Swallow This

by Joanna Blythman

  The brand names of many products being promoted at Food Ingredients did offer small clues as to their purpose. Hydro-Fi™ is a ‘high performance synergy of citrus fibre and hydrocolloids (essentially glues), designed to ‘improve the yield of meatballs’. It is one of the latest products that use ‘gum technology’. SuperStab™ (the sales material shows a glass of water with an oil-like substance swirling through it) is ‘the ultimate natural emulsifier’ made from ‘an innovative proprietary process with specific raw material screening and preparation’. A yeast extract, Bionis®, boosts the ‘meaty, condiment and umami flavour notes in frankfurters’. A ‘speciality starch’ called Culinar Keep promises ‘prolonged shelf life of sensitive ingredients’ so ‘increasing productivity and savings costs’. Amongst other selling points, Meatshure®, an ‘encapsulated acidulant’, ‘prevents protein extraction’ and ‘controls alginate reaction to yield desired binding’. The pitch for Cavamax®, various cyclodextrin formulations, is that they offer ‘targeted protection and masking of specific flavourings’. Volactose is ‘a whey permeate that ‘allows exceptional handling in the manufacturing environment’ producing ‘superior surface browning’. A light brown liquid named Ecoprol, a melange of propyl gallate, citric acid, potassium sorbate, orthophosphoric acid, acetic acid and propylene glycol, sounded like a truly original fisherman’s friend, because it ‘extends the shelf life of fish, especially in the processing and marketing phase’.

  Food manufacturing terminology is as linguistically taxing as a foreign language, and possibly even more impenetrable to the uninitiated, because the underlying concepts and semantics are so utterly different from those that underpin lay discussions of the properties of food.

  Tired after hours of walking round Food Ingredients, and uncharacteristically, not feeling hungry, I sought refuge at a stand displaying cut up fruits and vegetables; it just felt so good to see something natural, something instantly recognisable as food in a sea of products that were quite the opposite. But why, I wondered, did they have dates, several weeks past, beside them? It was only in conversation with a salesman for Agricoat that I learned that the fruits had been dipped in one of its solutions, NatureSeal, which because it contains citric acid along with other unnamed ingredients, adds 21 days to their shelf life. Treated in this way, carrots don’t develop that tell-tale white that makes them look old, cut apples don’t turn brown, pears don’t become translucent, melons don’t ooze, and kiwis don’t collapse into a jellied mush. As for leafy salads, a dip in NatureSeal leaves them ‘appearing fresh and natural’.

  For the salesman, this preparation was a technical triumph, a boon to caterers who would otherwise waste unsold food. And there was a further benefit. Because NatureSeal is classed as a processing aid, and not an ingredient, there is no need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their ‘fresh’ fruit salad was weeks old.

  Somehow, I couldn’t share his enthusiasm for NatureSeal’s waste reduction potential because a disturbing thought had dropped into my mind. Had I eaten ‘fresh’ fruit salads treated in this way? Maybe I had bought a tub on a station platform, seeing it as the healthiest option in amongst an otherwise dire choice of junk? Or perhaps I had settled for it on a hotel buffet breakfast, thinking that it would be preferable to toast made from rubbish industrial bread?

  And then a further penny dropped. Even though I was someone who never knowingly eats food with obscure ingredients that I don’t recognise, I had probably consumed many of the wonder products at Food Ingredients 2013 unawares. So many of these products have been introduced, slowly and artfully, into ready-made, processed foods that many of us eat every day, in canteens, cafeterias, pubs, hotels, restaurants and takeaways that buy in and serve up factory-made products, everything from reheatable bistro meals and ready-to-bake baguettes, to ready-to-serve cheesecake and pre-rolled pizza bases. The fact is that we are all eating prepared foods made using such state-of-the-art food manufacturing technology, and mainly doing so unwittingly, either because these food components and aids don’t need to be listed on the label, or because weasel words, such as ‘flour’ and ‘protein’, peppered with the liberal use of the adjective ‘natural’, do not give us the full flavour of their production method. What’s more, we don’t have a clue, and probably neither do many manufacturers, about what this novel diet might actually be doing to us.

