Authors: Joanna Blythman
If that sounds like stretching the meaning of the term somewhat, try ‘physical’:
An ‘appropriate physical process’ … includes, but is not limited to, absorption/adsorption, chromatography, ion-exchange, electrophoresis, ultrasonic treatment, centrifugation, (reverse) osmosis, crystallisation, precipitation, lyophilisation, enzymatic processes and others.
And when we come to ‘chemical synthesis’, we enter even deeper into a dark labyrinth of complication, from which only the professional biochemist, or chemical engineer, will emerge:
The term ‘appropriate chemical process’ comprises intentionally triggered simple chemical reactions such as acidification/basification, hydrolysis, salt formation, ester cleavage, chelate formation, cis/trans- and other isomerisations.
If your head is reeling and you’re thinking ‘Stop, no more!’, have one last attempt at getting your head around this masterfully opaque clarification:
Depending on the concrete process, an ‘appropriate chemical process’ may be considered a ‘traditional process’ as defined above.
So, in practical terms more of us can actually understand, how are ‘natural’ colours actually made? Let’s consider the example of the dark red viscous liquid known as paprika extract E160c. The pigment is indeed extracted from a natural source – ground up dried red peppers – but in a wholly chemical process that uses any of the following solvents (substances which dissolve it): methanol, ethanol, acetone, hexane, dichloromethane, ethyl acetate and propan-2-ol. The finished colour can, by law, contain traces of these solvents. It can also contain heavy metals – arsenic, lead, mercury and cadmium – left over from this extraction process. Of course, levels of these contaminants must be within ‘safe limits’, but these limits are set by food regulators who have never seriously investigated the potential cocktail effect of such substances on regular consumers of processed food.
This exceedingly inclusive interpretation of the word natural enables colour companies to create a dazzling kaleidoscope of shades – and we’re not talking discreetly tasteful Farrow & Ball here. The websites and marketing materials of colouring companies are a riot of throbbing, glowing colorants – magenta from sweet potato, indigo blue from gardenia, emerald green from chlorophyllin, scarlet from elderberry, lemon yellow from safflower, orange from lutein, crimson from beetroot, royal blue from anthocyanins, slate-grey from black sesame, white from titanium, and hundreds more. Their colours, neatly grouped by general shade category, are as comprehensive as a Dulux colour chart, and even more vivid. Mind you, it would be wrong to suggest that they offer no subtlety. As the Roha colour company warns:
Too much color can make products look too bright and unrefined in the consumers’ mind. Color should be added, keeping in mind the cultural values of the sales zone and the customers’ psyche.
In other words, the braying colours of a Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake won’t go down well in a chic patisserie selling macaroons in demure sugared almond shades.
Supposing you’re looking for a yellow. Sensient, another colour company, can come up with several sophisticated options: ‘From the greenish yellow chartreuse of your lime yoghurt to the sweet leaf vanilla fudge of your ice cream, you will find the right Sensient shade of yellow giving the desired appearance to your product.’
The selection of ‘natural’ colourings is so extensive, in fact, that it is potentially overwhelming. Sensient encourages manufacturers who want to brighten up their lacklustre products to dip into its ‘colour book’ to choose hues that will ‘bring products to life’. One example is margarine-type spread, which has added yellows and oranges to change its unedifying grey appearance into an appealing primrose. ‘Colour is powerful’, Sensient points out. ‘It can fool our taste perception producing taste differences and differentiations which do not exist.’ And let’s face it, margarine needs all the help it can get.
Another flavouring company, Hawkins Watts, presents food manufacturers with a full Pantone colour matching chart ‘to assist your colour selection and specification process’. Food manufacturers also use its ‘colour selector’, a tool that helps them track down the right shade for their products. First they choose a colour range from a list, such as purple or orange, and then state whether they are looking for an artificial one. To that they must indicate what temperature the food will be processed at – high (over 100°C), medium or low – and confirm the length of time the colour must remain stable in light, choosing an option such as ‘more than six months’. Finally, they must select the acidity level of the product in question, and whether or not it contains sulphur, because these factors have a further chemical effect on certain colours. For example, the yellow colouring curcumin can take on a green tint in foods with low acidity. That done, the company will recommend a shade to suit. Diana, yet another supplier of food colourings, has a ‘Colour Impact Configurator’ that allows manufacturers to specify with some precision the colour, shade and intensity they require.
