Don't Kill the Birthday Girl

by Sandra Beasley

  Colonel Sanders was frying chicken by his own hand, which took about thirty minutes per piece. But as the operation grew—he annexed a nearby motel and turned it into a sit-down restaurant—he looked to streamline his operation. By 1939, he was using a pressure fryer, and by 1940, the secret Original Recipe was born. In 1952, the Colonel had acquired a co-owner from South Salt Lake, Utah, and the first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet opened. Over the next decade, the franchise spread across the country.

  Colonel Sanders left the company after a buyout in 1964. His disavowal of the KFC gravy, made in some exit interviews, was a key sign that his hold on the franchise’s menu had weakened as its geographic reach had increased. Journalist George Ritzer described how Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s and Sanders’s friend, remembered the Colonel declaring, “I had the greatest gravy in the world, and those sons of bitches—they dragged it out and extended it and watered it down.…”

  Theoretically, his secret recipe endured. A single sheet of yellowing paper recording ingredients and amounts, scribbled in the Colonel’s own hand, was kept first in a filing cabinet with two combination locks, and later in a computerized vault. Company leaders claim that portions of the spice mix are assembled in several different locations around the country, to prevent the line workers from transcribing the complete process.

  Ironically, the success of the Original Recipe is what has contributed to its downfall. As KFC became popular enough to open in more than eighty-five countries, they began modifying their core cuisine to suit wider audiences. They offer a “grilled” chicken option, in which the Original Recipe is treated as a spice rub, and an “extra-crispy” variation that double-dips in flour. I’m especially intrigued by the testing of a Famous Bowl, a modified shepherd’s pie consisting of layers of mashed potatoes, gravy, corn, popcorn chicken, and cheese. The Famous Bowl would kill me at least four different ways. In India, the “hot and spicy” chicken flavor has proven more popular with the South Asian palate. In Taiwan, you can order a side of egg tarts or lotus root salad.

  Moans can be heard emanating from the grave of Sanders, who died in 1980.

  The integrity of the Colonel’s secret recipe is gone for good, as is the ritual of its preparation. Some say that the nuance of his frying technique, which included a controlled shift in temperature after the first minute, cannot be replicated in the age of automatic deep fryers. Surely some of the flavor was lost when a class action lawsuit filed by Ralph Nader’s Center for Science in the Public Interest (alleging that the use of partially hydrogenated cooking oils posed a flagrant and reckless threat to public health) forced KFC to switch to trans-fat-free soybean oil for use throughout the restaurant chain by April 2007.

  In 1983, William Poundstone published Big Secrets, in which he set out to expose America’s greatest “mysteries”—and assert, along the way, that many were nothing more than market-driven hoopla. He submitted an off-the-street sample of KFC for chemical analysis that revealed the batter’s ingredient list to be no more complicated than flour, salt, black pepper, and MSG. MSG, monosodium glutamate, is the Chinese-food additive that enhances flavor and, people joke, makes you hungry for more within the half hour. Whatever the Original Recipe was, it has been traded in (at least at the street level, by managers of individual franchises) for cheap ingredients and simpler proportions.

  Poundstone also publicized the secret ingredients of Coca-Cola Classic, which include vanilla extract, citrus oils, and lime juice. Part of me knows that if I had a lime allergy and could never figure out why Coca-Cola made my throat itch, I would be grateful to him. Yet when I picture Harland Sanders in his kitchen apron, adding a pinch of this, a pinch of that, I can’t help but mourn the death of the secret-recipe ritual. The problem is, I am the problem. Those with food allergies are the patron saints of the fight against secret ingredients, and Congress has acted in our name.

  • • •

  As food sellers increased their investment in prepackaged products during the twentienth century, we lost the ability to run down the street and double-check whether the baker had brushed his breads with egg that morning. Bread went from having four to fourteen ingredients, including any number of chemical derivatives designed to increase its shelf life. The markers of a modern kitchen included the pull-tab soda, the TV dinner, and other containers designed to rob foods of their organic shape and provenance.