  Outside the exhibition halls, in the lobby, the movers and shakers of the food manufacturing world stood in huddles, cutting deals, swopping business cards and posing for photos for the next corporate brochure. Given the scarcity of anything truly food-like to graze on at Food Ingredients, it wasn’t too surprising to see that a long queue had formed for a pop-up pretzel stand. I was almost tempted to join it until I found myself wondering whether, perhaps, those warm pretzels owed their humid chew, their sheen, their flavour, their colour, or their smell to some of the innovative products on display inside. Instead, with a spring in my step I headed for a breath of fresh air outdoors. Food Ingredients had seriously blunted my appetite, and only reconnecting with food in its natural state would kick it back into life.

  5

  Fresh in store

  When you pop into an M&S food hall, you need a will of iron to walk past the in-store bakery without buying anything. After you have pushed your trolley down those sterile, odour-free, teeth-chatteringly cold aisles, past shelves banked high with convenience food in boxes, who isn’t going to be seduced? The pleasing contours and golden hues of the assorted Viennoiserie, traybakes, muffins, tea breads, pastries and loaves create a visual architecture that primes us to expect real food in a fresh-from-the-oven state. That captivating aroma curls its way under the nose, stimulating the salivary glands, engendering feel-good thoughts of happy homes, nurturing childhoods and reassuring, dependable everyday pleasures. With its base notes of yeasty bread, buttery croissants and crusty scones, and its top notes of cinnamon, fragrant apple, vanilla and chocolate, you would make a fortune if you could distil and bottle this heart-melting scent: Parfum de Home Baking, the nation’s comfort blanket.

  Nowadays, many of the in-store bakeries at M&S are state-of-the-art. This is relatively recent. By the chain’s own admission, they used to be behind the market in terms of sales and volume and were viewed as ‘clinical, uninspiring, out of touch and with below-average food-hall profitability’. They looked utilitarian, just like the standard supermarket in-store bakery where any come-hither scents created must compete with the brash odours of the washing powder aisle, but then they were revamped. Now they are smartly kitted out with gleaming white-tiled walls, stylish pendant lights, and a floor that looks like timeless limestone. Everything on sale is displayed unwrapped in rustic wicker trays, in baskets resting on wooden crates, or on jute sacks; this creates a more informal homespun look and encourages you to help yourself. Staff wear chefs’ whites under a linen-like apron, and a smart Nehru-style black cap, a mood board design ethos that combines the sophistication of Dean & DeLuca-style Manhattan deli chic with country barn.

  The point of all this effort is to ‘create theatre’ in the food hall, ‘drive purchase’ of other items (that is, get customers to buy more of everything else), and help establish M&S’s ‘food credentials’ as a specialist food retailer. This strategy has paid off handsomely. Profitability has tripled as the bakeries have seen record-breaking like-for-like growth.

  These bakeries look and smell so good, you might just think ‘Why on earth would I bother to bake?’ Even for dedicated home bakers who sit glued to the latest round of The Great British Bake Off for nights on end, it is terribly tempting to hang up your pinny and just graze from the in-store bakery. After all, M&S is widely held to be a cut above the other chains, and those loaves, cakes, buns and muffins do look like something an Earth-goddess-mum-come-craft-baker would knock up – and with all the associated simple virtues. Strategically situated near the shelves of pre-wrapped bakery goods, these goodies seem, by comparison, positively homely an
d low-tech. But are they?

  While all baked goods not made in an in-store bakery must, by law, come labelled with a complete list of every ingredient and additive in the mix, so that if you are interested, you can see what you will be eating, the same requirement does not apply to anything sold from in-store bakeries. Still, you’d think that progressive retailers would offer such information voluntarily.

  I tried to find the ingredient listings for M&S in-store bakery products online. In the ‘About our food’ sections of the M&S website it simply said ‘As some of our foods are freshly prepared in our stores, this page can help you find out the nutritional content’. It gave a breakdown for everything from the walnut loaf to the pecan and almond Danish pastry – how much fat, protein, salt, calories and so on – in one of those supposedly illuminating charts that purport to be the ultimate exercise in transparency, but which are more or less incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a professional dietician. Fulsome nutritional details, but no sign of an ingredient listing.

