gathering in the processed food industry. There are few locations better suited to a celebration of food than New Orleans. The town’s luscious aromas are an indelible a part of its character, with New Orleans’s contributions to the national diet including crayfish bisque, jambalaya, po’ boys, spicy red beans and rice, oysters Rockefeller, shrimp remoulade, trout amandine, and shrimp cooked every which way. These carnal, spicy foods have evolved from a rich brew of diverse populations and prompted the novelist Tom Robbins to write, “The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off.”

There was lots to eat at IFT, but not the standard New Orleans fare. IFT isn’t the Fancy Food Show. You’ll find no morel mushrooms, Italian fruit vinegar, or Hawaiian honey. And it isn’t Aspen’s Food & Wine Classic with its melted-cheese master class. Dedicated to the latest advances in food science, it’s a conference where the idea of eating seemed to take on a curious notional quality, a place where food isn’t plant or animal but a matrix or application.

The conference opened with a video entitled “Day in the Life of a Food Scientist,” featuring both a NASA food scientist talking about how she confects space meals and scientists at Disney making new kids’ snacks with cartoon characters. Michael Specter, author of the book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, delivered the keynote address. He spoke about how science—food and otherwise—is often misunderstood by the public. Afterward, a panel discussion explored “Changing the Image of Food Science in the Marketplace.”

The conference’s main event was held in an immense exposition hall, where nine hundred companies that supply ingredients for processed food had set up booths to showcase their new products. The largest installations featured colorful banners suspended from the ceiling, plush carpets, comfy couches, counters with bar stools, and small kitchens. One company had driven a truck into the hall to serve as its cooking station. Another hung a giant saltshaker from the rafters at an angle, as if it were about to unleash a snowstorm on the crowd below. Along the perimeter, rows of more modest setups extended as far as the eye could see.

As I wandered the floor, I noted strange banners that advertised “cheese application needs” and “emulsified meat systems.” A company selling milk powders declared, “At Marron Foods, people eat, sleep, and drink agglomeration.” Another firm boasted about “meat enhancement.” At one booth, I asked a twenty-something sales rep for a dairy ingredient company whether it was difficult to explain to his friends what he does for a living. “I tell them that I’m building milk backwards,” he said, grinning.

It was, I thought, an apt description of the basic blueprint for processed food. The companies in the convention center disassemble food (usually corn, soybeans, wheat, or milk) into hundreds of different ingredients, which manufacturers such as Kraft, Pepsi, General Mills, ConAgra, Tyson, and Sysco then construct into the packaged foods we buy at grocery stores and fast-food restaurants. Some of the ingredients on display were ordinary and familiar—I saw a company selling vanilla extract and another displaying dried fruit. Many others were novel creations designed to perform highly specialized functions: monk fruit extract to replace sugar, specialized yeast extracts to lower salt, algae-based flour to reduce fat.

Many ingredients I’d never envisioned myself eating, but probably have—inner pea fiber, microparticulated whey protein concentrate, corn fiber designed to be dissolved into clear beverages. I saw a company selling a substance made from castor oil and added to chocolate to lower costs. A Chinese firm was offering promotional samples of synthetic fruit flavoring. And there was plenty of that old standby, xanthan gum, the slimy coating produced by fermentation of the bacteria Xanthomonas campestris with corn syrup.

Although IFT is a conference about processed food, no one who goes there refers to it that way. For those who work in the industry, the term is vague and prosaic, if not pejorative. The term doesn’t capture the complexity and breadth of their business. To articulate accurately the sophistication of manufactured food—whether a frozen dinner, package of lunch meat, cereal bar, or Egg McMuffin—a much more precise and technical language is preferred. This opaque vernacular was on display on the convention center’s upper level, where a three-day lineup of meetings and panels was under way. Some were accessible to nonscientists, like one entitled “Reducing Sodium in Foods: Implications for Flavor and Health.” Others required substantial translation. A dairy-food scientist from a company called TIC Gums gave a talk called “Texturing Alternatives for All-Natural Dairy Products Using Synergistic Hydrocolloids,” and a rep from a scientific standards organization held forth on “Developing a Compendial HPLC Procedure for Steviol Glycosides.”