  In Ralph Nader’s introduction to The Chemical Feast, a 1970 critique of the Food and Drug Administration authored by regulatory affairs attorney Jim Turner, Nader issued a clarion call for transparency in the labeling of commercial foods. “Food is the most intimate consumer product,” Nader observed. So why is it, he asked, that we know more about what goes into a can of dog food than about what goes into our own bellies?

  By the mid-1970s, the FDA provided suggested guidelines for labels describing products in terms of basic nutritional values: protein, fats, carbohydrates, and so on. Some companies chose to obey these guidelines in response to an increasing popular interest in good health. After all, this was the beginning of the era of Richard Simmons (real name: Milton Teagle Simmons), whose rise to fitness guru fame was preceded by stints as a New Orleans pralines vendor, a New York advertising executive, and a Beverly Hills maître d’. Take that unholy combination of vocational skills, add a costume of candy-striped dolphin shorts and Swarovski-crystal-dotted tank tops, and voilà! A nation was inspired to run like hell. And count calories as they ran.

  Labels that we take for granted today were not institutionalized until the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, the year I turned ten. What had been voluntary became mandatory: disclosure of nutritional values, including saturated and unsaturated fat, sugar, and sodium, on all manufactured foods and the top-twenty selling fruits, vegetables, fish, and shellfish at any given grocery store. Meat, poultry, and egg products were addressed in 1993 with legislation coauthored by the Department of Agriculture.

  Because much of the consumer activism was driven by concerns over scams related to the burgeoning diet-food market, the act focused on standardizing definitions for terms such as low, lean, lite, and reduced. Some notable exemptions to the labeling requirements were made for foods that weren’t seen as contributing to the rapidly expanding waistlines of the masses. These included some infant formulas, mom-and-pop products with less than $500,000 in retail sales each year, and “spices, flavorings, and colors.”

  This last exception did not raise much objection at the time. Making collective declarations of something like “Cajun spice” seemed like a pragmatic nod toward minor ingredients. A set of measuring spoons doesn’t include the measurements for a pinch, a dash, or a smidge. Similarly, an exception was made for incidental additives and processing aids. These loopholes would soon become troublesome.

  By 1996, the FDA issued an “Allergy Warning Letter” after receiving a number of reports “concerning consumers who experienced adverse reactions following exposure to allergenic substances in foods.” The culprits? Just to name a few: “natural flavorings” wherein the flavors included butter; a “processing aid” of margarine used to grease a baking sheet; tiny flakes of egg or shrimp in Japanese spice mixes.

  The letter, authored by Fred Shank, director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, declared that manufacturers had “incorrectly interpreted what constitutes an insignificant level of a substance.” Although it was true that unlisted incidental additives could include subingredients, any additives serving a functional purpose in the final product should be listed. So if the breading on a frozen fish filet uses egg as a binder, it is not sufficient to list “bread crumbs” on the ingredients; “egg whites” needs to appear as well. Shank urged manufacturers to declare within its ingredient list any color, flavor, or spice known to be a common allergen.

  In the case of Communion wafers, ritualized ingestion places religious leaders and those with allergies on opposite sides of the food fight. But in the fight for accurate food labeli
ng, those with allergies have recognized allies among those religions that require avoidance of foods such as pork (for kosher Jews or Muslims) and beef (for Hindus). Long before ingredient lists were brought up to today’s standard of specificity, my mother would remind me to look for the pareve symbol as shorthand for “dairy-free,” and to beware packaged boxes marked D.

  In a widely circulated 2003 Daf Hakashrus article by Rabbi Gavriel Price of the Orthodox Union Ingredients Approval Registry, Rabbi Price used the example of beta-carotene to demonstrate the complexities of hidden ingredients. Beta-carotene is a yellow or orange food agent often used to color margarine. Because margarine’s appearance is not reflected in a final product, such as cookies, beta-carotene was regarded as an incidental additive and did not have to be listed under existing guidelines. But the water-dispersible variation of beta-carotene uses gelatin that could be made from fish, pork, or beef. The possibility of contamination by pork or nonkosher slaughtered beef renders the food impermissible for those who keep kosher.

