by Bee Wilson
In this atmosphere of universal mistrust of food, it becomes easier to be gulled by scaremongers who manipulate the fear of food to sell their wares. There is no shortage of food shamans—some of them call themselves “nutritionists”—prepared to tell you that you will irrevocably damage your body if you take another bite of cooked food/wheat/dairy/anything really, other than their own special approved food supplement, which you can conveniently send off for, only $69.99 for a month’s supply plus postage and handling.
Other food scares become exaggerated not because anyone stands to gain by them, but because they take on a life of their own, spiralling out of control. The Sudan 1 affair of 2005 was just such a needless panic. The biggest food recall in British history was triggered after some adulterated chilli powder was found in Crosse & Blackwell Worcester sauce, which had been supplied to all the main food manufacturers, going into more than four hundred supermarket products, from chicken lasagne and pepperoni pizza to country vegetable soup and shepherd’s pie. The discovery created widespread alarm. It was found that the chilli powder, imported from India, had been touched up with a red “azo dye” called Sudan 1, which has been declared a possible carcinogen (though this has not been proven), and which is commonly used in floor polish and boot polish. People were disgusted to think they had been eating cancer-causing boot polish! The Food Standards Agency tried to allay public concerns—“no need to panic” was the message from the FSA chairman. Yet the agency itself exacerbated the panic by demanding the recall of all four hundred affected products. Shoppers were alarmed. Usually such a gesture would be reserved for a serious hazard, such as food contaminated with shards of glass. What was forgotten in the midst of the panic was that the amount of Sudan 1 that had made its way into the processed foods was so negligible as to pose no risk at all to human health. Moreover, as recently as 2003, it was perfectly legal to import foods containing Sudan 1 into Britain. Thus only two years earlier, Sudan 1 had been an “additive.” not a toxin. The whole scare was a phantom.
Just as false and exaggerated dangers swarm everywhere, real dangers may become invisible. Trans fats (the popular name for partially hydrogenated fats or trans-fatty acids) are now generally seen to be something you wouldn’t want to eat too much of. Hydrogenated fats are produced through a chemical process that hardens vegetable oil by passing hydrogen through it. There is incontrovertible evidence that consuming too much of them can contribute to high cholesterol and heart disease. In December 2006, New York City banned all but tiny amounts of trans fats from the city’s restaurants.33 Big food corporations from Starbucks to KFC have announced that they are cutting back on trans fats in the foods they sell.
The question remains, however, what trans fats were doing in food in the first place. Their risks have been known about for thirty years.34 Yet until very recently, trans fats found their way into as much as 40 percent of “ordinary” processed foods, lending crispness and long shelf-life to cakes and biscuits, breakfast cereals and breads. It was only after an enterprising lawyer sued the manufacturers of Oreo cookies over their high trans fat content in 2003 that the food industry was finally shamed into looking for healthier fats. Before that, despite knowing the risks to the poor saps who bought their products, food manufacturers adored trans fats because they were cheap and reliable. Consumers were kept in total ignorance of their presence, since there was no requirement to list them on the label, alongside saturated and unsaturated fats (this changed in the United States as of 2006).
Worst of all, many products high in trans fats might say that they were “low in cholesterol” or “low in saturated fat,” statements that were true but entirely misleading, since trans fats are probably just as unhealthy as saturated ones. A couple of years ago, while researching an article on trans fats, I phoned the customer care line of a major British biscuit manufacturer. I told the “customer care adviser” that I was concerned about the fat in their biscuits: was it hydrogenated? A kind-sounding lady advised me not to worry; the fat was only “partially hydrogenated,” the implication being that this meant that it was only partially bad. (Perhaps, when my time came, it would give me only a partial heart attack.) The line that this nice lady had been asked to spin by her bosses was abject nonsense. In fact, all trans fats are “partially hydrogenated”; when the fatty acids become fully hydrogenated, they are free of trans. A lot of this kind of active misinformation must have gone on before the public finally woke up to the dangers of trans fats; before we moved from apathy to hysteria.
