So when the home cook decides to make a Bakewell tart, for instance, she or he looks out a recipe, puts together a line-up of well-established ingredients – raspberry jam, flour, butter, whole eggs, almonds, butter and sugar – and then bakes it in a tried-and-tested way. The factory food technologist, on the other hand, approaches this venerable confection from a totally different angle. What alternative ingredients can we use to create a Bakewell tart-style product, while replacing or reducing expensive ingredients – those costly nuts, butter and berries? How can we cut the amount of butter, yet boost that buttery flavour, while disguising the addition of cheaper fats with an inferior taste profile? What sweeteners can we add to lower the tart’s blatant sugar content and justify a ‘reduced calorie’ label? How many times can we re-use the pastry left over from each production run in subsequent ones? What antioxidants could we throw into the mix to prolong the tart’s shelf life? Which enzyme would keep the almond sponge layer moist for longer? Might we use a long-life raspberry purée and gel mixture instead of conventional jam? What about coating the almond sponge layer with an invisible edible film that would keep the almonds crunchy for weeks? Could we substitute some starch for a proportion of the flour to give a more voluminously risen result? Would powdered, rather than pasteurised liquid egg, stick less to the equipment on the production line? Could we use a modified protein to do away with the eggs altogether, or to mimic fat? And so on.
According to the Food and Drink Federation, a body that promotes the interests of companies active in the field, food and drink manufacturing is ‘a great British success story’. Thanks to the steady stream of pre-prepared, convenience food it puts on our plates, the average proportion of household income spent on food has dropped from 50 per cent in 1914 to around 10 per cent in 2014. In fact, the UK now spends less on food than any country in the world, bar the USA.
We have been striding purposefully down this Anglo-American food path for decades. George Orwell clocked the trend back in 1937 in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier. ‘The English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year’, he wrote. He noted that in England at that time, a man over six feet was usually ‘skin and bone and not much else’, attributing this largely to ‘the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything’. He warned in no uncertain terms where the move away from home-cooked, real food might lead us: ‘We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun’.
How prescient Orwell was. Nowadays, the expression of our ongoing embrace of factory food in its myriad processed forms is rather different than in the 1930s, with an irony that would not be lost on him. A growing number of us are simultaneously overfed and undernourished, a crazy consequence of our reliance on food manufactured in an industrial setting. Whereas Orwell linked processed food consumption with excessive skinniness, today’s six-foot-tall man, like most other citizens, will most likely be carrying a good few kilos of excess weight. These days, a disturbing 60 per cent of the UK population is overweight; a quarter of us are obese.
Are we leaping to an unjustified conclusion when we lay a significant part of the blame for obesity, chronic disease and the dramatic rise in reported food allergies, at the door of processed food? There are several a priori grounds for seriously examining this possibility. Firstly, food manufacturers combine ingredients that do not occur in natural food, notably the trilogy of sugar, processed fat and salt, in their most quickly digested, highly refined, nutrient-depleted forms. Might these modern constructions be addictive? That proposition is gaining airtime. Secondly, manufactured foods often contain chemicals with known toxic properties – although we are reassured that at low levels, this is not a cause for concern. Thirdly, the processed food industry has an ignoble history of actively defending its use of controversial ingredients, such as partially hydrogenated oils, long after well-documented, subsequently validated, suspicions have been aired.
The precautionary principle doesn’t seem to figure prominently in the convenience food industry’s calculations, and such is the lobbying power of this influential sector, it does not loom large in the deliberations of our would-be regulators either. If it did, then steering clear of manufactured products that are very likely to prejudice your health would be a lot easier. All through this book, you will read examples of potentially harmful ingredients and processes being used in food and drink manufacturing, yet statutory bodies fail to restrict them because they do not yet have full, incontestable certainty of damage.