  I then asked the M&S press centre to provide me with the information, and got back a civil, but unilluminating response:

  I’m afraid as we don’t sell food online (other than our food to order), we don’t have a central database that I can direct you to, so it’s a bit tricky. If you could let me know the specific bakery products you’d like the ingredients for, I can certainly try to find out for you.

  And was it just me, or was there a rising note of defensiveness in the final line:

  Would you also mind giving me a bit more info about the book – what’s the angle you’re looking at?

  It sounded as though it could be like pulling teeth to extract ingredients lists via the regular press channels, so on a quiet Monday morning, I decided to visit an M&S in-store bakery in person, as a member of the public, thinking that this would be a more direct way to get an answer. I asked one of the women who was working away behind the baskets of bread and buns if I could see the ingredients listing for the products on sale. She looked a bit perplexed; this was clearly not a question she had been trained to answer. Still, trying to be helpful, she showed me information about allergens (soya, eggs, peanuts, etc.) and yet again, offered up that already familiar nutritional information. But, she said, there wasn’t a list of ingredients as such, only a behind-the-counter product guide for the bakery staff’s guidance. It did list ingredients by product, but she wasn’t sure if she could let me see it. Why was I asking anyway? Knowing what’s in your food should be a matter of public record, and the relevant information readily available, but it was beginning to feel like an off-the-wall, Freedom of Information Act request. Eventually, though I managed to see a copy of the manual.

  Flicking though the manual, it soon became apparent that there are quite a few nuggets of information contained within it that would act as a reality check for anyone who thinks that what they buy here isn’t that different from the homemade equivalent. For starters, it knocks on the head the wishful thinking inherent in the term ‘in-store bakery’: the cosy notion that these products are created from scratch on the premises. The manual makes it clear that, on the contrary, the products are purchased, usually frozen and ready to be finished off in ovens, from named third-party bakery companies all over the UK, then sold as fresh. Several of these suppliers are well-known brands in the world of catering, supplying products to everything from train station takeaways and hotels to coffee shops and supermarket chains. This is why the products in those country fair baskets look hauntingly familiar. You will have seen them, or products very similar to them, on many occasions, and in various settings.

  First up was the M&S jam doughnut. The functional product description in the manual is as follows: ‘A doughnut, deep fried in vegetable oil and injected with raspberry jam filling. Supplied with four plastic bags per case. Using these bags, doughnuts to be coated with approximately three grams of sugar in-store.’ The product sheet makes clear that the doughnuts arrive cooked and frozen and can be kept that way for nine months. All that the ‘bakers’ had to do was put them through the oven on a set programme (number 7 in the case of doughnuts, which is 120°C for eight minutes, followed by 100°C for three minutes), then allow them to cool before sugaring them in the bags provided. Et les voilà, nice ‘fresh’ doughnuts!

  The same push-button method of baking applied to other items on sale. Once these products are delivered to the store – either unbaked or part-baked, and frozen – staff simply had to bake them off at a specified oven programme: French apple pastries (Programme 15), custard pastries (Programme 17), cinnamon croissants (Programme 5), bread rolls (Programme 12), and so on. Perhaps the Real Bread Campaign was overstating its point when it described such in-store bakeries as ‘tanning salons’ for products that have been made in industrial bakery plants elsewhere, and joked about the ‘Great British Fake-Off’, but you can see what it was getting at.

  Baking method apart, the product information sheet did indeed provide a comprehensive ingredient listing, which covered some items you’d expect to find (flour, yeast, oil, sugar) and others that you might not (wheat gluten, ascorbic acid, dextrose, soya flour). While a homemade raspberry jam contains only two items – raspberries and sugar – this ‘raspberry jam filling’ was an amalgam of sugar syrup, raspberry purée, pectin, citric acid and calcium chloride E509, a ‘sequestrant’ chemical that acts as a preservative and firming agent. So the red stuff in your M&S doughnut was raspberry jam of sorts, but not jam as the Women’s Institute would know it.

  The Bakewell tart, supplied frozen and unbaked, with a freezer life of six months, offered another spin on raspberry jam, with ingredients that echo the jam filling in the doughnut, only this time it also included two different sugar syrups, sucrose syrup and glucose-fructose syrup, the latter a relatively modern formulation that health campaigners in the USA believe is helping to drive the obesity epidemic.