Even with superhuman levels of energy, visiting even a fraction of the small city of booths and exhibits would require more than the three full days. At every turn, a smiling person offered a tray of mouthwatering samples or motioned toward a counter lined with treats. Having eaten my way around the floor, I remarked to one of the reps in the IFT pressroom that I was going to cut myself off. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked, a bit worried. I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Some of these things are really new and they don’t always agree with people. I had some problems last year.”

Cheaper Ingredients

I tasted a blueberry muffin baked with something called Flav-R-Bites that were moist and sweet and tasted a lot like blueberries. As I chewed, a sales rep from Cereal Ingredients split open a muffin to show me what his product looked like inside. “Like a lot of food, it’s about eye appeal. You want it to look just like blueberries.”

Actual berries are quite expensive. Flav-R-Bites consist of flour, sugar, starch, flavorings, and just six percent blueberry solids, but enough so that the word “blueberry” can appear on the label. Such substitutions help keep raw material costs low and ensure an endless and affordable national supply of blueberry muffins, scones, and bagels. The nuggets also have a much longer shelf life; with bona fide blueberries, you get maybe a few days of longevity. Cereal Ingredients had dozens of nuggets on display in every imaginable flavor and color. Lined up in glass jars, they shimmered.

Over at the other end of the expo hall, I wandered into National Starch’s installation, one of the show’s biggest and most prominent. Founded back in 1890 in Bridgewater, New Jersey, the company provides food starches to customers such as General Mills, Nestlé, Kellogg’s, and McDonald’s. National Starch’s products first ushered in the era of frozen meals in the fifties. Without modified starches, the sauces in TV dinners would have been a goopy, oily mess and the meat dry and rubbery. Today, the company’s starches, which are made from corn, tapioca, and potatoes, still add structure to sauces and moisture to meat. They also give yogurts and puddings the sort of thickness you can plant a spoon into, provide frozen food with “freeze-thaw stability,” and, perhaps most important, help lower production costs for food products of all stripes.

These altered starches do this very well, apparently. According to an ambitious campaign National Starch ran a number of years ago, its starches, which were branded with the trademarked name “Starchology,” can mimic a variety of more traditional food ingredients. “The tomato is feeling insecure,” read one trade magazine ad. “Starchology can squeeze 40% out of vegetable solids. It’s tough for the tomato but terrific for you.” Another ad targeted manufacturers laboring under the unnecessary burden of buying real butter: “Butter is feeling left out. Starchology can help you replace fat with savings.” As an added bonus, these food-simulating starches could be identified on package labels by the everyday, reassuring words “cornstarch” or “flour.” There was no need to indicate that these starches had been altered in labs, either by chemicals or through a heating and cooling process. The company explained that “Wholesome, consumer-friendly ingredients enhance your products and give them a ‘made-at-home’ feel while withstanding typical food processing conditions.”

You might think that having a product contain actual tomatoes or real blueberries would be a good thing. But when processed food is concerned, fruits and vegetables cause problems since they contain water, which can cause spoilage or ice crystals when products are frozen—not to mention that these whole-food ingredients are expensive for food manufacturers. All businesses must be mindful of how operating costs affect the bottom line, and food companies may be under a greater burden than most, since American grocery shoppers and fast-food eaters have become deeply attached to the idea of inexpensive food. The amount we pay for our food has declined dramatically over the last six decades, from 20.6 percent of disposable income in 1950 to now 9.8 percent. This is lower than at any other time in our history and less than any other country. Most food companies dread the idea of raising prices, since it’s certain to be followed by some degree of customer defection.