I would like to be able to report that the powers-that-be are working away in the best interests of the population to curb the processed food industry’s worst excesses. I would be delighted if the concerns I raise in this book could be swept away by strategic government action: better labelling, taxes on miscreant foods, and tighter industry surveillance. But I believe that hell will freeze over before the state takes radical action to protect us from the damage caused by processed food. Why? This industry is just so damn profitable.
The bottom line here is that there are already reasonable grounds to infer that a diet heavy in processed food is bad for us. We can wait for that contention to be ‘proven’, and the activities of the companies that sell unhealthy food to be restricted, or we can start operating our own personal precautionary principle by eating less of it, and cooking more of our own food from scratch.
This is not to say that there is no such thing as a healthy, wholesome manufactured food. I happily use many processed ingredients. Realistically, I am not likely to keep a house cow for milk, or make my own butter and cheese. Nor do I intend to grow my own grain and mill it into flour; although I know some inspiring people who do, and very much admire their commitment. I am a purchaser of bread, not a baker. I might, in a flush of enthusiasm for a new recipe, make some egg pasta from scratch, but usually, I’ll buy it in a packet. I don’t lie awake at night worrying about what effect canning might have on my anchovies or pilchards. I often grind my spices for a special dish because they are fresher and more aromatic that way, but pre-ground spices also sit usefully in my larder alongside other processed foods such as tomato paste, soy sauce, sesame oil, rosewater, olives, gherkins, oatcakes, mustard. When my mother no longer has any of her homemade marmalade or jam to give me, I’ll gladly buy some. My salads contain seeds that have been sprouted by someone other than me. Although I am intellectually enthused by the fashion for fermentation, I remain a more likely candidate for buying sauerkraut than making it. While I fully appreciate that it is possible to cure your own bacon, I’m just too lazy to try it.
In short, I have absolutely no intention of becoming a food neurotic, or living in splendid isolation as a Trappist monk. Like most of us, I am not always in control of what I eat, so I have to settle for the best option in the circumstances. Sometimes, I might be organised enough to bring my own food on a long journey, knowing that in quality terms, it will be streets ahead of anything I can buy, not to mention cheaper. But other times I still have to pick up lunch from a takeaway, trust my local delicatessen to make a reasonable quiche or sandwich, or politely eat a meal that I would never choose. I am also a restaurant critic, reviewing everything from chains to fine dining establishments on a weekly basis. Doing this job would be impossible if I was a purist, someone who took the attitude that my body is a temple that can never be sullied by processed food in any shape or form. I do not beat myself up if I can’t meet my highest aspirations for eating good food on a daily basis. I am a pragmatist. Food is my love, not my enemy. I will not allow my professional knowledge of how it is produced to spoil my appetite for it.
Yet what I choose to eat and drink starts from the over-arching principle that natural ingredients in their least processed forms have an inbuilt, effortless integrity that make them the best basis for a body and soul-sustaining life. Natu
ral foods are brilliantly conceived and intricate little packages wherein every nutrient works in a companionable ‘one for all, and all for one’ synergy. When we prepare and eat natural foods, their wise completeness translates into palpable health benefits. Nutritionally speaking, the whole apple does much more for us than the apple juice, or the apple crumble, or the apple and oat breakfast bar, or the apple-flavoured gum, and it’s hard to overeat whole apples. Manufactured foods, by contrast, are put together by people who, although indisputably smart and capable, do not have Nature’s all-embracing, all-seeing intelligence. This is why so many of the products manufacturers create share the capacity to shorten our lifespans.
I honestly didn’t set out to put you off eating anything that comes in a bottle, jar, packet, tin, tube, carton or polystyrene container, but when you read about certain practices and procedures used to make some of our most popular foods, this might somewhat dull your appetite for a few products. My message is not the comfortable one that the UK Department of Health wants to convey with its ‘eatwell plate’, which conspicuously promotes many popular processed foods and drinks – sweets, biscuits, cake, cornflakes, baked beans, flavoured yoghurts, sliced white bread, even a can of cola, and crisps – as part of a ‘balanced diet’. Nor are the sentiments that run through this book in tune with the ‘Don’t Cook, Just Eat!’ campaign so loudly promoted by purveyors of fast food, with eye-grabbing posters in the windows of takeaways up and down the land. Their self-styled ‘anti-cooking manifesto’ urges us to ‘liberate’ ourselves from its ‘tyranny’ by letting ‘professionals do the work’.
