Inside the food industry

So, this article highlights important issues with convenience foods, with a minimum of fearmongering relative to the standard of this topic.

The article claims that rosemary extract is Bad because it substitutes for BHA/BHT, a preservative. At this point I stopped reading due to an overwhelming urge to bang my head into the table. Preservation is in fact a major reason for seasoning-- in a preserved meat, no less! (And BHA/BHT are antioxidants-- which makes them Good...)

Similarly, it's not surprising that yeast extract (nutritional yeast Good) contains the Bad MSG. Glutamate is a fundamental building block of life. If you've ever tasted yeast extract, you will immediately notice that it's very salty. The only reason to eat it is as a flavor enhancer, because as a major constituent it's too salty-- except for various Commonwealth countries that like to put it on toast.

Etc...

Shit, I bet the egg yolks in my cake batter are Bad because they substitute for cholesterol, an emulsifier and flavor enhancer which is linked to diseases (it also tastes nasty on its own)

Crappy food optimized for convenience, scale and profit is a huge problem. I hate-- the actual, painful, comsuming hate-- convenience foods and I double hate franchise restaurants etc. because they reduce the amount of "real," freshly prepared, flavorful food immediately available to me. But that doesn't obviate the need for critical thinking.

Finally, as a practicing biochemist and excellent cooker/eater I'm Offended by the insinuation that one cannot be equally comfortable in a kitchen or in a lab.

Derek Lowe's several article[0]s should be boilerplate at the end of any chemicals vs food piece.

[0] http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/04/30/is_that_food...

Edit: after skimming the remainder of the article, it becomes clear that its author has never cooked anything

People who are hung up on ingredients being "natural" drive me nuts. I'm 100% for rigorous product testing to ensure safety, but if an ingredient is safe and allows the creation of higher quality food, it shouldn't matter it is natural or not. Cars, the internet and modern medicine aren't "natural" either...

There are literally tons of people who will ridicule anti-vaccination nuts, then turn around and insist all food be "natural", completely oblivious to the hypocrisy.

I can see a lot of positive comments here, but say that even IF these additives don't impose any risks to the consumers, apparently this is still something the consumers don't want. For the industry to then whitelabel these ingredients is just like Lenovo secretly puts adware on their laptops with the arguments that they are helping their customers find new products.

I don't want you to help me in secret. I want you to be transparent so I can make my own decisions!

Starting a food startup revealed a lot of this stuff to me. There's something called "clean labeling" which refers to the ability to put various synthetic shelf life or flavor enhancing compounds in your foods and label it as something innocuous sounding due to skirting the labeling laws. The companies that generate these compounds advertise them as such. This intersects with the fact that the FDA operates essentially on a complaint basis. That is, if they don't receive any complaints about something it is very unlikely to ever be looked in to. And how would you know to complain if the package just says "modified starch"? So it's hard to credibly differentiate yourself along this dimension since in some cases there is literally no way that the customer could tell that one company is using less crap in their food.

I live out in the country. My favorite part of the summer is that most of the food I consume is coming from farms/homes that are within 2 miles of where I live. Vegetables from one guy, chicken, eggs, meat from another. It's hard to keep up with it in the winter, but it really opened my eyes as to what I am eating. I started out just thinking, "I wonder if I could eat without going to the grocery store." It was surprisingly easier than I thought and then I realized all the health stuff after. Its nice knowing where my food comes from.

I would be surprised if how easy ingredients are to pronounce is correlated with their health. Since half of all food is wasted, preservatives could even be good for the environment.

Ingredients of an All-Natural Banana: https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2013/12/12/ingredie...

> NatureSeal is classed as a processing aid, not an ingredient, so there’s no need to declare it on the label, no obligation to tell consumers that their “fresh” fruit salad is weeks old.

Here's how the FDA defines processing aids [1]:

    (ii) Processing aids, which are as follows:

        (a) Substances that are added to a food during the
        processing of such food but are removed in some
        manner from the food before it is packaged in its
        finished form.

        (b) Substances that are added to a food during
        processing, are converted into constituents normally
        present in the food, and do not significantly
        increase the amount of the constitutents naturally
        found in the food.