  (Beta-carotene is also a frequent additive to premixed juice drinks, which is why many companies invest in placing kosher pareve signs on their drink labels. For years, you’d find gelatin in Sunny Delight. They claim to have gotten rid of it when the brand relaunched as SunnyD, though they’ve passed on the opportunity to advertise “Now with fewer fish bones.”)

  Back in 2003, Rabbi Price was skeptical that the FDA would ever mandate acknowledgment of contaminating ingredients to a degree that could satisfy Jewish dietary law. In a typical processing plant, “airborne particles of whey powder, although in parts per million, can nevertheless be present in food.… Labeling laws do not require such declaration because the whey powder is present at ‘insignificant levels.’ ” He judged that “the dairy or non-kosher status of equipment, important in an evaluation of the kosher or pareve status of a food, is totally outside the FDA’s universe of concern.”

  “Totally outside the universe” proved to be a slight overstatement. In 2003, skyrocketing levels of celiac disease and peanut allergy were already shifting the mainstream perception of what constituted “insignificant levels” of exposure. Just over a year after the article in Daf Hakashrus, the U.S. government passed the Food Allergen Labeling and Consumer Protection Act of 2004. This act required that the secretary of Health and Human Services submit a congressional report analyzing “the ways in which foods, during manufacturing and processing, are unintentionally contaminated with major food allergens.” The secretary was also instructed to begin conducting inspections to ensure the reduction or elimination of cross contact between foods. It might not have been a banishing of whey from the factory, Rabbi Price, but it was a start.

  The act’s primary function is to formally recognize those eight major foods or food groups that account for more than 90 percent of food allergies in the United States: milk, egg, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy, and wheat. When it comes to the “big eight,” loopholes have been sewn tight. Their presence may not be generalized within colorings, spices, or flavors. If a derivative such as casein is used, the label must include the major allergen label, either in the form of casein (MILK) or by appending CONTAINS MILK to the end of the ingredient list. The specific member of an allergen group must be specified; e.g., “cashews,” rather than simply “nuts.” Soy lecithin, used to coat baking pans, is no longer a hidden “processing aid.” Provisions are made for research into national prevalence rates of food allergies and anaphylactic reactions, and to develop allergen-free guidelines for food preparation in restaurants, grocery store delicatessens, and school cafeterias.

  The wheels of bureaucracy—even after they begin turning—take a long time to move the cart forward. FALCPA, as the food-allergen labeling act is sometimes called, prescribes a somewhat labyrinthine system of ingredient parsing. A year earlier, Congress had also passed a stringent set of guidelines for labeling trans fats. Out of consideration for companies absorbing the cost of rejiggering recipes and reprinting labels on dozens of products, accommodating both sets of guidelines, the FDA did not demand compliance on either front until January 1, 2006.

  In February 2006, the media picked up on the fact that the McDonald’s corporation had added the phrase “contains wheat and milk ingredients” to the nutritional labeling of their French fries. The Associated Press contacted Cathy Kapica, McDonald’s then director of global nutrition (a rather idealistic job title coming from the folks behind McNuggets). Kapica confirmed that a flavoring agent in the cooking oil contained “wheat and dairy derivatives.” She was quick to clarify that the derivatives did not include proteins, and suggested that people with wheat or dairy allergies who had eaten fries without problem should continue eating them.

  “Technically there are no allergens in there,” she said. “What this is is an example of science evolving.”

  Uh-huh. This was not the first controversy over McDonald’s flagship product. In 1990, the company had announced a switch from cooking with beef tallow to pure vegetable oil. But a 2002 lawsuit brought on by vegetarian groups revealed most fries were still being cooked in “beef-flavored oil” (to the horror of Hindus everywhere), resulting in a $10 million settlement. Apparently, McDonald’s subsequent promise to really change the recipe had become mired in production purgatory. The reality was that they were scared to alter the taste of an iconic product; as Colonel Sanders could have attested, there would be no going back.

