Okay, so it was one of those weeks. As usual, I started on the blog on Monday and got it all laid out in my head so as to provide you with an endless minute of entertaining and thought-provoking humor on a subject I hold almost as near and dear to my heart as I do economics, namely: food preservation. But then I did something stupid. I opened a book, or whatever – as said “book” was on my Kobo so “opening a book” is one of those Guttenbergian metaphors like “turning the page” to make our modern technology seem more familiar and less like the data grabbing spook-ware it really is.
But this is not going to be one of those rants since I just put you through that ringer a few weeks back anyway.
But it is going to be similar in that this week’s tirade will give you the Cliff Notes version of a corporate malfeasance at least as insidious and self-serving as if Monsanto merged with Disney and rebooted Captain Kangaroo as an action hero.
“What’s that you’re spraying Mr. Green Jeans?” Asked Mr. Moose.
Or should that be “Mr. Green Genes” in the new version?
But back to Monday.
I recently read a very interesting book – by my lofty standards, anyway– called Pickled, Potted, and Canned: How the Art and Science of Food Preserving Changed the World by Sue Shephard. The book talks about all the different ways food has been preserved over the years, centuries, and millennia since the first homo sapiens dropped down from the branches and started figuring out how to build elevators so they wouldn’t have to climb back up. The problem with designing elevators – or iPhones, autos, or even airplanes for that matter – is that it takes one away from the primary Goal of Life which is to get something to eat. As these proto-elevator engineers were dropping like flies somebody figured out that if we wanted to keep them alive we better figure out how to keep food from turning into a pile of greenish-gray, furry sludge sitting on the counter.
So they pressed an elevator designer into alternate service and – Voila! – the refrigerator was born.
A device to which I invite you to travel with me now. Open it up and feel the rush of Alpine air spread across the floor. Open the freezer compartment and travel instead to the high arctic. Brrrr…
Isn’t it wonderful?
Now, pause for a second to remember that 100 years ago, nobody owned one. Your grand- or great-grand parents grew up in a world largely devoid of home refrigeration. They had to rely on that other mainstay of food preservation: the can.
But that too is a relative newcomer in the history of food defense. The round can sitting in your cupboard dates back to 1888 (not the actual can, the concept), only a few years before home refrigeration became available. The canning process itself can’t be traced back much further, only to the beginning of the 19th Century. A whole 200 years ago.
Before that you had a mere four options for preserving food. You could salt it, you could dry it, you could ferment it, or you could sugar it. Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages but all are used to create an environment in the food in which nasty bugs like bacteria and molds are prevented from growing.
It was while I was looking into sugar as a preservative that my problems began.
I was first exposed to the preservative power of sugar during my commuting days in South Florida. My daily drive took me by a sugar terminal in West Palm Beach wherein piles of granulated sweetness lay out in an open warehouse where they were manipulated by equipment more commonly used in highway construction. While it was cool to see a massive front-end loader dipping into the glistening heap, I was more interested in why the whole pile hadn’t been carried off by ants and roaches, what with this being Florida and all.
Well, it turns out that pure sugar is not a particularly inviting place for life. Being so fond of water any bug straying onto the dry sugar is rapidly dehydrated and incorporated into the mix. A blending which is perfectly fine with the US FDA.
Sugar is so powerful a preservative that when you open up that jar of strawberry jam that’s been in the back of the fridge for years and it’s covered with the aforementioned greenish-gray fuzz, just under that layer of slime the jam is still perfectly edible, preserved by the added sugar, the acid in the strawberries and – with fitting irony – the exclusion of oxygen provided by the layer of mold itself.
But don’t take my word for it, try it yourself.
Which brings us to Thursday.
I’m now about two thirds of the way through the book which started my troubles. It’s titled Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Michael Moss. In it he describes, with disturbing detail, how the major food companies have manipulated the composition of what a lot of us eat with the sole purpose of making it more attractive to our limbic brains thereby inducing us to buy more, and – even worse – want to eat even more so that the cycle builds in a positive feedback loop with disastrous consequences for those who fall into the vortex.
This profit-over-all menu is directly responsible for the current epidemic of obesity sweeping the globe. Yes, even in France.
The way it works is that the major food companies buy up brands and start subtly replacing the ingredients which gave the brand its quality, taste, and reputation, and replacing them with cheaper – often chemical-based – proxies to fool their customers and make more money. This has happened in everything from Kraft cheeses (yes, they even found a way to cheapen Cheez-Whiz) to Hebrew National hotdogs (owned by ConAgra Foods, a thirteen billion dollar “food” conglomerate whose annual report is also required to have a section on “Mine Safety Disclosures”).
What the food producers do is manipulate the ingredients to achieve what food scientists call the “bliss point”: the formulation at which more of an ingredient doesn’t taste better but at which the “user” (as we consumers are known in the biz) can’t stop eating.
The bliss point for sugar was the first one determined back in the old days of the 1970s. When that happened, food companies rushed to inject sweetness into their products to hit this target. Coincidentally, this is also when High Fructose Corn Syrup became available which allowed the “food” to be sweetened more while still costing the companies much less than real sugar.
Which you already know.
But there was a predictable outcome to all of this. Alongside the growth in the refinery-by-products-as-food movement ran the “healthy-eating” subculture with its silly preference for “natural” foods, whole grains, and a rejection of everything the corporate food producers had to offer.
And so they tricked us. The bastards tricked us.
And they did it with sugar.
Several years ago I noticed many products appearing on the shelves with labels like “no added sugar” and “no HFCS” and “contains real fruit.” Forget nasty cane sugar. Leave behind your fears of HFCS brewed from Roundup drenched Monsanto corn. This new stuff was better because it was made using water and “fruit juice concentrate.”
When you buy a processed food product the portion of what you pay that goes to marketing the stuff is on the order of two times what the product cost to make. Because of this it is twice as important to list the ingredients from a marketing angle as it is to inform you what’s actually in the bottle or box. Because “sugar” has gotten a bad health rap, and HFCS has been indicted in everything from weight gain to dementia, clearly what was needed was something both sweet and healthful; or apparently so.
Enter fruit. Yuh-um! Sun-ripened sweet, straight from the tree goodness.
But this is not your grandmother’s fruit or even the mono-culture, picked-green-and-refrigerated excuse for “fruit” found in your local Safeway. This is what’s left over after the good stuff is sold and the rest gets handed over for processing. The term “fruit juice concentrate” was invented to induce the “user” to envision round cans of frozen juice concentrate but it is anything but that. Rather, it is a mélange of different fruits, squeezed, mixed together, and then blended, cooked, enzymed and filtered until all traces of the juices’ origin, nutrition, and taste have been lost from the syrupy goo and you are left with…
…pure sugar.
It’s not table sugar. It’s not HFCS. It’s also not fruit.
But they don’t tell you that.
So what was supposed to be a funny, ha-ha, isn’t-that-clever look at me turning our one surviving head of cabbage into sauerkraut using old-timey methods of preservation devolved into this. I feel duped. I feel cheated. I feel lied to.
I think I’m going to go eat some cookies.