        (c) Substances that are added to a food for their
        technical or functional effect in the processing but
        are present in the finished food at insignificant
        levels and do not have any technical or functional
        effect in that food.

I have not seen anything that says that it means to have a "technical or functional effect".

Speaking of food labeling, I just last night noticed something odd at Domino's. Here is what they list on their site as the ingredients in their garlic dipping sauce:

    Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Natural Flavor,
    Soy Lecithin, Artificial Flavor, Beta Carotene (Color).

I can't help but notice that their "garlic" dipping sauce has no listed ingredient that has any obvious connection to garlic.

[1] http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFRS...

The problem lies deeper. The main problem is the alienation between the producer and consumer. Industrialization does not fit well with food production. Because price optimization through division of fixed costs leads to standardized high volume products. But it is diversity that is healthy, tastes good and is natural.

The Community-supported agriculture (CSA) model or Food cooperatives (foodcoop) directly addresses those fundamental problems.

The author of this article and the food industry seem to know what the people want:

> Ingredients that give the impression that they originated in a grandmother’s kitchen and have not been processed too harshly are of great appeal to consumers.

The common convenience food route minimize price and maximize flavour but ignores nutrition. They are so optimized flavor-wise that they are literally addicting. On the other hand, "natural" foods maximize "healthy sounding" ingredients. What if advancements in the food industry were used in healthy food too? For example, what if we could create a spinach salad that is as addictive as dorritos?

As an example from the article, the scientists were able to transform potato protein into something that tastes like "butter, cream, and eggs." There's no mention of the nutritional value of this stuff but imagine if it was a powder with no nutritional value (like Splenda) which you could sprinkle over your previously bland and healthy food to make it taste buttery?

Industrial processes are slowly making their way into the mainstream with books like Modernist Cuisine. As an example from the book, the common "grandmother" way to thicken gravies and other sauces is to use flour or corn starch. However, these thickeners require (1) a large amount of starch, and (2) have a large particle size. The result is that the flavour in the food decreases (perhaps now you need to add more salt), and the mouthfeel becomes gritty. Scary commercial chemicals such as N-Zorbit (Tapioca Maltodextrin) don't have this problem.

There's no big secret about this. See "http://www.foodprocessing.com". Typical article: "Understanding Polydextrose and How It Works".

Food stopped being "natural" when cooking was invented.

Then there's the darling of the startup community, "Soylent". Not only is it incredibly overpriced ($85/week) for a soy product, they require pre-ordering months in advance.

OK, so for me, the only takeaway from this article is that we need radically more transparency and we will not get it from food manufacturers voluntarily.

I'm not sure it will make us any healthier, but at least it may help journalists do something a little more helpful than dumping long lists of suspicious sounding names of chemicals on us.

Ideally, more transparency would enable scientists to identify the few really bad stuffs among artificial AND natural ingredients more quickly.

I doubt it will have any big effect on public health though, as it takes very long term studies to answer even the most basic questions about the main components of our food.

Relevant here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food,_Inc. (the last time I checked this was available on Netflix)

This kinda again confirms you should stick to fruit and vegetable based diet. Although sensationalist title would make you want to think different.

People should focus instead on something that has worsened, not improved, with scientific intervention and technological development - the enslavement, brutalisation, and mass slaughter of billions of land animals (not to mention the treatment of sea animals and ecosystems) due to the continued maladjusted cultural preference for animal products. How can people winge and moan about their wounded sense of aesthetic purity (the same people driving this trend by picking the brand 10 cents cheaper on the supermarket shelves) when countless numbers of living, sentient creatures are brought into being by us, for the sole purpose of living miserable, dreary lives, punctuated by sickness and episodes of violence, capped off by a final often-horrific experience of slaughter, simply so that we can treat them like small factories, extracting products from them, then eating their body parts or furnishing our cars and bodies with their skin?

Why not be simply thankful that you have freedom from pain, sickness, confinement and slaughter. To complain of the food we eat, as if we are the victims of our own preferences for convenience and low cost, while billions of animals are subjected to treatment tantamount of instituionalised torture, is the height of entitlement.