Sex, Bombs and Burgers

by Peter Nowak

  By using simple chemistry in combination with a proven Napoleonic-era preservation technique, Jay Hormel had come up with the original “Frankenfood.” He showed his peers that easily spoiled natural foods could be made more durable with the application of some basic science. Moreover, just as Raytheon had shown other electronics makers how to get rich from government contracts, Hormel too had cashed in by supplying the military at home and abroad. Spam showed other foodmakers what such contracts could mean to their bottom lines.

  The Long, Long March to Nutrition

  Spam is not and never has been a healthy food. A small, two-ounce serving contains about one-third of the daily recommended total fat and sodium intake. Too much Spam can raise your blood pressure and make you fat. Back in the forties, however, what little information the U.S. military had on Spam’s nutritional quality was set aside in the quest for quick, inexpensive and durable meat. During the war, the Food and Nutrition Board—formed in 1941 to investigate issues that affected national defence— developed the Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) list to spell out the components of a healthy diet. The list, which was influenced by wartime shortages of certain foodstuffs including meat, was first published in 1943 and revised numerous times afterward. Regulations requiring processors to disclose what percentage of the RDA their foods provided, however, were a long time coming because the industry fought such moves every step of the way.

  In the early twentieth century there were few rules governing food; American processors were subject only to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, administered by the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry. The act prohibited the manufacture and sale of poisonous and “adulterated” foods, a vague definition that applied to fillers of reduced quality or strength, colouring to conceal damage or inferiority, injurious additives and the use of “filthy, decomposed or putrid” substances.

  In 1927 the bureau was reorganized into the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration, which dropped insecticides from its name in 1930 to finally become the FDA. The 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act did little new other than expand the 1906 legislation to include cosmetics and authorize factory inspections and spell out acceptable food colourings. It wasn’t until 1958 that significant food safety requirements were established, when the Food Additives Amendment banned the use of additives found to cause cancer in humans or animals. A similar amendment two years later outlawed cancer-causing colourings. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1966 required that all consumer products be honestly and informatively labelled, while 1975 produced a landmark FDA ruling that finally required processors to display nutrient information on their foods. The new rule, however, only applied to products that made nutritional claims and was not expanded to include all foods for nearly two decades, in 1992. Regulations in other developed countries followed similar trajectories and timelines.

  By that time, however, Pacific Islanders were thoroughly hooked on Spam. Like Native American populations afflicted by the diseases brought by colonizing Europeans, the Islanders were exposed to the unhealthy food imported by American armed forces. Spam and other canned meats have had a devastating effect on the region in what has been called a “raging epidemic” of diabetes, stroke and heart disease. In 2008 eight of the world’s ten most obese countries were Pacific islands. Nauru, northeast of the Solomon Islands, fared the worst with 95 percent of inhabitants over the age of fifteen considered obese by the World Health Organization. “What is unfolding here is a physical disaster and a fiscal disaster,” said Carl Hacker, the director of economic policy and planning in the Marshall Islands.10 Experts said Spam and other fatty canned meats such as corned beef were squarely to blame. But for the rest of the world, Spam has proved to be only a small contributing factor to obesity, when compared with some of the other food products that came about as the result of war technology.

  Potato Diplomacy

  By the time the Second World War broke out, John Richard Simplot had put Idaho on the map as the potato heart of the United States. His company was already the largest shipper of fresh potatoes in the country and ran a side business selling dried onions, which he dehydrated in a modified prune dryer. Like sides of beef, potatoes were difficult to ship to troops because of their weight and tendency to spoil. But Simplot, who had dropped out of school in the eighth grade and gone into business for himself at fourteen, was every bit as inventive as Jay Hormel and knew the solution lay in processing. He took his cue from the ancient Incas, who were the first to grow potatoes, in the high Andes more than four thousand years ago.11 In between herding llamas and getting high chewing coca leaves, the Incas discovered that storing potatoes at high altitudes caused them to lose much of their moisture, which increased their longevity. Simplot’s scientists discovered that the higher air pressures and lower temperatures of the Andes enabled a natural form of freeze-drying, an effect they then duplicated using their prune dryer back in Idaho. They took the resultant dried spuds and diced them into flakes, which could then be reconstituted into mashed potatoes by adding water or milk. Simplot packaged the flakes in boxes and sold them to the army, a move that ended up making the already-rich Idahoan wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. After the war, he bought his own potato farms, cattle ranches and fertilizer plants, as well as lumber mills and mining claims.

  As with radar, demand from the army for dehydrated potatoes dried up after the war, leaving Simplot to find new lines of business. Clarence Birdseye, a Brooklyn native, had pioneered flash-freezing in the twenties but his fish products sold poorly because few grocery stores—and fewer homes—owned freezers to store them. That changed during the war when shortages of fresh foods led to a boom in refrigerator and freezer sales.

