by Peter Nowak
Mass Processing
The advances in dehydration, freezing and drying, however, paled in significance to the advent of the mass spectrometer, a scientific instrument that virtually no one outside of a laboratory has heard of. The spectrometer, which measures the mass and relative concentrations of atoms and molecules, was arguably the most significant technological invention of the twentieth century, next to the atomic bomb. In fact, the bomb itself might not have been possible without the spectrometer.
The field of mass spectrometry was created by Manchester-born physicist Joseph John Thomson in the early part of the century. In 1913 Thomson, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his experiments on the conductivity of gases, was investigating the effects of magnetism and electricity on atoms. He believed that if he shot a stream of electron-charged neon gas through a magnetic field, the particles would deviate from their straight path and curve. He used a photographic plate to measure the angle of deflection and his hypothesis proved to be more accurate than he anticipated: the plate showed two different patches of light, indicating that his stream hadn’t just curved, it had split off into two different rays. Thomson took this to mean that neon gas was actually composed of atoms of two different weights. He had discovered the isotope: a chemical twin of a natural element that had a different atomic weight than its brethren.
His system was improved upon and by the war had evolved into the mass spectrometer, a device that allowed scientists to accurately identify different molecules and isotopes by their atomic weight. During the war, the spectrometer was used to find uranium isotope 235, the key element in the atomic bomb. The uranium isotope was particularly dense, which gave it maximum explosive power when split. Mass spectrometry, one of two methods of producing elements that could be split, was used at the giant government facility built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to create the uranium-based atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. (The second method, used at the DuPont plant in Washington, produced plutonium—a derivative of uranium—through a chemical-splitting process. The plutonium-based bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima.)
After the war, the mass spectrometer was widely adopted by scientists across a broad range of fields and industries, including pharmaceuticals, energy and electronics. Food processors were particularly enthusiastic about the new technology because it took a lot of the guesswork out of their jobs by allowing them to study their products at the molecular level. Scientists could now see how adding one molecule or altering the chemical composition of another affected a given food. In wartime experiments with orange juice, potatoes, milk and eggs, scientists found that processing often deprived food of its taste. The mass spectrometer now allowed them to correct those problems on a chemical level.
This introduced a number of new phenomena to the food industry. First, it led to the birth of the flavour industry. With the capability to mix and match molecules, chemical makers were now able to synthesize any aroma or taste. This was a godsend for food processors, because it meant that they could do whatever they wanted to food and not worry about how the end product tasted—artificial flavouring would take care of that. Not surprisingly, the flavour companies that sprung up saw no shortage of demand from food companies. Today, the global flavour market is worth more than $20 billion and is led by companies such as Swiss duo Givaudan and Firmenich, New York–based International Flavors & Fragrances and Germany’s Symrise.31
Mass spectrometers also allowed food processors to dissect their competitors’ products. If company A came out with a particular food that was a big hit, company B could easily replicate it. Some long-held and zealously guarded formulas, like Coca-Cola’s, were no longer secret. Scott Smith, the chair of the food science program at Kansas State University and an expert in mass spectrometers, explains that the device took much of the guesswork out of food production. “If you’re looking at coffee and you want to know something about coffee—like are you seeing some differences in the coffee beans from different parts of the world or different types of roasting—you can use taste panels, but you can also use a mass spectrometer to give you more of a subjective analytical approach.”32
The devices have also become indispensable in ensuring food quality, particularly when something goes wrong. Smith recently used a spectrometer to analyze a chocolate-covered nut product that had been brought to his lab because it “tasted like cardboard.” He found heavy oxidization in one of the product’s compounds, a problem that was solved by simply eliminating that compound. With food problems, the spectrometer “will usually give you an idea of where to start looking,” Smith says. “At my lab, we live and die by it.”
The fifties and sixties thus saw an explosion of new food products, many of which were full of new preservatives, additives, flavours and colourings. Pop Tarts, processed cheese slices, Frosted Flakes, TV dinners, Cheez Whiz, Rice-A-Roni, Fruit Loops, Cool Whip, Spaghetti-O’s, prepared cake mixes and many other products hit grocery stores and became popular with consumers. Chemical intake shot up dramatically—between 1949 and 1959, food processors came up with more than 400 new additives.33 The FDA couldn’t keep pace; in 1958 the regulator published a list of 200 “Substances Generally Recognized as Safe,” but by then more than 700 were being used in foods.34 In the rush to provide the world with products that wouldn’t spoil but tasted just as good through additives, little attention was being paid to the nutritional value or the potential long-term effects of these technologically engineered foods.
Vitamin B52
Luckily, it wasn’t a total downward spiral into nutritional ignorance. Although the science wasn’t conclusive yet, people did suspect that processed foods weren’t as healthy as the fresh variety, and studies were under way.