Once food manufacturers have established the right colour for their product, they have a choice of formats. It could come as a liquid or paste mixed up in glycerine, sugar syrup, castor oil, vegetable oil, gum arabic, or even propylene glycol, the latter best known for its antifreeze potential. It can be supplied in a water-insoluble form as an aluminium ‘lake’, made by reacting aluminium sulfate or chloride with sodium carbonate/bicarbonate or ammonia. Although these lakes are then filtered, washed with water and dried, small traces of unreacted aluminium oxide are allowed in the final product, along with sulfates, arsenic and lead, provided they don’t exceed certain limits. There are special colour forms for every use. The confectionery industry is keen on ‘speed lakes’, or lakes that are already dispersed in sugar syrup. Chocolatiers achieve a pearlescent effect by using colours from minerals (silica, mica) mixed in with lakes or fats. Processed meat companies like filmy coloured coatings that stick to the meat and give it a finished look. One type of caramel, for instance, will give a ‘mottled black color on the surface of roast beef or Black Forest ham’, while another will produce ‘a uniform golden to brown coating on surface of poultry products that gives the look of oven roast turkey’. Some manufacturers use ‘dyes’ blended with sugars and cheap starches, such as lactose, corn starch and maltodextrin. Sometimes the colours are microencapsulated, that is, encased in vegetable fat, carbohydrates, gum or protein, inside beadlets to control their release and ensure that the shade spreads evenly through the food or beverage without leaving any tell-tale specks. Colours also come in bespoke mixtures that include a clouding agent. These ‘cloudifiers’, usually oil mixed with gum, lend a translucent effect. Cloudy colours are used particularly by drinks manufacturers because they help give consumers the impression that their products contain more real fruit juice pulp than they actually do. As one industry manual explains:
A soft drink with low natural juice content may require a clouding agent to boost the turbidity [haziness] in order for it to resemble the cloudy natural juice of the fruit it is named after.
The technology of natural colours is advanced and elaborate, allowing food manufacturers plenty of scope for artful creativity in shaping our perceptions of what we eat and drink. Their interpretation of ‘natural’ does not reflect most consumers’ understanding of, or hopes for, that term, yet this hasn’t stopped food manufacturers taking advantage of the move away from artificial colours for marketing purposes. Our supermarkets are full of products plastered with prominent ‘no artificial colours’, ‘free from’ logos and tick lists, most prominently on food for infants and children. Such labels instantly put a ring of virtue around a product, and lull us into thinking that there’s no need to look in more forensic detail at the ingredients listing.
Cashing in on ‘natural’ has its limits though. Despite the generally laissez-faire regulation of food colourings, the hard fact for food manufacturers is that European law does at least insist that whether artificial or ‘natural’, any added food colouring must be labelled as such. Along with the designation ‘colour’, manufacturers can choose to declare it either by name or E number. They have some discretion about how they do that. They can use the name, say lutein, along with the explanatory words ‘natural food colour’, or they can list this yellow colour by its E (additive) number, E161b. But there’s no getting around the requirement that any added colour must be declared, however small and hard to read, in the ingredients listing on the back of the product. And when observant shoppers spot that, it makes them wonder about the breezy ‘free from’ claims on the front of the pack.
Anticipating that public suspicion of food colourings was bound to grow, the processed food industry, always a step ahead, has in recent years come up with a sparkling new concept: ‘colouring foods’. The sales pitch here is that instead of using added colourings as we know them, either artificial or natural, bright pigments extracted from foods such as beetroot, spinach and paprika, are being used.
On first sight, colouring foods are an engaging proposition, not least because vegetable and plant names always bestow a highly desirable botanical probity on a product. But are colouring foods really as benign as they might seem? While it would be wrong to imply that food manufacturers are simply engaged in a cynical rebadging exercise, the truth is there is no bright blue sea, nor clear red line, between ‘natural colours’ and ‘colouring foods’. As the FSA diplomatically puts it: ‘Both industry and regulators consider there is a difficult legislative boundary between a food colour additive and a colouring food.’
