by Bee Wilson
Throughout the 1960s, however, studies had linked cyclamate with health problems. Studies in 1965 showed that cyclamates could cause cancer in lab rats, evidence initially discounted by the FDA. Further studies in Japan in 1966 showed that when cyclamates passed through the human body, they could create a different and highly dangerous chemical, cyclohexylamine (CHA). In America, several rats injected with cyclamates developed cancer of the bladder. Finally, in 1968, an FDA biochemist, Dr Jacqueline Verrett, did some experiments on the effects of cyclamates on chickens. She found that when cyclamate was injected into a hen’s egg, the resulting chicks developed hideous deformities, “such as wings growing out of the wrong part of the body, a leg rotated in the socket, and extreme curvature of the spine.”82 These are not the sort of images you want in your head when giving your child a vitamin pill. Dr Verrett’s results—which were publicized on TV, to widespread public horror—precipitated the nationwide ban on cyclamates in the United States and led to a voluntary withdrawal of cyclamates from many foods in Britain.
The cyclamates scandal did not, however, lead to a more sceptical attitude to diet foods and drinks in industry or government. On the contrary; with cyclamate gone, more slimming techno-foods were needed to take its place. There had been excitement in 1969, when the Journal of the American Chemical Society announced the accidental discovery of a new sweetener, made from amino acids and 180 times sweeter than sugar. It had been discovered by a scientist working at the laboratories of G. B. Searle, a big pharmaceuticals firm based in Illinois. The scientist, James Schlatter, was trying to develop a treatment for ulcers. One of the protein compounds Schlatter created spilled on his hand. Later in the day, he licked his finger and found that it had a distinctly sweet taste.83 By 1973, Searle was marketing this sweetener as “aspartame,” now famous as the essential ingredient in Diet Coke. In 1974, the FDA cleared it for use in dry foods. Yet again, however, the shadow of the Delaney Clause loomed.
This 1969 advertisement for Diet Pepsi boasts that the drink is no longer sweetened with cyclamates.
In 1974, a neuroscientist, Dr. John Olney, came to the FDA with reports of research he had done on aspartame in 1970, showing that one of its components, aspartic acid, had caused brain lesions in mice (something that Searle denied). Olney was joined by consumer lobbyists who protested that the approval of aspartame was premature. The FDA froze its approval of the sweetener until more research could be done. Finally, in 1980, a Public Board of Inquiry, which had been convened to consider the safety of the sweetener, voted unanimously to reject the use of aspartame—which now had the attractive name of NutraSweet—for the time being. The board took into account four studies. Three of them had concluded that aspartame was not carcinogenic; but one had reported an increase in brain tumours in rats. Taking a cautious view, the board concluded that there was a chance— however remote—that aspartame might be a carcinogen, and that it should not be marketed until further safety tests had been done.84
Just a year later, aspartame was once more approved by the FDA as safe for marketing. Why? The decision was influenced by economics and politics as well as science. By the end of the 1970s, there was enormous commercial pressure to clear aspartame for use. In 1977, the cyclamates nightmare was repeated when the FDA announced a ban on saccharin—then the only artificial sweetener permitted in the food supply—because Canadian tests showed that it could cause bladder tumours in lab animals.85 The U.S. food market was shocked. Consumers stockpiled cans of their favourite Tab—the low-calorie drink sweetened with saccharin—before it was removed from stores.86 Hundreds of workers at the Sweet’N Low plant in Brooklyn were put “on vacation.” There was a frantic search for alternative sweeteners, to shore up the growing diet food industry.87 The Department of Agriculture developed a sweetener called “narangin,” made from citrus peel. The drawback: consumers registered its sweetness only after ten to twenty seconds of contact with the tongue, which was no good for dieters, who wanted instant gratification. Another sweetener, Miraculin, made from West African berries, seemed a winner until its manufacturers went bankrupt. This left only aspartame—whose sweetness was instant and which came with stable financial backing from Searle.
The problem was obviously the scientific uncertainty about its safety. Then again, a new study by the Ajimoto company, the Japanese manufacturers of aspartame, concluded that it was safe for human consumption, after all.88 For the scientific community, this was just one more study—not the end of the story, but a springboard for further experiments. The science of risk can never eliminate uncertainty entirely. The law, however, cannot live in a state of flux. As one lawyer has written, apropos of the aspartame case, it is the job of the law to resolve questions “inexpensively and quickly.”89 In the end, it was politics that supplied the necessary confidence in NutraSweet.
Aspartame had been championed during the 1970s by Donald Rumsfeld, when he was chief executive of Searle, the company that manfactured it. In 1981, Rumsfeld moved to the White House, as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff. In that position, he oversaw the appointment of a new head for the FDA, who conveniently made the decision to overrule the board’s initial decision and approve aspartame. The FDA now endorsed Searle’s contention that there was no evidence of aspartame having a carcinogenic effect on the brains of animals; the science and statistics on which the fourth report had been based were flawed. In 1983, Coca-Cola announced the distribution of Diet Coke sweetened with NutraSweet, and before long it was one of the world’s most ubiquitous forms of sweetness. By 2005, it was being used in more than six thousand food and drink products around the world, including Diet Snapple, Sugar-Free Kool Aid, low-calorie crisps, chewing gum, yoghurts, vitamins, medicines, and desserts.90 Pepsi and Coke may be rivals in many respects, but they are united in their use of NutraSweet.
Meanwhile, consumer groups, spearheaded by campaigning attorney James Turner, have continued to raise doubts about the safety of aspartame.91 In 2005, it was widely reported that an Italian research project based at the Ramazzini Foundation in Bologna involving eighteen hundred lab rats had found an increase in lymphomas and leukaemia among the female rats who were fed aspartame. Spokespeople for aspartame, however, vigorously disputed the research results, insisting that they was “inconsistent with human epidemiological data.” The International Sweeteners Association commented that “with billions of man-years of safe use, there is no indication of an association between aspartame and cancer in humans.”92
Over the past twenty-five years, a great deal of research has concluded that aspartame is safe for human consumption.93 Much of this research has been funded by the aspartame industry, but some has been independent. As recently as 2006, a huge federally funded study on human beings, rather than rats, conducted by the National Cancer Institute in the United States found no increased cancer risk even among people who drank vast quantities of Diet Coke and other aspartame-sweetened sodas.94 Enemies of aspartame claim that the components of aspartame—especially aspartic acid and phenylalanine—can be associated with adverse symptoms, such as headaches and seizures. Aspartame’s advocates reply that “These components are consumed in much greater amounts from common foods, such as milk, meats, fruits and vegetables.”95 Nevertheless, in 2007, a major British supermarket, Sainsbury’s, announced that it was removing aspartame from all of its own-label soft drinks in response to customer concerns, and replacing it with sucralose, yet another nonnutritive sweetener.96
Who is right? Who can say? I would not dream of impugning the integrity of either Donald Rumsfeld, Diet Coke, Nutra Sweet, or the FDA. But nor am I keen on consuming aspartame on a regular basis, if I can avoid it; not because I think it is bad for me, but because I dislike the taste and find the notion of all noncalorific sweeteners—whether sucralose, saccharine, aspartame, or cyclamate—mildly creepy. The food writer Amanda Hesser has written of her prejudice against artificial sweeteners on the grounds that “I avoid eating food whose ingredients I can’t picture in my head.”
She remarks that “When you taste raw sugar, you can make out the grains on your tongue, and as they melt, your palate gets a gentle, glorious bath of sweetness and caramel,” whereas when you taste a sweetener “it gives you a jolt of sweetness and zero nuance.”97
Safety aside, the most interesting aspect of the explosion in slimming foods in the postwar years was the way that ersatz foods effortlessly transformed themselves into consumer desirables. They violated one of the most fundamental properties of food—which is to nourish—but did so with such swagger that you might think they were saving the human race. Scientists boasted of creating “nonfoods” that could be eaten “with pleasure and interest” without making anyone fat: “attractive meals of guaranteed physiological valuelessness.”98 In 1968, the General Foods Corporation took out a patent for making artificial fruits and vegetables, made from “an edible, crisp, chewable non-uniform agglomerate of calcium alginate cells.” These would be crunchy, like vegetables, but almost entirely lacking in food value. Another nonfood was the synthetic cherry, made by dropping cherry-coloured sodium alginate solution into a bath of calcium salt; over time, little cherrylike droplets would gel together. These non-cherry cherries had the “advantage” that they were not affected by the heat of an oven. By 1970 synthetic cherries had been successfully marketed in the United States, Australia, Holland, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Finland.
How was such a thing possible? How did these nonfoods manage to please consumers (or at least some of them), when the ersatz foods of the early twentieth century had caused such fear and loathing? The answer lay not just in the very different circumstances in which they were produced: war and peace. They also owed their success to the machinations of the food technicians who laboured to make nonfoods “acceptable” to the average palette. Their chief tool in this quest was an astonishing new array of flavourings.
The Brave New World of Flavourings
In the early 1970s, a firm named Stevenson & Howell ran an advertising campaign in the food trade press. The ads featured pictures of mutant fruits—a pineapple crossed with an apple, or a plum that had mated with a strawberry, or a weird “pear-nana,” half banana, half pear. The tag-line read: “We can create any flavour you like. Try us.”99 It went on: “There’s nothing our research boffins enjoy more than to be given a big, juicy problem. One that can really stretch them. If the flavour you have in mind doesn’t exist at the moment. Fine. If it does exist but you want an improvement on Nature. Even Better.” An ad for a rival firm, Florasynth, showed a blond-haired toddler sucking his thumb. “There are very few flavours we can’t reproduce” was the slogan.100
During these halcyon years for synthetic flavourings, there was a mood of excitement and possibility among the scientists who chose the career of the commercial “flavourist.” Gone was the furtive shame of the flavour adjusters of the nineteenth century, the crude fraudsters exposed by Accum and Hassall who used chilli to spice up ginger or citric acid in the place of lemon. These new flavourists saw themselves as artists, operating with the blessing of the government, Willy Wonkas who could fashion entire meals out of nothing. They had an elevated view of their calling: “It is by the artistry of the flavourist that a flavour stands or falls,” said one.101 In exercising their highly attuned senses to harness a whole spectrum of flavours, they were like the haut-parfumiers of Paris, except that instead of essence of violets or tincture of rose, they used tomato extenders and powders of artificial cheese. The similarity was no accident. The flavourings industry emerged initially as a subsection of the perfume industry. Both depended, first, on the science of essential oils, and later, on “synthetics.” The world’s biggest flavour manufacturers—IFF in the United States and Givaudan in Switzerland—still create perfumes as well. As the Givaudan website says, it is all part of the same “sensory innovation,” whether the thing being created is body lotion or a beef stock cube.102
The “pearnana”—a 1970s’ trade advertisement from Stevenson & Howell.
Like the perfume artists of France, the flavourists used the vocabulary of music to describe what they did: the harmony of the perfect flavour; the scale of sweet, sour, salty, bitter.103 In his 1970 book, Synthetic Food, Magnus Pyke compared the incredible new tastes coming out of the flavour labs to the inventiveness of great composers: “After all, a Beethoven symphony is an artificial mixture of noises unknown to nature, but, in many people’s opinion, better than any natural sound. The taste of Coca-Cola is also unknown to nature.”104 In 1973, one flavour chemist wrote that the true flavourist “must have virtuosity . . . as does a musician in command of his instrument: a complete confidence in his own ability to extract from his medium the full scope of possible effects.”105 It sounds so impressive, you could almost forget what the virtuosity was for, namely. creating fake prawn cocktail flavouring for crisps or black cherry flavour for frozen dessert.
The new music of flavour came in many different forms. At the more traditional end, there were single-note essences such as lime, hazelnut, or coffee. Also common were “oleoresins,” concentrated solvent extractions from certain natural ingredients, such as paprika, cloves, black pepper, celery. More exciting to the flavourists were “seaslics” or liquid savoury flavourings, which represented “total flavourings” for such products as pâté de foie, liver sausage, or Polish sausage. Powdered flavour mixes gave the plethora of new snack foods their moreish qualities. Then there was the whole family of flavour extenders and enhancers, which tricked the palette into thinking that what it was tasting was realer than it was. With “tomato extenders,” manufacturers could drastically cut down on the amount of real tomatoes they needed to use. As with the adulteration of the past, so it was with these new flavours. One additive led to another. Flavourings often needed “flavour adjuncts” before they could be added to food. Extenders— such as cellulose—could “carry” or “extend” a feeble flavour to make it seem richer and longer in the mouth. Spray-dried emulsified oils gave “mouthfeel” to soups and sauces, deluding you into thinking that there was more to them than powder and water. Flavour enhancers—such as MSG (monosodium glutamate)—and flavour suppressors—such as sucrose—could mask unpleasant flavours and magnify desirable ones. More recently, a substance called Miraculin has been developed that changes sour into sweet in the mouth.106
A waste of good science? The flavourists didn’t think so. They took pride in the thought that they were creating an entirely new sensory landscape. In the prewar period, commercial food flavouring was not so very different from what the cook might do at home with a collection of spices, zests, and essences. In 1922, a Mr. A. Clarke, a technical food adviser to various British firms, revealed that a standard commercial sarsparilla flavouring consisted of sarsparilla root, sassafras bark, and licorice extract—a very natural combination. A spicy “cake flavour” mix might be nothing more than cinnamon bark oil mingled with clove oil, bitter almond oil, lemon oil, and sweet orange oil—a delicious-sounding mixture entirely in keeping with the traditions of home baking, the only difference being that the home cook would probably use orange and lemon zest, powdered cinnamon and clove, and almond essence.107
Admittedly, some artificial flavours were already in use. Fruit-flavoured confectionery was often made from a mixture of natural fruit essences with artificial fruit “esters.” These are compounds made by the reaction of an acid and an alcohol. Following their discovery in the mid-nineteenth century, esters were used in the manufacture of synthetic eau de colognes and floral extracts. For example, Geranyl Propionate was found to have an odour resembling bergamot, while Styrolyl Valerianate had a strong scent of jasmine. Other esters smelt fruity and were used to boost natural fruit essences. Ethyl Cinnamate had a nose uncannily like ripe apricot, while Phenyl-Ethyl Acetate was peachy. Isopentyl acetate has a powerful odour with a distant resemblance to pears. It would come to be used in the tooth-cracking boiled sweets called pear drops. Many English children were fond of them. No one could pretend, however, that pear drops
really taste like pears. Their flavour is one-dimensional, basic. Continuing the musical analogy, pear drops were like a symphony with all the instruments missing except for one.
By contrast, the postwar flavourist’s art was all about complexity and creating flavours that could almost stand in for the real thing. Thanks to the advent of gas chromatography, a technology that could separate out many different chemicals from a complex compound, the flavourist enjoyed a hugely widened palette. In 1966, a “tolerable” artificial flavouring for pineapple consisted of no fewer than ten chemical compounds mixed with seven natural oils.108 Now, the figure would be much higher. In Fast Food Nation in 2001, Eric Schlosser listed the flavour ingredients that go into a typical artificial strawberry flavour, “like the kind found in a Burger King strawberry milk shake”:
Amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethyl amyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanaote, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphrenyl-2-butanone (10 per cent solution in alcohol), α-ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, γ-undecalactone, vanillin and solvent.