Swallow This

by Joanna Blythman

  Food manufacturers also find batters and crumb coatings useful because they reduce one of their perennial technical issues: excessive oil ‘pick-up’. Here is the problem; when food is cooked in really fresh hot oil, the oil acts as a heat transfer agent, and there is no excessive absorption of oil into the food (pick-up). But as industrial food manufacturers use oils over and over again, the chemical and physical properties of the oil change, causing more oil to be absorbed. Never fazed, food manufacturers get round this challenge by creating an edible film around the food (turkey drummer, fish fillet, veggie burger, whatever) to bind in moisture. To do this job, they can turn to specially developed fish, meat and dairy proteins, sugar-based ‘gelators’, or hydrocolloids such as xanthan gum, konjac or HPMC ((hydroxypropyl)methyl cellulose). These gummy aids form a sticky barrier gel around the food and contribute greatly to its ‘freeze-thaw’ stability. In other words, the batter or crumb won’t appear soggy and start coming away from the food when it is defrosted. A ‘pre-dusting’ in a chemically modified starch will also act, in food manufacturing language, as a ‘texturiser’, sealing in moisture and reducing ‘blow-out’ (when the food bursts out of its coating).

  Somehow, the more you learn about commercial-scale deep frying, the less you feel like eating the resulting products, and to give full credit to the public health establishment in this regard, you have been warned. Most of us have heard the message that too many deep-fried foods are bad for our health, even if we tend to believe that saturated fat is the reason for the objection. But when polyunsaturate-rich oils are used to make non-fried products, in industrial baking for example, they are presented as nutritional saviours. The smoothest and most oleaginous of ambassadors for this proposition is margarine, or to give it its more bewitching modern title, low-fat spread. Low-fat spread is the family pet of the UK nutrition establishment, head prefect and hero product, an Achilles in the vanguard of the healthy eating charge. Its healthfulness is enshrined in government eating advice. The NHS even helps to sell the stuff: ‘Butter is high in fat, so try to use it sparingly. Low-fat spreads can be used instead of butter’, it tells us with great authority.

  Actually, you’d think that the dietetic establishment might by now have become more circumspect in the advice it dispenses, given that for half a century, it promoted margarine spreads stiff with trans fats, which we now know to be decisive life-shorteners. In 1993, for instance, the leading ‘heart-healthy’ margarine contained 21% trans fats and ‘normal’ margarines were one-third trans fats. It is only in the last decade that manufacturers have begun reformulating their spreads with allegedly less damaging alternatives. But don’t expect any mea culpa, no ‘sorry, we got it wrong’ statement from government nutrition gurus, or for that matter from the charities that become plump and lazy, recycling and disseminating tablets of nutritional wisdom dispensed from above. Instead, they have tried to bury that particular embarrassment.

  While NHS guidelines now grudgingly acknowledge that ‘consuming a diet high in trans fats can lead to high cholesterol levels in the blood, which can lead to health conditions, such as heart attacks, strokes and heart disease’, a statement to minimise any alarm caused follows closely. ‘However, most people in the UK don’t eat a lot of trans fats. We eat about half the recommended maximum of trans fats on average, which is why the more commonly eaten saturated fat is considered a bigger health risk’. In other words, trans fats weren’t and aren’t a problem, but those deviant saturated fats devised by psychopathic Mother Nature are still the root of all evil. This continues to be the entrenched official nutrition gospel, even though in 2010, a major review of 21 scientific studies on fat stated that ‘there is no significant evidence for concluding that saturated fat causes heart disease’. By 2014, the British Heart Foundation was still adhering to its anti-saturated fat doctrine after a systematic, wide-ranging study, funded by the foundation itself, examined 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, and found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk.

  For their part, manufacturers of spreads are keen to tell us, once again, that they are now using much healthier trans fat-free oils. Groundhog day. This time interesterified fats are presented as the heroes of the hour. But are they?

