Sunday Times (London)
May 09, 2004
News Review, Sec. 4, p. 9

What's really in your food . . .

It may look tasty but today's packaged food is a chemical cocktail of
additives, fats and sugars, says Felicity Lawrence


I cruised down the ready-meal aisle of a supermarket the other day. A
vast array of dishes, placed next to the fruit and vegetable section,
offered liberal sprinklings of* "fresh" this or "hand-selected" that.
Gorgeous colour photography and key words hinted at the care that had
gone into their preparation. Top chefs from around the world appeared
to have laboured personally to provide me with a choice of exotic
meals. I came back with a lamb dish with what sounded like a delicious
gravy and stuffing.

I was not alone. Britain is the largest consumer in Europe of ready
meals, a reflection no doubt of our long working hours. About a third
of us now have supermarket meals more than once a week.

There have been frozen versions of instant dinners before, but the
genius of today's "chilled" ready meal is that it promises freshness
and pleasure, too. Is the promise fulfilled? What really lies within?
While my lamb reheated, I read the list of ingredients. They included
eight kinds of sugar and sweetening agent, seven fats in various
forms, four preservatives and three chemical flavourings. Salt came in
at an impressive 5.9g for the pack. The maximum recommended salt
intake for an adult per day is 6g. Then there was starch.

Aah, starch! Starches are thickening and bulking agents often used to
replace more expensive ingredients. Starch in its natural form has
technical limitations, so food technologists have devised ways to
treat or modify it with acids, enzymes or oxidising agents to improve
its resistance to heat, make it more soluble in cold water and better
able to produce gels, pastes and other textures required by the food
industry. As modified starch has been altered at the molecular level,
it is banned in organic food production. Yum, yum.

At least my lamb was fresh and of high quality. Or was it? Frozen food
manufacturers say fresh chilled meals cost 40% more than frozen meals
made with similar ingredients. Yet many of the ingredients of fresh
chilled meals have been previously frozen and fresh chilled meals
often contain more additives and preservatives than frozen, they say.

It is not only ready meals that mislead: last October, Shropshire
trading standards officers bought chicken sandwiches from all the big
high-street retailers. "These sandwiches are described as chicken.
Some boast they contain 100% chicken breast . . . In many, the small
print . . . tells another story," they later reported.

Many of the sandwiches contained chicken that had been adulterated
with starch, water and flavourings. The small print of one "roast
chicken and salad sandwich with tender roast chicken breasts" revealed
the presence of water, salt, dextrose, stabiliser, E450, E451, E452,
whey protein and modified maize starch.

Starch again. David Walker, chief trading standards officer at
Shropshire county council, explains: "Starch has no technological
function other than as a meat adulterant. It soaks up water. The
adulterated chicken industry has grown up in the past two years. Very
few people know. The Food Standards Agency didn't know about it. My
colleagues didn't know about it. The problem is that the technology is
moving so fast, we'll never keep up with it."

The low-fat yoghurt is another classic example of the use of modified
starch to add value. Often marketed as a healthy food, a typical
strawberry yoghurt contains not just yoghurt and strawberries but also
modified starch to thicken it and replace the texture of fruit;
gelatin, gums or pectin to make it gel; colouring and flavourings and
some form of fructose (corn sugar). It helps to know your labelling
law he a strawberry yoghurt must contain some strawberry. A
strawberry-flavoured yoghurt has had a briefer encounter with the
fruit, while a strawberry-flavour yoghurt has not even been within
sight of a strawberry.

Starch is not the only trick of the trade. Perhaps the most lucrative
product of the carbohydrate chemist's imagination is high-fructose
corn syrup, which can be up to eight times sweeter than sucrose from
cane sugar.


Another characteristic of processed foods is that they are high in
fats. Hydrogenated fat is exceptionally hard and plastic-like when
cooled which makes it particularly useful in food processing. Rapeseed
oil may be treated in the same way. But the very property that makes
the hydrogenated fats so useful to manufacturers also makes them
increase the risk of coronary heart disease. Avoiding them is hard
work. They are widely used in processed foods such as ready meals,
margarines, crisps, confectionery, biscuits and cakes.

So why all this effort to make use of corn, sugar, soya and other
oils, and why are manufacturers so keen to replace fresh fruits and
vegetables or meat with these ingredients? Simple: corn, sugar, soya,
palm and rapeseed happen to be among the most heavily subsidised crops
in the world. Fresh fruit and vegetables, on the other hand, are not
subsidised. The former, when processed, are blessed with a long shelf
life but are high in calories and low in nutrients; the latter are
high in vitamins and minerals but have a tiresome habit of going off.
Straightforward economics dictate what goes into the processed food we
eat today.