For IFT 2011, National Starch—which merged in 2012 with a starch and high-fructose corn syrup maker named Corn Products and renamed itself Ingredion—had found an ideal food with which to exhibit the cost-cutting benefits of its starch technology: Greek yogurt. Sales of this yogurt, which is thicker and higher in protein than standard varieties, had catapulted to a quarter of all yogurt sales in just four years, taking big manufacturers like Dannon and General Mills, which owns the Yoplait brand, by complete surprise. Everyone was looking to take advantage of this booming market, yet cost was an issue. To develop its characteristic thickness, Greek yogurt must be strained in $10-million machines—one of the reasons that containers of Greek yogurt can cost twice as much as regular yogurt.

To solve this problem, National Starch devised a prototype Greek yogurt that could be manufactured at a fraction of the cost. The cheaper solution, served in clear plastic cups and lined neatly along a counter in the convention hall, was “Greek-style” yogurt made with its Novation Indulge 3340 tapioca starch and milk protein concentrate supplied by another company. The yogurt was topped with berries, or “superfruits,” as the industry has taken to calling them, and it was thick and creamy, with a slightly pasty texture. According to my taste buds, it tasted exactly like Greek yogurt. Paul Petersen, National Starch’s tall, slim, New Zealand-born global marketing director for texture products, wandered over to ask if I had any questions.

“How’s your starch being used in the yogurt? As a thickener?” I asked.

“It’s a texturing system,” he said. “We don’t like to use the term ‘thickeners,’ since that implies tough and clumpy. It binds with moisture to give that creamy texture people eating Greek yogurt expect.”

“But would those people feel shortchanged if they knew they weren’t eating real Greek yogurt?” I asked.

Petersen looked at me as if I’d missed the point entirely. “There’s no standard or rule of identity for Greek yogurt, so there is no real thing,” he said.

He was right. The Food and Drug Administration maintains regulations for what can go into roughly two hundred eighty different foods—rules that don’t include newer products like Greek yogurt. There’s no standard for Greek yogurt any more than there are regulations for what constitutes a Greek salad. “And don’t forget,” Petersen said, “this yogurt is going to cost much less than the traditional Greek yogurts.”

In fact, it already did. “Greek yogurts” containing National Starch’s thickeners and added milk protein concentrate were on the market, and they cost less. Safeway’s store brand Lucerne had one, as did Yoplait. However, several months after IFT, a General Mills food scientist told me that this was one cost-cutting move that hadn’t quite turned out as hoped. Yoplait Greek yogurt wasn’t selling particularly well because customers perceived it to be less authentic than other brands. “The Greek people who work here think it’s terrible,” she added. The company was considering going back to the drawing board to do actual straining, she said. As of the fall of 2012, General Mills seemed to be still testing the benefits of this new authenticity. Some packages of Yoplait Greek yogurt were made with milk protein concentrate; others weren’t.

After finishing my “Greek yogurt,” I moved on to National Starch’s light cucumber ranch dip, made with their Precisa Cling 20 starch. Petersen explained what was happening here: “You want the dip to cling to the vegetables but not to have the consistency of snot.” I tried some. The dip formed a nice, tight ball around my baby carrot, nothing close to a drippy homemade veggie dip situation. I wiggled it a little and, as advertised, the dip clung.

White Powders

I suppose I never realized it would be someone’s job to negotiate the fine line between sturdy and snotty veggie dips. Or to measure moisture and fat “cook-out” in hamburgers, as a rep at International Fiber Corporation (IFC) put it. “The demo is amazing,” he told me as an enormous poster of a thick hamburger dangled over his head. The company’s oat fiber, he explained, helps prevent burgers from shrinking when they’re cooked, making them juicier and allowing less meat to be used for that quarter pounder. One of IFC’s ingredients—at the time isolated oat product, now cellulose (made from tree pulp)—is among the purported nonbeef substances in Taco Bell’s taco meat that prompted a much-publicized 2011 lawsuit. The suit, which accused Taco Bell of using less than the required level of meat in its tacos, was withdrawn just two months after it was filed. But not before Taco Bell’s CEO Greg Creed had a chance to go on Good Morning America to talk to George Stephanopoulos, who asked him, “What’s an isolated oat product?” Creed was forced to admit he had no idea.