  To make these interesterified fats, oil refiners rearrange the fatty acids in liquid oil at a high temperature, and under pressure, using enzymes or chemical catalysts. This changes the melting points and makes the resulting oils harder and more ‘plastic’ or malleable. Whether interesterified oils are any less lethal in health terms than the hydrogenated ones they are replacing remains to be seen, but already research studies are flagging up negative effects on blood glucose, insulin, immune function and liver enzymes in humans. As one group of researchers warns: ‘More research is warranted to determine the appropriateness of interesterified fat consumption, particularly before it becomes insidiously embedded in the food supply similar to TFA [Trans Fatty Acids] and intake levels are achieved that compromise long-term health.’ That sounds awfully like scientists saying: ‘We made a big mistake with trans fats. Let’s not make another one.’

  Nevertheless, the dietetic establishment’s evangelical enthusiasm for spreads, now made with RBD oils that have been interesterified, goes on unchecked. For instance, in 2014 the UK government Change4Life campaign, which is meant to be about urging citizens to make healthier food choices, asked: ‘Why not swap butter in your mash for lower fat butters and spreads?’ Anticipating groans and ‘Do I have to?’ reactions, it added chirpily: ‘It will still be creamy and just as tasty.’

  Really? Even margarine manufacturers never try to assert that spreads taste as good as butter. Wisely so: to do so is preposterous. Butter has an inimitable flavour, and is clean on the palate. Margarine spreads, on the other hand, leave a greasy coating on the roof of the mouth and taste of nothing pleasant. Yet switching from butter to margarine is a UK government-endorsed ‘Smart Swap’. That our public health advisers never miss an opportunity to champion such a thoroughly artificial and fake food concoction speaks volumes about their failure to grasp the essentials of good food. But it does highlight their queasily close embrace of industrial food manufacturing, and all its dubious products.

  If you think about it, margarine is an edible construction that owes its very existence to technology. It is a forced marriage of two cheap substances that won’t naturally come together: oil – refined and processed out of all recognition – and water. This unwilling twosome is coerced into an alliance brokered by emulsifying additives. The resulting slippery sludge then needs to be coloured to be lifted out of murky greyness, flavoured to help us get it down our gullets, fortified with vitamins it lacks, and spiked with substances to stop it turning rancid. Is this really what we ought to be eating?

  8

  Flavoured

  So accustomed are we to seeing that familiar word ‘flavouring’ on the ingredients lists of manufactured food, we have almost stopped noticing it. At one level, it is easily comprehensible: a substance that imparts flavour. At another level, the term is utterly opaque. What is flavouring actually? Is it animal, vegetable, mineral? How is it made? What is its composition? What does it look like? We swallow these mystery additives regularly in everything from crisps and drinks to ready meals and yogurts, yet most of us haven’t a clue about them.

  Because flavourings always sit so far down on the ingredients listing, we can be forgiven for assuming that they are just trivial little extras. Like a few last-minute drops of truffle oil on a painstaking risotto, we want to think that they are merely rounding off well-made food. But that perception couldn’t be further from the truth. Although food manufacturers add flavourings to processed food in tiny quantities, they have a disproportionately transformative effect on them. In fact, they are the miraculous ‘X factor’ that makes countless manufactured foods possible. In the words of the flavouring company, Carotex: ‘It is difficult to imagine how certain products would taste
without flavours added in their production.’ And why might that be? ‘The technological processes of mass food production often result in loss of flavour and mouthfeel. To compensate for this, products are enriched with supplementary flavours.’

  This circumspect language does not convey the full extent of food manufacturers’ dependency on flavourings. Forget enrichment; that term implies that you are taking something that is well endowed with flavour in its own right, then improving it by adding something that further embellishes it. In the context of processed food, quite the opposite is the case. The hard fact of the matter is that the extreme temperatures and stress involved in industrial food manufacture do grievous bodily harm to natural ingredients, irrevocably damaging their intrinsic textures, flavours and aromas. Any casualties that aren’t dead on the pavement after the brutal assault are left clinging on to life in a shaky, weakened, scarred, never-the-same-again state. They need help, and so added flavourings step in to boost them, additives that make it possible to sell the otherwise unsellable by conning us into thinking that food and drink tastes of something that it does not.