An early breakthrough came in 1928 at the University of Wisconsin, where scientists irradiated canned and pasteurized milk with vitamin D, a nutrient it did not naturally have. The effect was soon duplicated with cheese. Many companies, sensing that their ever-growing list of processed foods would eventually come under regulatory scrutiny, began funding vitamin research. At the same time, scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota were performing vitamin experiments on teenagers. After putting them on a diet low in thiamine, or vitamin B1, researchers found their four subjects became sluggish, moody and “mentally fatigued.”35 They repeated the experiment with six female housekeepers, who found their ability to do chest presses greatly diminished. When two of the six were put on a diet high in thiamine, their abilities recovered.
Russell Wilder, one of the doctors, argued that Hitler was using vitamin deficiency as a weapon in his domination of Europe. The Nazis were “making deliberate use of thiamine starvation to reduce the populations ... to a state of depression and mental weakness and despair which will make them easier to hold in subjection.”36 Thiamine, Wilder declared, was therefore the “morale vitamin,” a vital part of any military effort, not to mention a balanced breakfast.
Thiamine is naturally found in beans, legumes and whole-wheat flour, but in 1940, Americans hated whole-wheat bread—it accounted for only 2 percent of the bread sold.37 Milling removed between 70 and 80 percent of wheat’s thiamine to produce the white bread Americans loved, so Wilder believed some sort of government intervention was needed. Having joined the Council on Foods and Nutrition of the American Medical Association in 1931 and the Committee on Medicine of the National Research Council in 1940, he was already a food authority and in a strong position to proclaim his views on vitamins. In 1941 he organized and became the first chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council, which put him within earshot of the most powerful American politicians.
In 1942 he finally convinced the government to decree that all flour used by the armed forces and federal institutions should be “enriched,” with nutrients such as thiamine mixed back in. The ruling took immediate effect, and by the middle of 1943 about three-quarters of the bread being produced in the United States was enrich
ed with B1.38 The British military came to the same conclusions. After finding that 41 percent of the young men drafted for service during the First World War were medically unfit, mainly because of poor nutrition, the government also ruled that its flour had to be enriched.39 The move to counter the bad effects of food-processing technology with good food-processing technology had officially begun. Following the war, processors cashed in on the emerging trend toward health consciousness by expanding enrichment practices to other foods, including rice and cereals. They also took it a step further by “fortifying” products, or adding nutrients to foods that did not naturally have them. (The trend went overboard in the fifties, when even chewing gum was imbued with vitamins.)
Enrichment was one step forward to good nutrition, but by the end of the fifties the world had taken a number of steps back. Mass spectrometers, used today by just about everybody—from sports bodies in detecting the use of performance-enhancing drugs to mining companies in finding gold deposits—allowed food processors to alter the chemical make-up of foods. Tastes, textures, shapes and colours could be changed and moulded as desired. Canning, dehydration, freezing and drying techniques, as well as packaging made possible by new plastics, all improved the longevity of food, preventing spoilage and allowing for transportation across vast distances. The road was paved for truly international foods and, with them, international food-processing companies.
The wartime boom in refrigerator and freezer sales also continued into the fifties and sixties and, combined with the advent of the microwave oven and plastics, gave households new and easier ways of storing and preparing foods. In the span of three decades, the creation, sale and consumption of food had changed more dramatically than it had over the previous three centuries.
All of this was the product of the emerging prosperity-driven consumer culture. Again, after total war came total living, and food was an integral part of that maxim. Food was no longer the precious commodity it had been during the Great Depression and the wars; time was now at a premium. Food producers, armed with an arsenal of new technologies, were more than happy to cater to these desires. As with plastics and their eventual environmental harm, when it came to the potential negative health effects of these new processed foods, the collective thinking was, “To hell with them, let’s eat.”
From Lab to Drive-Thru
Wartime processing advances were only half the food revolution story, though. The second part wasn’t taking place in home kitchens and grocery stores, but in restaurants around America. Just as the accelerating pace of post-war life was creating demand for domestic foods that were faster to prepare and easier to store, the same was happening outside the home. Before the war, eating at a restaurant was a rarity for the typical family, but the economic boom led to a wave of new restaurants focused on getting people their meals quickly, cheaply and efficiently. And technological engineering was at their core.
The first fast-food chain to achieve international success, Dairy Queen, was centred on an invention that solved the two biggest problems of the ice cream business: the hardness of the product and the time-consuming manual labour that went into scooping it. The new machine stored ice cream at temperatures just above freezing, so it was cold but soft, and dispensed it with the simple opening of a spigot. This allowed Dairy Queen outlets to pump out hundreds of cones an hour, vastly increasing their volume of business.
Burger King was also founded on a similar volume-enabling machine. The restaurant’s contraption cooked four hundred burgers an hour by automatically moving them through a broiler in wire baskets, which was significantly faster than cooking them manually. Kentucky Fried Chicken, meanwhile, used a new type of pressurized deep fryer to cook drumsticks and breasts in one-third the time of conventional deep fryers. Now titans of the industry, all of these chains relied on technology to mass-produce food, achieve ever-increasing sales volumes and drive large-scale expansion.