Leave food to the professionals? Once you have digested the information in the pages that follow, you may understand why I am unable to oblige. Somehow, I feel more affinity with the message of the mysterious graffiti artist in Cologne who superimposes his or her own home cooking recipes on fast-food billboards, so that instead of seeing a Big Mac advert, for example, passers-by will spot the ingredients needed to make spaghetti with meat sauce, or a courgette rice casserole. These days, cooking is a powerful political statement, a small daily act of resistance that gives us significantly more control of our lives.
PART ONE
How the processed food system works
1
Why it all tastes the same
I am not a fan of convenience food, a sentiment rooted in a formative early experience. As a small child in the 1960s, I was captivated by the TV advert for one of the first generation of ready meals: the Vesta chicken curry. I seem to remember that it had beautiful sari-clad dancing girls, and all the thousand-and-one-nights exoticism so sumptuously on show in Alexander Korda’s spectacular film, The Thief of Bagdad. Revisiting the Vesta advert now, with a more cynical adult eye, it would doubtless look laughably lame, but at the time, it had me spellbound.
In my home we ate almost no convenience food. Either my mother or grandmother cooked, more or less from scratch; this was the way most people ate until the 1970s. So I waged a long, attritional campaign to buy Vesta chicken curry, exercising what food advertisers now call ‘pester power’. Neither the adults in the household, nor my older, wiser sister, shared my enthusiasm. I pleaded persistently with my mother who repeatedly blocked my requests. ‘If you got it, you wouldn’t like it really’ she tried to convince me, to no avail. Then one night – bingo! – my parents were going out, and by way of compensation and a Saturday night treat, I was allowed to choose my own meal. My mother was worn down, and caved in. At last, I would get to taste the much longed-for Vesta curry! What’s more, I’d even get to eat it on my lap while watching telly! In a household where we all sat down together for breakfast and evening meal, with the TV switched off, this departure from custom felt thrillingly subversive.
I’ll never forget the crushing disillusionment I felt at the gulf between the TV advert, the imagery on the packaging, and the reality. The box showed an almond-eyed, bejewelled beauty bearing a generous plateful of something that looked enticingly glossy and brown, set on a bed of pearly white rice. But what I had on my lap was about half as much in quantity as I had expected, and the curry bit looked pretty much like dog food, or worse, something you’d been taught to step around if you saw it lying on the pavement.
I had to tough it out though. Maybe it would taste better than it looked; I didn’t want to give anyone the opportunity to say ‘We told you so’. But after a couple of mouthfuls, I was defeated, and had to admit that I just couldn’t eat it. Fortunately, my grandmother was hovering around, with the comforting Plan B of cheese on toast already in mind.
I should point out that I was, perhaps, a rather unusual six-year-old: I had eaten curry and enjoyed spicy food. A family friend had once been in Pakistan and he had learned to make ‘Indian’ food that actually tasted like something you’d eat on the subcontinent, or so he said. In retrospect, since this was decades before the painstaking Madhur Jaffrey and Rick Stein age of grinding your own spices, I imagine he used the then ubiquitous ready-made Vencat curry powder, but what he cooked for us did, nevertheless, give us a hint of what home-cooked Indian food might taste like, enough for me to see instantly that Vesta curry, with its brown Windsor soup-like gloop, was something else entirely.