In recent years, companies have largely done their own thing, developing colouring foods with enthusiasm, and using terms such as beetroot extract, roasted barley malt extract and carrot concentrate to describe them. To most consumers this sounds progressive, even medicinally beneficial, and of course it allows manufacturers more scope for cleaner labels with prominent ‘no nasties’-type claims. From a commercial point of view, colourful food extracts have the additional benefit of being easier to bring to market. Under European law, food colourings, both artificial and ‘natural’, require pre-marketing approval and safety assessment. ‘Colouring foods’, on the other hand, don’t, because they are classed as ingredients, not additives. So, a further bonus, they don’t need to be labelled with those pesky E numbers either.
In 2014, the European Commission belatedly issued guidance designed to clarify matters: as long as a substance has not been selectively extracted from a natural food it can be marketed as a ‘colouring food’. But in yet another demonstration of the blurry, watercolour language of food colours, ‘selective extraction’ is an obligingly loose term. It ‘leaves some room for preparations obtained from foods using a process of physical and/or chemical extraction which may be interpreted as not being selectively extracted’, and ‘extraction can range from simple extraction, to degrees of selective extraction’. The practical test of whether something has been selectively extracted or not comes down to two factors – enrichment and purity – both of which involve ratio calculations. Just as when accountants prepare complicated tax returns, it is a matter of interpretation. One company’s carrot root extract might possibly qualify as a ‘colouring food’ while another company’s does not.
And some of the ingredients used as colouring foods might not be to everyone’s taste. For instance, the Belgian company Veos markets red blood cells for colouring meat:
The stabilised red cells are used as a natural colouring agent, without E-number as a colorant! This protein is perfect to improve the colour of meat products and to increase the meat perception. After cooking hams for instance, a nice homogeneous meat colour will be reached, even when working with PSE meat.
PSE, by the way, stands for pale soft exudative. PSE meat has an abnormal colour, and looks dry. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization explains why this happens:
PSE in pigs is caused by severe, short-term stress just prior to slaughter, for example during off-loading, handling, holding in pens and stunning. Here the animal is subjected to severe anxiety and fright caused by manhandling, fighting in the pens and bad stunning techniques. All this may result in biochemical processes in the muscle, in particular, in rapid breakdown of muscle glycogen and the meat becoming very pale with pronounced acidity and poor flavour.
So poor quality meat, from stressed-out animals, turns out a nice healthy-looking pink when coloured pink with blood cells. Mmm, nice.
The bottom line here is that the boundary between ‘natural colourings’ and ‘colouring foods’ is about as clear as mud, and exists only in the form of meek industry guidance, not meticulously defined law.
In fact, the guidance notes come with this puzzling disclaimer: ‘These guidance notes do not represent the official position of the Commission and they do not intend to produce legally binding effects.’ Which makes you wonder about the point of the whole exercise. Cynicism only grows when you know that these guidance notes were ‘elaborated by Commission services after consultation with the Member States’ experts on food additives and the relevant stakeholders’. Considering that the aforementioned ‘member states’ experts’ are frequently chemical industry scientists who have captured influential positions on government committees, and ‘relevant stakeholders’ is code for companies active in the food additive business, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that the colouring industry is writing its own lurid rules.
10
Before I began investigating them for this book, ready-to-eat meats were a bit of a mystery to me, just because they were so different in form, texture and taste from any meats I have ever cooked at home. The first thing that struck me as strange was that they shared a certain sheen; it reminds me of the effect you get when petrol and water mix accidentally on the paving of a rainy petrol station forecourt. Whenever I cook meat, once the initial sheen of heat has gone, it looks matt, rather than shiny, with a variation in colour: some parts are pink, others much darker. Texture was a further puzzler. No meat cooked at home by me, or anyone else I know for that matter, has the slippery humidity and ‘bounce’ that is a hallmark of processed, cooked meats. At the firm end of the spectrum lie products with a Spam-like firmness, things like tinned ham, hot dogs, luncheon meat and garlic sausage. In the middle ground, there are those that have a bit of a wobble, offering an elastic resistance in the mouth. Think of the chicken discs that parents are encouraged to slip into their children’s lunchbox. At the softer end, you get those floppy yet still cohesive slices of ham with the clamminess of a limp, damp handshake; the sort that turns up in your workplace cafeteria sandwich, or on top of your pizza. And then there was the conundrum of the shape. No home-boiled ham or turkey I ever came across carved obligingly into identical slices of the same dimensions.