The people who go to IFT every year don’t consider any of this as odd. Not even a little. It’s their job to sell isolated oat substances and cheaper yogurt ingredients. It’s how they pay their mortgages and clothe their families. And beyond that, a lot of people in the food industry quite like their jobs; formulating a new snack bar or frozen dessert can yield the same pleasures as solving a really challenging puzzle. When I asked one food scientist whether he thought the average person would find IFT perplexing, he replied, “Not everyone can eat fresh vegetables.” The world needs processed food, he argued—though he admitted he needed it less than most. He told me he likes to shop at farmer’s markets and plants a garden every spring.

Perhaps my most surreal moment at IFT came at a large, circular encampment erected by Tate & Lyle, a $4.3 billion British agribusiness that got its start selling sugar in the 1800s. The company now makes a range of ingredients, including starches and various sugar substitutes, such as Splenda. I walked onto a thick, gray carpet and bellied up to a makeshift bar to sample a small dish of vanilla parfait topped with a single raspberry. A sales rep wearing a seafoam-green shirt emblazoned with a Tate & Lyle logo explained that this parfait was already being sold at some supermarkets as a dip for fruit. She said it was made with two different types of Tate & Lyle’s corn-based starches and sweetened with its crystalline fructose, also made from corn. “The starches work as a kind of glue that binds everything together,” she explained.

Under a sign that read “Our ingredients, your success,” I tasted the contents of my parfait cup. It was smooth and sweet, but oddly bland and indistinct. I was at a loss to figure out what exactly I was eating. “What’s in it?” I asked. “You know, the primary ingredient.”

The rep looked at me with a puzzled, blank stare. She turned to her colleague, who also had no idea. After a few moments, she said, “It’s a cultured dairy product.”

“So it’s yogurt?”

“Um, it’s not yogurt.” She paused. “It’s a powdered product probably. You’d add water to it. But it’s definitely cultured dairy. That’s where you’re getting the tangy flavor.”

I wasn’t getting much of a tangy flavor, but that was beside the point. The parfait wasn’t food so much as the chosen delivery system for several edible powdered ingredients, which, I was coming to realize, were everywhere.

If you strip away the food freebies and colorful backdrops of plump fruits and juicy burgers, IFT stands as a grand festival of neutral-hued powders. Crystalline fructose and modified starches are white, as are Splenda and monk fruit extract. Yeast extracts, enzymes, preservatives such as BHT and citric acid, dough conditioners like ammonium sulfate and sodium stearoyl lactylate, and many flavorings are sold as beige powders. Soy protein is a pale yellow powder, and dairy proteins are closer to white. A lot of synthetic vitamins are white powders—and, of course, that yogurt-esque ingredient in my parfait. The food industry relies heavily on these dried, finely pulverized materials because they’re cheap and convenient to ship, and because they last much longer than anything with moisture in it.

You probably don’t think of your lunch as being constructed from powders, but consider the ingredients of a Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich. Of the 105 ingredients, 55 are dry, dusty substances that were added to the sandwich for a whole variety of reasons. The chicken contains thirteen: potassium chloride, maltodextrin, autolyzed yeast extract, gum Arabic, salt, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, fructose, dextrose, thiamine hydrochloride, soy protein concentrate, modified potato starch, sodium phosphates. The teriyaki glaze has twelve: sodium benzoate, modified food starch, salt, sugar, acetic acid, maltodextrin, corn starch, spice, wheat, natural flavoring, garlic powder, yeast extract. In the fat-free sweet onion sauce, you get another eight: sugar, corn starch, modif...