To backtrack here, Vesta, the pioneering ready meal brand, was already pushing a sales pitch that was to become all too familiar to British consumers. Its ‘lavish’ chicken curry came ‘complete with an authentic curry sauce’. It was ‘ready prepared by Vesta for you to cook’ by ‘expert chefs who have done the hard work for you’. OK, it was a slowcoach of a product by today’s ping-of-a-microwave standards, taking 20 minutes to reheat, but that seductive labour-saving promise, combined with prominent claims of authenticity and the skill of a professional chef, is still the central plank in processed food marketing today. The ready meals entrepreneur, Sir Gulam Noon, summed up the industry’s vision of itself when he told the Financial Times that he ‘changed the palate of the nation, and broke the housewife’s shackles from the kitchen’.
These days, convenience foods have certainly moved on from the Vesta days, both in terms of their technical sophistication and the claims advanced for their ‘realness’. In the ready meal category, lasagne and chicken tikka are now the two best sellers. But I have yet to encounter a ready meal that tastes a lot, or even a little, like homemade food. They have improved from the Vesta days, but freed from their packaging and reheated, they generally remind me of the dispiriting hot meals dished up by budget airlines. That sticky brownness, that larger-than-life tinned tomato soup aroma, those uniform textures and consistencies, those starch-stiff ecru sauces, the predictable high tone twinning of sweet with salty, and the consequent thirst that surely follows; for me, ready meals are a sorry apology for real food.
I am forced to revisit this prejudice at regular intervals, however, when newspapers ask me to investigate a particular convenience food category – value, low-calorie, children’s, free-from, for instance – and the claims made on their packaging. And trust me, there are legions of products to investigate. Looking at the chilled category alone, by 2013, UK-based food companies were manufacturing over 12,000 different chilled food recipes. This is a big business – over £10 billion a year – which represents some 13% of the UK’s total retail food market. Within this grand total, ready meals are by far the largest sales category. The UK ate its way through 3 billion of them in 2012.
The only way to investigate ready meals properly is to buy a batch of comparable products from a variety of different retailers, and take them home to study in depth; it’s not something that you can do easily in the supermarket aisle. The ingredients listing is obviously the first port of call, and these days, because processed foods such as ready meals are often complex, multi-ingredient products, these lists can run to several paragraphs of tiny print that’s more or less impossible to read without some sort of magnification; unless, that is, you happen to have 20/20 vision.
Editors often want a description of how each product looks
and tastes, so I remove them from their packaging and reheat them in the oven or pot. Now, perhaps if you eat them regularly, the sight and smell of warm, bubbling convenience meals will set your gastric juices flowing, but for people like me who aren’t, they are strikingly different from the home-prepared equivalent. For starters, they often have a quite powerful odour, one that tends to hang around in the bin, sink and dishwasher long after the contents are gone.
Of course all food, including home-prepared food, makes itself known to the nasal passages to a greater or lesser extent, but usually in a pleasant, appealing way. Yet when you compare a selection of processed foods, you start noticing that they have particularly distinctive smells, or rather, a curiously similar portfolio of smells.
Now, according to Greencore, one of the largest chilled food manufacturers, the UK chilled food industry is ‘the most advanced in the world because of its high standards, rigorous safety and management systems and the sheer quantity of exciting new recipes which it develops constantly’. That would make you think that there is a rich diversity amongst all the convenience foods on our shelves. But when I opened them in my kitchen, I found that I could easily classify my ready meals into odiferous families, a bit like houses of cards: aces, spades and so on. First there’s the ‘red’ family, that’s the hot tomato/pizza/lasagne/tomato and basil soup/‘med’ veg bunch. Next up, there’s the ‘brown’ family, think of cottage pie/steak and kidney/casserole/stew/Peking duck, chow mein noodles and everything sold with a barbecue label. In the ‘beige’ family, variously labelled breadcrumbed/battered products share a strong resemblance, a particularly haunting, almost acrid oily aroma that soon impregnates the oven and lingers thereafter, irrespective of whether they are fish, meat or vegetable-based. The all-out attention-grabbers are the Indian-themed dishes, whose spices give them just enough personality to distinguish them from the others, although they otherwise share many similar characteristics.
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