  Although hoodwinking our taste buds is the prime driver for adding flavourings, their pivotal importance in food processing doesn’t end there. Not only do they cover for a dearth of true taste, they also do the vital job of actively suppressing undesirable flavours and smells created by the manufacturing process. Carotex informs its manufacturer clients that its flavourings can be used ‘as masking agents to cover any unwanted odours’. Flaverco, a company selling dairy flavourings ‘with flavour strength up to 70 times that of cream and milk’, explains to prospective customers that they are ‘excellent at masking off flavours’. These ‘off’ tastes and smells are part and parcel of industrial food processing, a consequence of severe treatments that denature them – ultra-heat treatment, centrifugation, evaporation, deodorising, spray drying, sterilisation, pasteurisation, extrusion, for instance – or traces of chemical solvents and residual contaminants, such as heavy metals.

  Flavourings also hide the jarring tastes of common processed food ingredients. For instance, the trendy sweetener stevia, artificial sweeteners, whey protein, and the salt substitute potassium chloride, all leave lingering bitter, metallic tastes. Soya protein and added vitamins trail astringency in their wake. The Butter Buds® company, whose quaintly folksy motto is ‘Making the most of Mother Nature’, sells its dairy flavourings to ‘round out harsh notes’, for which read residual taints lingering on from the production process that would offend the olfactory system. Symrise is another company active in the flavour-masking field that offers manufacturers ‘customised masking solutions for tastes you want to hide’. It says that its ‘flavor development expertise, creative problem-solving skills and technological toolbox of masking agents’ can help manufacturers overcome ‘undesirable sensory perceptions, avoid troublesome off-flavors’, and ‘suppress off-notes while simultaneously increasing flavor impact’. As you can see, in food manufacturing, getting rid of unpalatable tastes and reeks is almost as much of a preoccupation as adding in desirable ones.

  Flavourings deceive our taste buds and disguise the stink of industrial food manufacture, but they also perform a purely financial function: they are cheap, and so make it possible for manufacturers to use less of something more expensive. As the cost of real food ingredients steadily mounts, manufacturers have a strong financial incentive to bump up their use of flavourings. Less cheese, more cheese flavouring, less lemon juice, more lemon flavouring, less beef, more beef flavouring, and so on. It’s only business sense.

  Kalsec®, a company very active in flavouring supply, offers this example of just how profitable dialogue between food industry chemists (‘flavourists’ as they prefer to be known) and manufacturers can be:

  A leading manufacturer of private label [branded] foods met our team at an industry trade show. They inquired about cost savings for one of their condiment products. Following up with this customer immediately after the show, Kalsec®’s team went to work. While cost savings was the goal, it was equally important to match the existing flavor profile of this product. The Kalsec® Application Team analysed the product and returned within two weeks with a matching profile for bench scale testing. In collaboration with the Kalsec® team, the private label company made minor tweaks in the formulation and a successful liquid alternative was developed. This condiment was now ready for store shelves at a considerable savings and with a timely turnaround.

  ‘Considerable saving’ is a term guaranteed to prick up the ears of food manufacturers, and flavourings make it possible to put an appealing ingredient on a product label, but use very little of it. An industry flavour chemist offers the example of the recently fashionable, and very expensive, açai berry:

  Instead of adding açai juice to a dairy beverage, a natural açai [flavouring] could be added, which consists of açai extracts and natural aroma materials to mimic açai taste. A flavor is preferred, because the overall taste nuance can be adjusted – fresh versus fruity, versus jammy or cooked. The flavor also allows for an increased shelf life, provides ease of use and decreases cost.

  Put it this way, flavourings may be small in bulk, but they are mighty and multi-tasking in effect. Simulation, modification, masking, that’s the very essence of flavouring, as one flavour chemist summarises:

  Flavors are used to impart or simulate a taste characteristic of choice, to modify a flavor that is already present, to maintain the flavor character after processing or to mask some undesirable flavor to increase consumer acceptance.