  The first successful frozen food was orange juice, invented by the Massachusetts-based National Research Corporation during the latter part of the war. NRC’s early attempts to dehydrate orange juice by boiling the water out of it didn’t work because the process destroyed the flavour. The company’s founder, Richard Morse, found a suitable alternative with a high-vacuum process he had created to dehydrate penicillin, blood plasma and antibiotics. Morse was able to suck the moisture out of the juice using a giant vacuum machine to create an orange powder which, when reconstituted with water, retained some of its flavour and vitamins. The breakthrough won him a hefty contract with the army in early 1945.12 NRC formed the Florida Foods Corporation and began building a plant in Florida in the spring, only to have the army cancel its contract when the war ended that summer. The company scrambled to reorient itself to the consumer market, renaming itself Vacuum Foods and beginning to sell frozen orange juice concentrate, an intermediate step in its process. The slushy concentrate was more expensive to produce than the powder, but it also produced a more real-tasting juice. A Boston marketing firm came up with the name “Minute Maid,” a brand that reflected the amount of time the juice took to make and which referenced the heroic Minute Men militia of the American revolutionary war. The company’s frozen concentrate hit stores in 1946 and sales were immediately good, then exploded over the next few years. Vacuum Foods saw revenue go from under $400,000 in its first year to nearly $30 million just five years later.13

  The company changed its name once again, finally settling on Minute Maid in 1949. Frozen orange juice proved to be immensely successful, and by the end of the decade Minute Maid was competing for space in grocery stores against sixty different imitation labels. Company president John Fox proclaimed that Minute Maid had single-handedly saved the Florida citrus industry—in 1946 it was appealing to the government for subsidies, but by 1950 it was overwhelmed with demand for oranges.14 Powdered orange juice, meanwhile, resurfaced in several forms during the fifties, including Tang (1959), but many of these products were full of sugar and other additives to make up for the taste lost in processing.

  Minute Maid’s success was not lost on Simplot, who had scientists trying to figure out a way to freeze french fries. After a number of attempts that resulted in po
or-tasting and mushy fries, one of his researchers, Ray Dunlap, discovered a method that kept the potatoes’ flavour intact. Dunlap first pre-cooked the fries in hot oil for two minutes, then immediately blasted them with super-cooled air. This flash-freezing technique brought the temperature of the fries down to around –30 Fahrenheit in a manner of minutes and had a major advantage over previous attempts. Slow freezing over a longer period of time caused the water molecules inside the fries to expand, which made the fries mushy when they were eventually thawed. Flash-freezing, on the other hand, didn’t give the water the opportunity to gather, so when the fries were thawed they retained the same moisture as before. The result was a frozen fry that, when re-cooked in oil for another two minutes, tasted the same as a fresh one. Dunlap presented his invention to Simplot, who took one bite and said, “That’s a helluva thing.”15

  Simplot sold the frozen fries to grocery stores in 1953, but they didn’t take off right away. Although the fries could be cooked in any home oven, they tasted best when made in hot oil, a method few households had the equipment for. The trick lay in the moisture inside the fries—hot oil caused the water molecules to evaporate, leaving gaps that were then filled by the oil itself, which added to their taste. Simplot sought out restaurants that were equipped with oil cookers, such as the fast-rising McDonald’s. He was already a major supplier to the chain, accounting for about 20 percent of its potatoes. He took his idea to McDonald’s president Harry Sonneborn, who gave him a frosty reception. “He laughed at us,” Simplot said. “The only thing he was interested in talking about was fresh potatoes.”16

  Still, potatoes posed a big problem for McDonald’s. Because of their high solid content, the Idaho Russets the chain used were available fresh only nine months out of the year. They were harvested in the fall and kept in cold storage throughout the winter, but tended to go bad during the hot months, so the restaurant chain was forced to switch to California white potatoes during the summer. The white potatoes didn’t produce as crisp a fry, though, which gave McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc quality-control headaches. Fresh fries were also McDonald’s most time-consuming menu item to prepare since the potatoes needed to be peeled, cut and cooked. Finally, the fast growth of Kroc’s chain—it had about 725 restaurants at the time and would have more than 3,000 by the end of the decade—was making it difficult to maintain potato uniformity. “The sugar content of the potatoes was constantly going up and down, and they would get fries with every colour of the rainbow,” Simplot said.17

  The potato baron used his clout with the chain to go over Sonneborn’s head to meet directly with Kroc. Appealing to his obsession with quality, Simplot convinced Kroc to take a chance on frozen fries and, with a handshake, the two changed potatoes forever. Kroc agreed to try the frozen fries and, when customers couldn’t tell the difference, McDonald’s began a large-scale conversion, a move it completed in 1972. Other fast-food chains followed McDonald’s lead, leading to an explosion in consumption. In 1960 the average American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen fries. By 2000 that had changed to forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes and more than thirty pounds of frozen fries, 90 percent of which were bought at fast-food restaurants.18