Trans fats were not the first invisible danger to be exposed as “not on the label”; nor will they be the last. Food campaigners have increasingly turned their attention not just to what is in food, but how it is produced. Processing aids are one of the hidden scandals of modern food, because unlike additives, they do not have to be declared on the label. Take enzymes. While Mark Woolfe uses his enzyme gels to detect adulterations, other enzymes are being used to disguise the true properties of foods. Enzymes are used to tidy up many of the inconvenient defects of nature: there are enzymes to tenderize meat and ripen cheese, enzymes to prevent discolouration in shrimp or white wine; enzymes to keep pickles crisp and to peel mandarin oranges before they are canned; and, most of all, enzymes to help make the perfect modern industrial loaf of bread: soft, white, and slow to go mouldy.35 To the baking industry, enzymes are “tiny invisible helpers,” proteins that speed up biological reactions, enabling industrial bakers to make stretchier dough, or to make high-rise bread from poor-quality flour, or to knead in more water, thus boosting profits.36 Most consumers have no idea they are even there. The reason that processing aids do not have to be listed on the label is that they are supposedly used up during production, leaving no trace of their existence behind. Yet this is contradicted by the fact that enzyme manufacturers themselves boast about the “thermostability” of their products, their ability to withstand the heat of the oven without altering; and by studies that have shown that significant traces of enzymes can remain after baking, including amylase, which is known to cause serious allergic reactions in some people.37
Enzymes in bread may seem like a trivial problem compared to arsenic lozenges. But the unheralded presence of these substances in bread is part of a bigger problem of food ethics. As the artisanal baker Andrew Whitley says: “If you don’t know what’s gone into your bread—in the fullest sense of those words—how can you exercise any meaningful choice over whether to eat it or not?”38 The European law on processing aids is currently under review; the Food Standards Agency is also looking at tighter labelling laws for enzymes. In the future, enzymes may have to be declared on the label, but they will probably be listed under the blanket term “enzymes,” with no indication of which particular enzymes have been used. For Whitley, this is not enough. “People have a right to know not just what is in their food but how it has been made.”‘39 This right has become all the more pressing in an age when the techniques by which a food is reared or grown have come under as much scrutiny as its ingredients. While much of the story of swindling in the twenty-first century turns out to be familiar, here is something genuinely new: the threat of biological changes to the basic structure of food itself.
Fatty Chickens and Agricultural Adulteration
At every other period in history, the best way to avoid adulteration has been to eat food that was what it said it was: basic agricultural produce. Arthur Hassall wanted mustard that really was mustard. Harvey Wiley sought out preservative-free meat. “EAT WHOLE, FRESH FOOD” was Caroline Walker’s summation of a lifetime of giving nutritional advice. The swindlers might be able to tamper with mixtures and powders, but some foods had an integrity that couldn’t be tampered with. A carrot was always a carrot; a chicken was always a chicken. If you stuck to fresh vegetables and fruits and poultry and wholewheat bread, you would be all right. Now, though, these old certainties seem to be crumbling, as the essential values of basic foods have changed.
In 2004, chicken—a supposedly low-fat
, “healthy” meat by comparison with beef—was found to contain nearly three times as much fat as it had thirty-five years earlier, thanks to changes in farming methods.40 Professor Michael Crawford, an expert on fats who works at the Institute of Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition at London Metropolitan University, commented that consumers who bought modern chicken in the belief it was good for them were “being sold a pup down the line.”41 For the first time since records had begun in the 1870s, the fat content in a basic roast chicken had overtaken its protein content. “Six times as many calories are coming from fat as from protein,” noted Professor Crawford. This was the case even with chicken that had been plainly roasted with lemon and salt, without so much as a drizzling of oil. In 1970, chicken contained 8.6 grams of fat per 100 grams; now, the average supermarket chicken contained a whopping 22.8 grams. A single roasted chicken leg had more fat than a Big Mac. The British now eat close to 30 kg of chicken per person per year, more than twice as much as in the 1970s.