  And it was the same story with everything else on sale here – they all contained ingredients you won’t find in any home baker’s larder or, for that matter, in the kitchen of any self-respecting pastry chef. The ingredients in a homemade classic crème pâtissière would be milk, egg yolks, sugar, cornflour and a vanilla pod, or vanilla extract. But the crème pâtissière in the pain aux raisins, yet again supplied pre-prepared and frozen, was made from water, sugar, modified potato starch, dry whey (a milk protein), dried milk, maltodextrin (a starch that helps increase volume to create what food manufacturers refer to as ‘a rich mouthfeel’), xanthan gum (a gluey thickener), a product charmingly called ‘spent vanilla seeds’, as well as flavouring and colouring.

  Similarly, the first ingredient in the chocolate-filled muffins was not flour, but sugar; its further ingredients include glycerine, modified maize starch, three different E-numbered emulsifiers, dried whey, dried protein, guar gum (used as a ‘stabiliser’) and flavouring.

  A toothsome Danish pastry contained pectin (to provide a smooth, elastic gel structure in the custard), isomalt (a sugar alcohol), whey protein, flavouring, a gelling agent, an acidity regulator, a preservative, and mixed carotenes for colouring. The latter additive is derived either from plants or algae obtained by fermentation of a fungus, Blakeslea trispora. Put it this way, it’s not the sort of kit that your average home baker has to hand.

  As I photographed the product sheets, the enticing scent of the still warm cinnamon twists was making me feel ravenous, but then I saw its ingredients, which included potato starch, sodium alginate, xanthan gum, and agar (thickeners), enzyme (exact nature and purpose unspecified), calcium carbonate (a type of chalk), and colour, and it suddenly lost its winsome appeal.

  Bear in mind though that in ‘baking off’ pre-made frozen breads and pastries, M&S is only doing what all the other supermarket chains do, and because our big grocery chains often use the same third party, industrial bakery product companies, it seems not unreasonable to assume that the ingredients used, while they might vary a little, will not be hugely dissimilar.

 
Would takeaways be any different, I wondered? So it was off – where else? – to Greggs, Britain’s oldest and largest bakery chain. With more bakery shops than McDonald’s has burger bars, it is beginning to look every bit as much of a national institution as M&S. ‘We’re proud to be keeping the craft of fresh baking alive’, says Greggs. ‘Our bakers bake daily to our own unique recipes.’ Furthermore, Greggs boasts that ‘all the food we make is free from artificial colours, hydrogenated fats, and has no trans fats’, which sounds promising. The bragging doesn’t stop there:

  We’re proud to keep the art of the confectioner alive in our bakeries. We insist on using quality ingredients, like the tangy flavouring from Sicilian lemons and rich Belgian chocolate in our gorgeous muffins. Our dedicated confectioners always strive for perfection, many of our sweet treats are finished by hand. Our Yum Yums are hand-twisted and the cream on our cream cakes is piped by hand in true craft bakery style.

  Mmm, hand-twisted Yum Yums, now that certainly gets the gastric juices flowing.

  Because Greggs so clearly takes such a craft pride in its bakery art, surely it would be keen to provide me with further chapter and verse? Once again, its ingredients list seemed the obvious place to start. Walking into one of its town centre shops, which seems to be steadily busy from breakfast through lunch until tea-time, I posed the same question as I had at M&S – where is the ingredient list? – and got the same response. A pleasant woman behind the counter gave me a copy of a customer information leaflet headed ‘From wheat to eat’, with an expansive-looking section headed ‘What goes into your favourite savouries’, but yet again – groundhog day – in amongst the marketing spin, the only hard facts offered were a product-by-product nutritional breakdown: calories, energy value and so on. I reiterated that I was looking for ingredients listings. She shot me a your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine look, then pointed to the wall, where unobtrusive next to the chiller cabinets filled with sandwiches and soft drinks, was a terse customer advice notice. This still didn’t give me the full disclosure I was looking for, but it did offer a few hard facts, required by law, such as: