When technology meets nature, you save!
This week will be released the book “Swallow This: Serving Up The Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets”, by the British investigative food journalist and writer Joanna Blythman. Saturday 21 February 2015, The Guardian has published an abstract of the book on its website (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/21/a-feast-of-engineering-whats-really-in-your-food?CMP=fb_gu). Blythman’s analysis allows us to explore the debates about the role of technology in the industrial production of food, with a particular attention on chemicals in food and its worldwide health concern.
Traditional cheddar is not considered truly mature until it has spent between nine and 24 months in the maturing room. Food engineers can now create a “natural” mature cheese flavouring by blending young, immature cheese with enzymes that intensify the cheese flavour until it reaches “maturity” – within 24 to 72 hours. ‘Everything nature can do, man can do so much better, and more profitably’.
How little we know about the food that sits on our supermarket shelves, in boxes, cartons and bottles? Often this food has had something done to it to make it more convenient and ready to eat. For instance, why do the fruit at supermarket have dates several weeks past beside them? They had been dipped in some solutions, such as ‘NatureSeal’, which adds 21 days to their shelf life. Treated in this way, cut apples do not turn brown, pears do not become translucent, melons do not ooze and kiwis do not collapse into a jellied mush. A dip in NatureSeal leaves salads “appearing fresh and natural”.
The history of food processing is littered with ingredients that were initially presented as safer and more desirable, yet subsequently outed as the opposite. Blythman draws our attention on the clean-label campaign: is it a heart-and-soul effort by manufacturers to respond to our desire for more wholesome food? Or just a self-interested substitution exercise? Meanwhile, the journalist points out, there is no evidence that manufacturers are using greater quantities of the real, natural ingredients consumers want.
Contributed by GiuliaCavicchioli on 23/02/2015
One response to “When technology meets nature, you save!”
Thank you, Giulia, for introducing us to Blythman’s work. I have read her article in the Guardian on Saturday and also thought that it was very relevant to the OiM course.