Even if you avoid the skin—the fattiest part of the bird—and eat only the white breast meat, you still cannot get away from the essential problem. Crawford insists that “This whole focus on rapid growth, achieved through a high-energy, high cereal-based diet has changed the lipid composition of the chicken meat itself.”42 The chicken has been adulterated from within. Advocates of better animal husbandry would agree. The life of the average broiler chicken, debeaked, crammed in darkened, filth-encrusted sheds, and fattened up to a physique so top-heavy it could not fly even if it was given the chance, has been debased to a point where it is doubtful whether it should be called “chicken” at all. All this has been done to satisfy consumer demand for healthy white meat; there is a certain bleak justice in discovering that the broiler system is bad for us as well as for the poor chickens.
Human physiology is adapted to eating wild meats, which are dense and lean. As Crawford says, “Chickens used to roam free and eat herbs and seeds. . . . You just wouldn’t find anything like these [supermarket] chickens in the wild.”43 When modern industrially produced meat is put under the microscope—beef as well as chicken—it is possible to see signs of “pathological fat infiltration,” a fat so pervasive it inveigles its way between the animal’s muscles. The muscles themselves have largely atrophied from lack of exercise. Crawford argues that of the chickens currently on the market, “a free-range bird is best,” one that has been permitted the freedom to exercise its limbs and some time to grow at a natural pace; but even then, the fat content would depend on the diet the bird had been fed. Essentially, Crawford’s findings on chicken meant that “we now need a new definition of what we mean by a healthy food.”44
Some would argue that the same is true of modern fruits and vegetables, traditionally the last bastion against adulteration. Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University in London, has said: “We think of something like an orange as a constant, but it isn’t.”45 In 2002, a Canadian newspaper reported that fruit and vegetables sold in supermarkets contained “far fewer nutrients” than fifty years ago. The report concluded that consumers would have to eat eight oranges to obtain the level of vitamin A that an earlier generation got from a single fruit.46 Similarly, if records are correct, many British vegetables have lost much of the mineral content they had half a century ago. Broccoli has 80 percent less copper than it once did. Tomatoes have a quarter as much calcium. In each case, blame has been laid on intensive farming methods. David Thomas, a geologist, has claimed that the long supply chains, fertilizers, and hydroponic growing methods of modern agriculture, by which plants are grown not in the soil but in artificial matting, are the cause of this decline.47
While some fruits and vegetables have become depleted of nutrients, other have become supercharged with them, a result of genetic modification. Biotechnology has yielded tomatoes bursting with lycopene, vitamin A, and beta-carotene, and Monsanto’s “golden rice” enhanced with vitamin A. To proponents of genetic modification, these represent improvements on nature. To critics, GM crops are adulterations, not just of the individual foods that have been altered but of the whole horticultural environment, which may be affected by possible genetic mutation and biosphere damage.48 At the time of writing, there is still no requirement in the United States that GM foods be labelled as such. Chefs have complained that they may be forced unwittingly to adulterate the food they serve their customers. In 1998, one chef commented that “People come to [my restaurant] because they trust me [and] know I’m going to source out the highest quality ingredients in the market for their dining experience. By not requiring mandatory labelling of all genetically modified foods, the government is taking away my ability to assure customers of the purity of the foods they eat at my restaurants.”49
Such issues do not arise in Europe, where GM foods must be clearly labelled as such—not that they are often seen, because they are not grown at all in the EU. Even here, however, concerns remain that GM crops could cross-pollinate with non-GM crops and thus “contaminate” them. This is a particular concern with organic food. In 2003, Mauro Albrizio from the European Environmental Bureau commented that “the right to eat GM-free food will be severely compromised if GM crops are grown on a large scale.”50
Viewed from the opposite perspective, however, GM farming is not the cause of agricultural adulteration but a remedy for it. Biotech evangelists argue that by breeding plants that have inbuilt insect resistance—such as genetically modified maize—they will be able vastly to reduce the use of chemicals on crops. Critics dispute this. A detailed study by scientists at Cornell University in 2006 found that GM cotton farmers in China initially reduced pesticide use but ended up using as much as they did with conventional crops.51 Whatever the facts of the matter, it is interesting that from opposite sides of the great food debate, organic farmers and GM scientists both see heavy pesticide use as a kind of adulteration. They both present themselves as a way of purifying this adulteration.