  Watching these news reports in 2006, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. I didn’t have many food rituals as a child. What I had were usually weird variations on what the “normal kids” did, merely offering the comfort of routine rather than signaling membership in their ranks. Who else lined up twelve hazelnuts in the pencil groove of her desk? Who else equated catching a cold with eating whole artichokes in home-brewed broth, instead of the comforting, canned conformity of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup?

  But I had one ritual that had made me feel like every other kid. During the first decade of my life, when I was undergoing weekly shots, only one reward brought any consolation: a trip to the McDonald’s near my allergist’s office. It was a particularly fancy one, with an indoor merry-go-round populated by Grimace, the Hamburglar, Birdie the Early Bird, and Ronald himself. I always knew what I would order: French fries in a cheery red cup.

  Every week, I endured injections to protect me from my dairy allergy. And apparently, every week my reward had been tainted with beef.

  Maybe the exposure was minimal. Just as KFC managers altered the “secret recipe” on-site, perhaps the manager of that McDonald’s used vegetable oil earlier than most. Still, we should have suspected something. There were times when the fries upset my stomach, my body refusing to digest the grease and stranding me in the bathroom for twenty minutes at a time. We’d blame it on contamination by a neighboring hamburger. We all ignored the warnings, even my watchful parents.

  What can I say? It was my ritual, and ritual is a powerful thing.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Great Peanut Scare

  Betrayed by McDonald’s, I had spent my teens and twenties searching for the next great fast-food fry. Wendy’s fries are too bland. Arby’s fries, though temptingly curly, are cooked in enough soybean oil to make my stomach churn. Then, thanks to my then boyfriend’s weekly pilgrimages for his bacon cheeseburger, I discovered Five Guys: hand-cut, skin-on potatoes doled out with an extra scoop that guarantees copious soggy, salty, bottom-of-the-bag fry perfection.

  On my first visit, I’d noticed a plaque on the front door warning guests that peanuts are served in bulk at every Five Guys—a barrel of nuts in their shells that sits by the register, available to customers to snack on while waiting for their order. I didn’t think twice about it. But on my next visit, someone had taped an ink-jet, large-font sign proclaiming DUE TO THE POSSIBILITY OF SEVERE ALLERGIC REACTION IN SOME NEIGHBORHOOD CHILDREN, PLEASE DO NOT TAKE PEANUTS OR PEANUT SHELLS OUTSIDE OF FIVE GUYS. That got my attention.

 
; More and more, public venues show an awareness of peanut allergies. The Washington Nationals (along with the Red Sox, Padres, Mariners, and several other major-league teams) designate peanut-free seating zones at a couple of baseball games each season. Sometimes a whole stadium goes peanut free for a minor-league game—no roasted nuts, no peanut M&M’s, no Snickers. Bags are inspected at the door for contraband.

  Peanut bans are spreading like cultural kudzu. No more making peanut butter-pinecone bird feeders in kindergarten. No more baskets of peanuts at the bar. In 2009, the Wisconsin Division of State Facilities sent a letter to downtown offices in Madison requesting that locals no longer feed peanuts to the squirrels. The front lawn of the capitol had become littered with shells, and officials feared reactions among the thousands of children coming through for tours.

  Why all the worry? Allergies among children are on the rise, and allergies to peanuts in particular. In a study titled “Food Allergy Among Children in the United States,” published in the November 2009 Pediatrics, a survey of 2005–2006 medical records revealed a 9 percent incidence rate for peanut-sensitive IgE antibodies. Note: This doesn’t mean 9 percent of children are allergic to peanuts. Only an oral food challenge reveals if the antibodies actually react. But it’s a marked increase from previous levels of sensitivity.

  Some try to dismiss these figures as an inflated product of the yuppie imagination. Come Halloween, the kid who dies “from a hidden peanut” has replaced the kid who dies “from a razor blade hidden in the apple” in the pantheon of suburban myth. Yet in urban areas, the incidence rate of allergies is also rising. In that same 2009 study, blood samples among African-American children showed they were twice as likely as white children to carry an IgE antibody for peanuts. The Hispanic population, though exhibiting the lowest prevalence rate overall, showed the greatest increase from previous years.