Good, pure food

When I was a graduate student, I was allowed into the chemistry staff Tea Room. In those days, my degree had only just changed from Applied and Industrial Chemistry to Chemical Engineering, and we still had strong ties to the Chemistry Department.

In the tea room, there was lots of scientific reading matter. There were bound copies of journals, some in German, and some going back into the 19th century. One which fascinated me was "The Analyst", dating back to 1878 and still published by the Royal Society for Chemistry today.

Much of the early work had to do with the adulteration of food. There were ways of measuring the amount of chalk added to milk, or pigfat added to butter, or glycerine to wine. It was pretty horrifying what the Victorians came up with to enrich the butcher or grocer without killing the customer. Sweeney Todd was no joke!

Fast forward to today. I do quite a lot of cooking for myself, and rather enjoy it. A recent recipe for sauerkraut from the Economist has proven a great success, even if I had to visit the local spice emporium to find fennel. But I soon found there was something funny about chicken. When I cooked it, it oozed a white, unappetising goo. Then my supermarket had a special on Brazilian chicken, and when I cooked that, it didn't ooze.

Curious, I did a bit of digging, and found that the local chicken had "brine" added to it. Now brine is a colloquial word for salt water, and salt water doesn't contain goo. A bit more digging, and I found I was buying not just chicken, but chicken fattened and moisturized with chicken blood plasma in brine. So that was why it oozed and shrank.

Then I observed the same phenomenon in bacon. The commercial stuff was limpid and ended up half the size when cooked - if you were lucky. The German butcher sold me the real thing at a small fortune per kg, but it was firm and didn't ooze and shrink when you cooked it.

Soon I was finding ooze everywhere. The kipper that barely fitted into the pan, but looked like a sardine once it was done. The gammon that looked big enough for ten hungry mouths, yet had to be sliced very thin to celebrate Christmas.

I'm cross, and so should you be. Why do we allow ourselves to be ripped off in this way? To be sold something that contains about 30% that isn't what it claims to be? I see the poultry producers are complaining about unfair competition from imports. If they would stop adulterating our food, perhaps we might be more sympathetic.

A Public Protector for food?

When I started studying chemical engineering, it was called "Applied and Industrial Chemistry."  Half way through the course, the name was changed to Chemical Engineering and that was how I started out in life.

The advantage of this was that I learned a lot of chemistry - we had to do virtually the full Honours course.  When I stayed on to do post-graduate work, we were still housed in the chemistry department, and had our tea each day with the chemists.  

The bookshelves of the tea room were lined with bound copies of chemical journals. One of the most fascinating was The Analyst. It started in 1876, and the early issues were largely devoted to identifying adulterants in food. There was chalk in the milk, mineral oil in the butter and limestone in the bread.  It was quite amazing how creative the early food producers were in flogging dirt as food.

Nothing has changed, except in many cases it has become legal. "Chicken" is mysteriously laced with a significant percentage of brine. I don't know what they add to "bacon" but I do know that as you grill it, it exudes white gunk and shrinks to less than half its size. I bought real bacon from the local German butcher just to prove to myself I wasn't imagining things - I wasn't!

Then there is the health story that fats are bad for you, and some fats are worse than others.  A recent investigation into the nutrition industry in the US concluded that "nutrition science" failed every test of being a science.  If you ever glance at a "health" magazine, you will see the result.  On page 1, there is a tale of the horror of salt; on page 11 there is "Salt - the most vital mineral."

This has spawned "lite" products. What "lite" means is "this product contains more water than the real thing" and sometimes the added water is as much as 50%.  Milk is the particular victim of this marketing ploy.  You pay just as much for "low-fat" milk as you pay for ordinary milk.  Either the producer has removed more of the fat to make butter, which he can then sell at a nice profit, or just watered down the product. The net result is a grey liquid.  The customer doesn't score, because you have to add twice as much to your coffee to get the same taste as you would with undiluted milk.

The latest scam of this kind to come my way is the watering-down of Marmite.  Now Marmite used to have a jelly-like consistency. It had to be spread on warm toast to get a nice even layer.  Now it is a thin gruel, and you need four times as much to get the real taste - and if you spread four times as much on warm toast, it melts and runs off to make everything sticky.

What I want for Christmas is a Public Protector for our food. Have a good one!