  So much research and development goes into formulating flavourings that it’s hard for food manufacturers to keep up to speed with the technology. The lists, portfolios, catalogues and ‘flavour libraries’ of flavouring companies are lengthy, and couched in terminology that is as slippery as an eel. They include flavour components, flavour emulsions, flavour boosters, recovery flavourings, concentrated and non-concentrated flavourings, replacer flavourings, heat management flavourings, bitterness blockers, fantasy flavourings, flavour precursors, soy suppressors, top-notes, long flavourings, reaction flavourings and sensation flavourings. The latter are evidently designed to thrill the palate. Some companies try helpfully to explain to their customers the function of the various options. The ‘flavour solution’ categories used by Comax, for instance, include ‘acid masking flavours, mouthfeel [mouth filling] flavours, debitterising flavours, sweetness enhancing flavours, fat replacing flavours, fried note flavours, cooling flavours, salt enhancing flavours’, and last but not least, ‘salivation enhancers’. Just reading this classification makes you want to lick your lips.

  If food manufacturers need help to keep abreast of the latest innovations in the flavouring field, and make their selection from literally thousands of flavouring products that enable a dizzying number of flavour permutations, what should an industry outsider make of them all?

  When you open the door onto food industry flavourings, you walk into a most original and downright ingenious grand bazaar of man-made smells and tastes. To get our bearings, most of us will seek out those we know, old stalwarts like peppermint. But then the eclectic selection spins off like a Catherine wheel in all directions, and the further into this odiferous marketplace we go, the more fantastical, hallucinogenic and positively surreal those flavourings become.

  The selection begins with a comprehensive list of fruit flavourings, everything from passion fruit and pitahaya, through to peach and pomegranate, with multiple cultivars represented, so you don’t just get raspberry flavouring, you also get black raspberry flavouring. There is an entire family of grape flavourings alone – Arkadia, Concorde, Isabella, Muscat and more. The foraging section includes sea buckthorn, truffle and rosehip flavourings. In the carvery, there are ‘hamburger spice’, fried chicken, smoked salmon, Serrano ham, Polish ham, bacon, roasted pork, boiled pork, beef, barbecue, chicken bouillon and ‘herb-crusted ham’ flavourings. Various smoke flavourings (mesquite, hickory, beech, oa
k, applewood) jostle for attention next to roast chicken, pit-roasted pork, Arabian burger flavourings and a ‘deliciously slow roasted prime rib of beef’ variant developed to ‘give your products that special authenticity note’. Not just any old flavouring then, but a special, slow-roasted flavouring from a named butcher’s cut. Bear in mind that many flavourings, such as Parma ham, sourdough bread and quince, are clearly designed for use in up-market products, items for which you’ll pay a premium at the delicatessen.

  Fishy flavourings are represented en masse: anchovy, concentrated clam, crab, generic ‘seafood’, scallop and a whole shoal more. The vegetables and herbs section in the flavourings emporium is stacked to the roof with garlic, asparagus, potato, spring onion, marjoram, tomato, celery, onion, shallot, cucumber, and every other vegetable you can think of, in various cooked (char-grilled, roasted, sun-dried) and raw states.

  By way of spices and condiments, ketchup, Cajun, pimento, allspice, anise, black pepper, Jamaican jerk, Dijon mustard, Worcestershire sauce, Kimchi and gingerbread flavourings are just a drop in an ocean of possibility. There are pistachio, walnut, chestnut, peanut, macadamia, sesame, coconut and coconut water flavourings, pesto and pizza flavourings a go-go. Vanilla offers a whole tribe: Tahitian, Mexican, vanilla ‘cream’. Honey represents another family tree with several branches: clover, acacia, lavender, pine, chestnut, thyme. The dairy department groans with cheesecake, cream, mascarpone, tiramisu, Gorgonzola, feta, ricotta, Emmental, mozzarella, goat’s cheese, buttermilk and yogurt flavourings.