  Simplot became immensely wealthy and spread his money into other investments. Some, such as his mining endeavours, did poorly while others, including a $1 million stake in Idaho-based microchip start-up Micron Technology in 1980, paid off handsomely. Micron is now a Fortune 500 company and, in an apparent tribute to the war ties that made Simplot rich, goes out of its way to employ military veterans, whom it actively recruits. In 2006 the company employed more than 3,500 veterans, comprising about 16 percent of its workforce.19 Simplot also expanded into other frozen foods such as meats and vegetables and even bought Birdseye’s companies in several countries, including Australia and New Zealand. His continued expansion and growth was paced by the frozen food industry itself. In the United States alone, frozen food sales had reached $40 billion—one-third of total food sales—by the turn of the new century.20 In 2007 the industry posted global sales of more than $100 billion.21

  At the time of his death in May 2008, Simplot and his family were worth more than $3 billion. His legacy to the world will always be the technologically engineered french fry, now a major contributor to what the World Health Organization calls an obesity epidemic. One of the main causes is the “increased consumption of more energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods with high levels of sugar and saturated fats,” such as french fries.22 The rising obesity numbers are not surprising given that one large portion of fries—and in the United States, one in every four vegetables consumed is a fry—constitutes nearly half your recommended daily fat intake.23

  Powder More Valuable Than Cocaine

  Other technological developments during the Second World War helped diminish the overall nutritional value of food. The process of spray-drying, for example, is a method that strips vitamins and minerals from many foods, including milk and eggs. Food processors had been using several different methods to create dried milk since the late nineteenth century, but few met with much success.

  Before the Second World War, the most popular method involved a process similar to NRC’s juice dehydration technique, where moisture was sucked out of milk, but the costs of running the heavy machinery proved too high, especially given that sales were low. Indeed, dried milk, which came in powder form, was a new substance that was mistrusted, particularly by bakers. When processors first tried to sell milk powder, bakers “looked first at the product, then at the man attempting to make the sale with suspicion. Believing it was some foreign substance to be substituted in place of milk, they would not accept it and thus it required very hard work and education to get them to use it in even a small quantity.”24 As a consequence, by 1939 about one-third of the 600 million pounds of dried milk produced in the United States went to feeding animals.25 The war changed all that. With a sudden need for milk that would not go bad, demand for the powder skyrocketed and food processors followed suit by investing in the relatively new and expensive spray-drying technology.

  The spray-drying process, largely unchanged since its inception, takes several steps. First, the bacteria in the milk are removed through pasteurization, a heating process similar to the method in which Spam is baked. The fat is then removed by spinning or “skimming” the milk in a centrifuge. The pasteurized skim milk is then put into an evaporator silo, where more moisture is removed through further heating. From there, the milk—now about 50 percent solid—finally hits the spray dryer, a large metal cylinder, where it is again heated and blasted with highly pressurized air. The air evaporates whatever water remains and mixes with the milk to form a powder, which then drops to the bottom of the dryer to await cooling and packaging.

  The process was relatively new during the Second World War, so the resultant powder still had a chalky taste when rehydrated with water, but it was cheaper, longer-lasting and more efficient than other methods, and it was deemed good enough for bread making. American production of spray-dried milk took off and reached about 700 million pounds by 1945, more than double pre-war levels.26 Food processors, led by Carnation, found a veritable bonanza in the technology after the war with a slew of new milk-related beverages. Swiss giant Nestlé, which ended up buying Carnation in 1985, released the ever-popular Quik chocolate milk powder complete with spokesrabbit—because everyone knows that rabbits like milk—in 1948, followed by a strawberry version in 1959. By 1954 sales of non-fat dry milk solids had grown from around two million shortly after the war to 120 million pounds, leading some industry observers to wonder if the long-lasting and unspoilable powdered milk might entirely replace its liquid counterpart.27 (Obviously, it didn’t.) Spray-drying wasn’t just limited to milk. In 1942 General Foods used the process to create instant coffee, which it supplied to American forces. When the war ended, the company sold the product to the general public as Maxwell House Instant Coffee, which also proved to be a hit.


  By the time war broke out, Detroit-based C.E. Rogers was a mid-sized player in the spray-drying industry. Eager to give his company a leg-up over competing milk processors, CEO Elmer Donald Rogers perfected the process of spray-drying eggs. The method was similar but the spray dryer was horizontal and box-shaped rather than vertical and cylindrical, like its milk counterpart, and the eggs weren’t heated, because doing so resulted in prematurely scrambled eggs.28

  Howard Rogers, the company’s current president and grandson of Elmer Donald, boasts about how lucrative selling the machines that made powdered eggs was. His company, run at the time by his grandfather, was assigned a priority “second only to the Manhattan Project” for obtaining the materials needed to build spray-dryers, including stainless and carbon steels. “They made a hell of a lot of money around World War Two,” he told me. “I know this because my grandfather built a home in Northfield, Michigan that was monstrous.” The move may have paid off handsomely, but the company reverted back to milk production after the war, likely because of the universal revulsion soldiers had for powdered eggs. “Ugh,” one naval officer said, “our engineering officer ... could eat a half dozen of those powdered items and squirt half a bottle of ketchup on them. No one else at the wardroom table could stand to watch him.”29 Larger food processors, including Carnation and Nestlé, furthered research after the war and improved the taste by adding artificial flavours, thereby establishing a commercial market. Today, one in ten eggs is consumed in powdered, frozen or liquid form.30