About $20 billion (£11.2 billion) is spent each year on chemical
additives to change the colour, texture, flavour and shelf life of our
food. More than $1 billion of that is spent on colourings.
Manufacturers wanting to create the impression of fruit, vegetables or
other expensive ingredients without the bother of paying for the real
thing have 4,500 flavouring compounds at their disposal.

Some additives are necessary to help the ingredients to survive the
factory process. In the manufacture of cheap yoghurt, for example,
high-speed machinery pumps the yoghurt along miles of pipes. This
breaks its delicate structure, which traditionally comes from the
natural thickening associated with the incubation of bacteria. So gums
are added at the beginning of the process to make the product
"bullet-proof", as one manufacturer described it. More expensive
yoghurts are not pumped to such an extent and have fruit added by hand
to preserve the structure, but that adds to labour costs.

The food industry often defends the use of additives by saying that
they protect consumers from food poisoning, but additives used as
preservatives or to stop fat going rancid account for less than 1% by
weight of all the additives used. About 90% of additives in processed
food are cosmetic. The vast majority are used to make cheap fat,
constipating starch and subsidised sugars look and taste like natural
food.

Food manufacturers have always cut corners. In 1429 the Guild of
Pepperers battled to stop people mixing gravel and twigs with pepper.
But the first mass adulterations came with the industrial revolution.
Previously, most people would have grown their own food or bought from
their immediate neighbours but city dwellers grew dependent on much
longer chains and soon became ignorant of how their food was made.

The adulterations have changed with each generation but they have
followed a pattern: ignorance among consumers, an assumption among
producers that what they are doing is entirely acceptable, the lure of
large profits and weak law or weak enforcement.

Real food does cost more. Legal adulteration trades on this fact, but
when people understand what is happening they are concerned. In 1983
European legislation required manufacturers to list additives by E
numbers for the first time.

As consumers started to see how processed food was made, they got
increasingly suspicious about additives. Then, as if by a miracle, E
numbers started to disappear. The E numbers were still in the food, of
course, but manufacturers stopped mentioning them on labels.

My lamb casserole contains E262, E221, either E450 or 544 or 545, E300
and E331, but there's not an E number in sight on the packaging.
Listing the additives in full might seem helpful, but I end up knowing
less. Which polyphosphate is it — the one that may prevent the
absorption of nutrients such as iron, the one associated with bowel
disorders, or neither?

For a glimpse behind the facade of the food industry today there is no
better place to go than Paris, the culinary capital of the world.
Every other year, the food industry gathers for a fair to which
members of the public are not invited.

When I visited, endless display fridges showed frozen meat chopped and
flavoured for ready-meal manufacture, Chinese spice, tikka or
chargrilled-style; Mediterranean vegetables pre-marked with black
grill lines for that instant barbecue feel; ready-frozen sauce
pellets; puréed cubes of sugared, coloured and flavoured frozen kiwi
fruit and mango; "industrial cheese".

I wandered to a stand that resembled a Victorian perfume shop. Its
olde worlde wooden shelves were full of silver vials that looked like
exquisite aromatherapy bottles. I gave one a quick squirt and the air
was filled with the delicious smell of wild mushroom. These "natural
extracts" were being marketed to restaurants for chefs to spray on to
dishes as they left the kitchen.

I joined the lecture tour on additives. I learnt that consumers are
becoming "more sophisticated", they want cleaner labels, they want
things to "nourish their intellects" as well as their taste buds and
they are preoccupied with "nomadism". The tour took in several new
"neutraceutical" products. This is where the drugs industry meets the
food industry and where many believe the money of the future is, with
vitamins and minerals added to highly processed foods so they can be
sold as healthy.

The truth is, however, that industrialised diets encourage the
consumption of too much of the wrong sorts of energy-dense food,
saturated and processed fats, highly refined carbohydrates and sugars
that load us with calories without providing nutrients.

These energy-dense foods have replaced unrefined fresh fruit and
vegetables, fish, nuts and seeds and unrefined carbohydrates. It is
hard to get fat on unrefined foods, because their natural bulk fills
us up. When we eat highly processed energy-dense foods, our bodies may
fail to realise when we have had enough.

The most visible evidence of the impact of our diet on health is the
obesity pandemic. Obesity is the disease that has finally pushed the
panic button over diet and health; one-third of the risk factors for
heart disease, cancer and strokes are diet-related, and diet-related
diseases cost the NHS £6.2 billion a year. So next time you reach for
that ready meal, think about the price of convenience.


Extracted from Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence, published by
Penguin at £7.99. Copies can be ordered for £6.79 plus £99p p&p from
The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585 or at
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