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

and sugar alcohols can revolutionise production, and offer technical ‘solutions’ to commonly encountered problems. Even then, when it comes to the nitty-gritty of what an ingredient, additive or process actually involves or does in a specific food or drink context, manufacturers are almost invariably urged to contact the company direct to discover what technical ‘applications’ the product in question might have for their business.

      Such sites are very definitely do-not-disturb zones for industry outsiders. In fact, you need to pass through various hurdles to be allowed into the club. For instance, when I tried to subscribe to Innovadex, formerly known as Chemidex, the biggest online ingredient search engine for food and drink manufacturers, I received the following reply:

      Thank you for completing your registration with Innovadex. Access is not immediate and is dependent upon approval. Notification of your access will be sent within one business day. Innovadex.com is an internet-based resource designed specifically for use by chemists and formulators. Membership is restricted to validated institutional users of product information who are involved in the purchase and use of raw materials and ingredients.

      Needless to say, my Innovadex subscription was not forthcoming, and it was the same story with the registered users-only sites of companies supplying our food manufacturers. Here you have to fill in a series of subscription application questions to establish your suitability. What is the name of your company? What is your company website? What sector are you in (meat, dairy, bakery, etc.)? Are you a manufacturer or retailer? What is your position and job title in the company (product developer, buyer, processor, etc.)? How many employees do you employ? What band does your annual turnover fall into? What school did you last attend? I’m joking about this last one, but unless you fit searching criteria, your subscription application goes no further.

      What about dropping in on some of the global summits where food manufacturers network with ‘visionary researchers’, ‘thought leaders’ and ‘horizon scanners’ from leading ingredient suppliers? The same restrictions apply. You must be an approved industry insider of the vetted sort, and even if you are, the fee for attendance is pitched at a level (several hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds) that only deep corporate pockets can contemplate. In food manufacturing, no one seems to blink at stumping up £1,999 for a conference pass, or paying £399 upwards for a workshop; and that’s before VAT.

      Just supposing you were enough of an anorak to want to read and digest meaty technical documents that would help cast light on what goes on behind the scenes of food manufacturing, you would have to pay handsomely for the privilege. For instance, a publication, such as ‘Food Flavours & Flavour Enhancers: Market, Technical & Regulatory Insights’, published by market researchers, Mintel, and Leatherhead Food Research, a leading food and drink industry research and development body, might fill us in on how these additives are used, and give us a steer on how much of them we all consume. But at £2,600 plus VAT, just like a Rolex, that’s a rather exclusive purchase. In many different ways, food manufacturers and the global ingredients companies that supply them, operate a very effective apartheid system that bars anyone who doesn’t belong. Glasnost is not a core operating principle of the factory food industry.

      Fortunately for consumers, the food and drink industry is not a monolith, and not all companies believe that the public is best left in the dark. A couple of them very kindly provided me with a ‘cover’ that allowed me to pass through the security vetting and gain unprecedented access to material that has not previously been in the public realm. They helped me get closer to the beating heart of modern factory food production. This book is all about what I found there, and even to me, as a seasoned food journalist, it was an eye-opener.

      In the first part, I have tried to set the scene of how the world of food and drink manufacturing operates, from the factory floor, to the supermarket sales floor, and at a cutting edge industry event. In the second part, I have laid out before you what, after all my research, I now consider to be the defining characteristics of this industry’s products: food and drink that is sweet, oily, old, flavoured, coloured, watery, starchy, tricky and packed. Where possible, I have allowed the industry to speak for itself. Quotes are revealing. When a company offers manufacturers ‘customised masking solutions for tastes you want to hide’, or promises shelf life extension products that give foods a ‘fresh-like’ quality for several weeks, this gives you a clue to some of this industry’s paramount concerns.

      In as much as we are encouraged to think about the nitty-gritty of manufacturing, that is, not at all, we are led to believe that what goes on in food factories is essentially the same as home cooking, only scaled-up. Any such perception is self-serving, coy and to my mind, misleading. What you might see, after dipping into this book, is how radically different food manufacturing is in its concepts, goals, behaviours and ethos from any form of domestic food preparation. Unlike home cooks, food manufacturers are driven by innovation and novelty. They work not from a framework of time-honoured principles, but with a blank sheet. Each new product is, in industry-speak, a ‘matrix’, a never-ending jigsaw puzzle of possible elements, either chiselled out from natural ingredients, or entirely man-made, that can be arranged and rearranged, right down to the molecular level if necessary, then stuck together in various ways, and in numerous forms, to meet certain overriding goals. For product developers and food technologists, the professionals who design and create a never-ending stream of products, whole, raw, unprocessed foods present a shopping trolley of components to play around with.

      So when the home cook decides to make a Bakewell tart, for instance, she or he looks out a recipe, puts together a line-up of well-established ingredients – raspberry jam, flour, butter, whole eggs, almonds, butter and sugar – and then bakes it in a tried-and-tested way. The factory food technologist, on the other hand, approaches this venerable confection from a totally different angle. What alternative ingredients can we use to create a Bakewell tart-style product, while replacing or reducing expensive ingredients – those costly nuts, butter and berries? How can we cut the amount of butter, yet boost that buttery flavour, while disguising the addition of cheaper fats with an inferior taste profile? What sweeteners can we add to lower the tart’s blatant sugar content and justify a ‘reduced calorie’ label? How many times can we re-use the pastry left over from each production run in subsequent ones? What antioxidants could we throw into the mix to prolong the tart’s shelf life? Which enzyme would keep the almond sponge layer moist for longer? Might we use a long-life raspberry purée and gel mixture instead of conventional jam? What about coating the almond sponge layer with an invisible edible film that would keep the almonds crunchy for weeks? Could we substitute some starch for a proportion of the flour to give a more voluminously risen result? Would powdered, rather than pasteurised liquid egg, stick less to the equipment on the production line? Could we use a modified protein to do away with the eggs altogether, or to mimic fat? And so on.

      According to the Food and Drink Federation, a body that promotes the interests of companies active in the field, food and drink manufacturing is ‘a great British success story’. Thanks to the steady stream of pre-prepared, convenience food it puts on our plates, the average proportion of household income spent on food has dropped from 50 per cent in 1914 to around 10 per cent in 2014. In fact, the UK now spends less on food than any country in the world, bar the USA.

      We have been striding purposefully down this Anglo-American food path for decades. George Orwell clocked the trend back in 1937 in his book, The Road to Wigan Pier. ‘The English palate, especially the working-class palate, now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year’, he wrote. He noted that in England at that time, a man over six feet was usually ‘skin and bone and not much else’, attributing this largely to ‘the modern industrial technique which provides you with cheap substitutes for everything’. He warned in no uncertain terms where the move away from home-cooked, real food might lead us: ‘We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun’.

      How prescient Orwell was. Nowadays, the expression of our ongoing embrace of factory food in its myriad processed forms is rather different than in the 1930s, with an irony that would not be lost on him. A growing number of us are simultaneously overfed and undernourished,