Of course, none were as successful as McDonald’s. In the fast-food industry’s early days, no other chain saw as much potential for technology, science and engineering to deliver sales speed and volume, and no one profited as much from investing in innovation. The original McDonald’s was started by Richard “Dick” McDonald and his older brother Maurice “Mac,” the sons of a shoe factory foreman in New Hampshire. The brothers had moved to California at the height of the Depression in 1930 in search of riches. After trying their hands at managing a movie theatre, they opened a drive-in hot dog stand in Pasadena in 1937. The stand was a success but the brothers wanted a higher volume of customers, so they relocated to the nearby boom town of San Bernardino, where they opened the first McDonald’s drive-in restaurant in 1940 on busy Route 66. It too was a hit, particularly with teenagers, who used the drive-in as a hangout. By the mid-forties McDonald’s, like many of the dozens of other drive-ins dotting California, was raking it in. Together the brothers had created a new style of restaurant, one that was driven by the post-war economic boom, the growing ubiquity of automobiles and an increasing desire for speedy service.
But the operation still wasn’t fast enough or achieving the sort of volumes the McDonalds wanted. They were frustrated with the traditional tools and systems of the restaurant business and wanted to apply the assembly-line technology that Henry Ford had used to speed up car manufacturing. The brothers invented their own equipment and “became enamoured of any technical improvement that could speed up the work,” as one McDonald’s historian put it.40 In the fall of 1948 they closed down the restaurant to refit it purely for speed. They replaced the grill with two bigger custom-built versions and hired a craftsman to design new equipment, much of which is still used in the fast-food business today, such as the broader metal spatulas that allowed for several burgers to be flipped at once, and the handheld stainless steel pump dispensers that squeeze precise amounts of ketchup and mustard onto buns. The McDonalds also purchased four Multimixers, each of which made five milkshakes at a time. The move turned out to be fateful, as it eventually brought them into contact with Ray Kroc.
Besides the gear, the brothers also made major changes to their system. The menu was pared down to just eleven items, and all china and flatware was scrapped in favour of paper bags, wrappers and cups. The carhops, who had served customers at their cars, were fired; customers now had to walk up to the window to place their order. Jobs were regimented into simple tasks, so that two employees were responsible for making milkshakes while another two did nothing but cook fries. The new-and-improved McDonald’s, featuring the “Speedee Service System” complete with a sign depicting the cartoon chef “Speedee,” re-opened in December as a finely tuned machine, the perfect blend of human and technological efficiency. Sales took a hit initially as the teenagers were scared away, but they soon rebounded and surpassed previous volumes as families discovered the new McDonald’s.
By 1954 the brothers were swimming in money and had sold a handful of franchises before their fateful meeting with Kroc. The fifty-three-year-old Chicago native had been a lifelong entrepreneur who had done moderately well, first by selling paper cups and then milkshake machines. His largest customers were using no more than two Multimixers, so he was intrigued by the tiny California operation that had four going at any given time. He travelled to San Bernardino to meet the McDonalds and was awestruck at the lunchtime crowd. Ever the entrepreneur, he knew he had to get on board.
Kroc struck a deal with the brothers for national rights to their restaurant and kicked McDonald’s franchising—and its use of technology to build volume—into high gear. Kroc enlisted Jim Schindler to help design his own test franchise in Des Moines, Illinois, near Kroc’s Chicago home base. Schindler had trained in electronics in the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War and designed tools for munitions manufacturing, but his most important skills, as far as Kroc was concerned, came from his experience in designing kitchens for submarines. Besides accounting for the cramped environment, submarine kitchens needed to be rugged, easy to clean and s
tandardized, so that one design could be plugged into a variety of ships. Kroc had the same need for his planned high-volume kitchens, so Schindler, who designed much of the plug-and-play stainless steel equipment found in the growing chain’s restaurants, was the perfect fit.
As Kroc’s franchising juggernaut gained steam—over four hundred restaurants by 1963—so too did its quality-control problems. McDonald’s quickly found it difficult to serve burgers and fries that tasted the same in Los Angeles as they did in New York, and year-round to boot. Kroc turned to the same kind of food science being employed by big processors such as Hormel, Carnation and Nestlé, and in 1957 McDonald’s became the first fast-food company to open a research lab. One of the lab’s first tasks was perfecting the french fry. Converting to Simplot’s frozen potatoes was only one step in the quest. The McScientists also experimented with curing potatoes so that their sugars were converted into starches, and studied the spuds’ solids content with new, complex machinery. They found that only potatoes with a solids content of at least 21 percent were acceptable, so they equipped suppliers with hydrometers, devices that measured a potato’s gravity and thus its solids content. Few potato farmers had ever seen a hydrometer before, let alone used one, but if they wanted to supply the growing food giant, they had to incorporate the new technology. McDonald’s even invented the “potato computer,” which was really just a sensor that detected when the oil in the fryer hit the correct temperature. The sensor, which beeped when the fries were perfectly cooked, was later used with all fried products, including Chicken McNuggets and Filet-o-Fish, and is now standard across the industry. McDonald’s quest for the perfect french fry, an endeavour that cost the company an estimated $3 million in its first decade, was not unlike unlocking the secrets of the atom.41