This is where we arrive at the thorny question of purity once again. It is often forgotten that pesticide use—which some now see as an adulteration in its own right—proliferated partly as a remedy for adulteration. Pesticides once offered the dream of a totally clean food supply.
The “Filth Clause,” Pesticides, and Organic Fraud
One of the most troublesome parts of the U.S. Pure Food and Drugs Act concerns “aesthetic adulteration.” Clause 402(a) states that a food is regarded as adulterated if it contains any “filthy, putrid or decomposed substance or is otherwise unfit for food.” As we saw in chapter 4, the Pure Food and Drugs Act was drafted in the aftermath of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and the “filth” the lawmakers had in mind was the kind of unsanitary goings-on Sinclair uncovered among the Chicago meatpackers: diseased beef, doctored sausages, and so on. The lawmakers were not thinking of the clods of soil on an organic carrot; they were not thinking of the decomposed fish in a bottle of Thai fish sauce or the mould on a Stilton. In defining adulteration as “filth,” however, this clause encouraged just the sort of squeamishness about food that can send people running away from real food into the arms of industrial manufacturers. As one legal commentator has said, “taken literally,” the standard embodied in clause 402(a) “would bar any level of extraneous matter in food and render virtually all food adulterated.”52
In practice, this did not—could not—happen. The American courts have not prosecuted farmers for selling muddy apples or grapes with the odd tiny insect still running about among the stalks, accepting the fact that eliminating all filth from the food supply is a utopian impossibility. Everyone who works in food production recognizes that no food is entirely clean. The American public, however, has effectively been kept in a state of childlike innocence, its fragile sensibilities preserved from the truth that dirt and food coexist. As Peter Barton Hutt wrote in 1978, “Emotionally, the public is not prepared to accept the fact that agricultural produce is raised in fields and stored in barns.”53 In 1972, in the interests of greater opennes
s about food, the FDA experimented with releasing a formerly secret list of “filth guidelines”—the unavoidable “filth allowances” that existed for each food.54 Weems Clevenger, an FDA spokesperson, announced that it was impossible to make food 100 percent pure. “There are insect fragments in every loaf of bread,” he stated, and an allowance of one rodent pellet per pint of white flour.55 These revelations were greeted with a public outcry, and the experiment in transparency was not repeated. As Barton Hutt says, “the American public is not yet prepared to face each new day with label statements of the maggots, mould, rodent pellets, rat hairs and insects contained in their fruit juice, cereal, bread, jam and coffee.”56 The same is true in Britain, where an obsession with clean food is pursued under the name of hygiene.
In the United States, filth guidelines still exist, with different action levels for different foods, but they are not widely publicized. A full list is available on the FDA website, but you probably wouldn’t find it unless you were looking for it.57 Reading through the list gives the lie to the notion of perfectly clean food. The average jar of peanut butter may contain up to 30 insect fragments per 100 g and up to one rodent hair; tomato juice may contain 10 fly eggs or 2 maggots per 100 g from the drosophilia fly; ginger is permitted 3 mg of “mammalian excreta” per 100 g; blue-fin fish may have 60 parasitic cysts per 100 fish; fig paste may harbour 13 or more insect heads per 100 g; dried mushrooms are allowed 75 mites per 100 g; ground marjoram may contain an astonishingly high sounding 1,175 insect fragments per 10 g. Some of the guidelines seem amazingly precise: frozen spinach is permitted an average of