Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets. Joanna Blythman

tidy-up, with the most embarrassing mess stuffed in the cupboard behind a firmly shut door, where hopefully no-one will notice it.

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       At the food makers’ market

      Where do the companies that manufacture our processed food do their shopping? The European marketplace for this business is an annual trade show called Food Ingredients. Under one roof, over three days, this exhibition hosts the world’s most important gathering of ingredient suppliers, distributors and buyers. Think of it as the food manufacturer’s equivalent of an arms fair.

      At Food Ingredients, the buyers, representatives of companies that make our ready meals and convenience foods, meet sellers with imposing job titles – Global Procurement Ingredients Director, European Lead Buyer and Innovation Partner, R&D Product Developer, Ingredient Specification Technologist, Product and Application Development Manager, Formulation Project Leader – who present them with the ‘personalised solutions they need to grow and nurture their business’.

      Food Ingredients represents the beating heart of the modern food industry, showcasing its very latest innovations and trends, and its dialogue is thoroughly international. In 2011, when it was held in Paris, over 23,000 visitors attended from 154 countries – industry movers and shakers who collectively represented an ingredient buying power of €4 billion.

      Consistent with the industry view that the general public is best given only the sketchiest notion of what goes on behind the scenes of food processing, Food Ingredients events aren’t open to the general public. Anyone who tries to register has to show that they work in food manufacturing but, using a fake ID, I managed to register for Food Ingredients 2013. It was housed in the vast, eerie expanses of Frankfurt’s Blade Runner-like Festhalle Messe, a fitting venue that mirrors the sheer scale of modern food manufacturing.

      For those who love to cook and eat, food trade exhibitions are sometimes alienating, disillusioning experiences, a through-the-keyhole insight into aspects of food production you’d rather not know about, but Food Ingredients had a surreal quality all of its own. I wasn’t greeted by the smell of food, and hardly anything on display much resembled it. While exhibitors at most food exhibitions are often keen for you to taste their products, at Food Ingredients, few of the stand-holders had anything instantly edible to offer. That’s possibly something to do with the fact that their potential customers, while prepared to buy the products on display for manufacturing, don’t much fancy eating them.

      And even the foods at those stands that did want visitors to taste something weren’t all that they seemed. Canapé-style cubes of white cheese dusted with herbs and spices sat under a bistro-style blackboard that nonchalantly read ‘Feta, with Glucono-Delta-Lactone’; the latter ingredient is, apparently, a ‘cyclic ester of gluconic acid’ that acts as an acidifier, thus prolonging shelf life. A pastry chef in gleaming whites was rounding off his live demonstration by offering sample petit fours to the buyers who had gathered. His dainty heart- and diamond-shaped cakes were dead ringers for those neat layers of sponge, glossy fruit jelly, foamy cream and chocolate you’d see in the window of a classy patisserie, but were made entirely without eggs, butter or cream, thanks to the crafty substitution of potato protein isolate. This revolutionary ingredient is ‘tailored to the required functionality: foaming, emulsifying, or gelling’ and provides ‘the volume, texture, stability and mouthfeel’ we look for in classic cakes, baked with traditional ingredients.

      Many exhibitors had striking visual displays, arranged like installations at an art gallery. Gleaming glass shelves were back-lit to show off a rainbow of super-sized phials of liquids so bright with colouring, they might be neon. Plates of various powders, shaped into pyramids, were artistically stacked on elegant Perspex stands bearing enigmatic labels, such as ‘texturised soy protein: minced ham colour’, or displayed in cabinets, as though they were exhibits in a museum.

      Walls were given over to geometric displays of powdery substances, from white, through beige and brown to orange in hue, each bearing an alphanumeric code, and glowing white, yet cryptic captions that read ‘pork skin products’, ‘beef products’, or similar. One porthole-sized convex glass round housed a liquid that captured the hue of harbour water on a dark night, another framed a solitary blueberry muffin. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t some art college end-of-term show though, because these intriguing objects were, according to the explanatory signage, ‘solutions for coating, glazing, polishing, releasing, emulsifying’. Still unsure what, exactly, I was looking at, the further information ‘flavour vehicles’, ‘MCT oils’ and ‘pan oil’ didn’t hugely enlighten me.

      Seeing a plate of puce-striped, chocolate-coated granola bars centre stage in a glass case, my initial reaction was that some avant-garde artist was making an ironic comment on modern life, like Carl André’s controversial floor of bricks at the Tate Gallery. But then I read the notice: ‘cereal bar with compound coating: oil-dispersible technology of ‘plain’ caramel colour and beetroot red’, and realised that everyone else was taking them deadly seriously.

      Perhaps the most beautifully curated artefacts on display were vases containing glowing orange liquids – some cloudy, some crystal clear – for colouring fruit juices. One looked particularly spectacular, like a lava lamp with ghostly threads of gossamer-like material suspended evenly in it. These were ‘orange cells’: they come in handy, apparently, for making those cartons of juice composed of pasteurised orange concentrate and water look as though they contain some freshly squeezed juice.

      In the absence of any sight or smell to whet the appetite, a lay visitor to Food Ingredients, one who was not part of the food manufacturing fraternity, might feel the need to double check that they were indeed at a food exhibition. For Food Ingredients is so clearly the domain of a technocracy of engineers and scientists, people whose natural environment is the laboratory and the factory, not the kitchen, the farm or the field, people who share the assumption that everything nature can do, man can do so much better, and more profitably.

      The broad business interest portfolio of the companies exhibiting at Food Ingredients was disconcerting. For instance, the Swiss company DKSH, whose sales pitch is ‘performance materials, concepts and ingredients for the confectionery and bakery industry’, described itself as ‘a leading speciality chemicals and ingredients supplier’. Its business interests span ‘speciality chemicals, food and beverage industry, pharmaceutical industry, and the personal care industry’.

      Omya, which seemed proud to be based in Hamburg because it is ‘the largest chemical trading place in the world’, announced itself as ‘a leading global chemical distributor and producer of industrial minerals’. The company reeled off its list of markets as food, pet food, oleochemicals, cosmetics, personal care, detergents, cleaners, papers, adhesives, construction, plastics, and industrial chemicals. Omya was at Food Ingredients selling products as diverse as granular onion powder, monosodium glutamate and phosphoric acid.