Authors: Joanna Blythman
First up are those classed as preservatives: benzoates (such as sodium benzoate, sodium ethyl p-hydroxybenzoate), nitrites and nitrates (such as potassium nitrite, sodium nitrate), sorbates (such as sodium sorbate, potassium sorbate), sulfites (such as potassium metabisulfite), and propionates (such as calcium propionate, propionic acid). This class of preservative turns up in many products, from muffins, through processed meats and mango juice, to milkshakes.
Clearly, this motley crew doesn’t go down too well with the ‘no chemicals brigade’ – a food industry term of derision for people who routinely avoid additives and obscure ingredients with unfamiliar names. Such preservatives are, as one food engineer tactfully puts it, ‘quite chemical in nature’, and the fact that they can cause health problems is beyond dispute. The additive industry itself admits that sulfites, and benzoic acid and its derivatives, can trigger breathing difficulties, shortness of breath, wheezing and coughing in sensitive individuals. Strong evidence suggests that consumption of the preservative sodium benzoate, in tandem with certain artificial food colours, could be linked to increased hyperactivity in children. These relatively minor reactions pale into insignificance when you consider the well-recorded impacts of the nitrates that have become standard kit in processed meats. Converted by bacteria in saliva to nitrates, these then react with various amines in the stomach to form nitrosamines, which are potent carcinogens.
Next in line in the assembled ranks of shelf-life extenders are antioxidants. These might appear more benign than the preservatives mentioned above, even beneficial, because relatively few people appreciate that they are quite a different kettle of fish from the natural antioxidants in raw food that disarm cell damage-causing free radicals. Ascorbic acid is the personable ambassador thrust forward to speak for this category, and regularly introduced as vitamin C by another name. But this is misleading. Ascorbic acid is made industrially in factories, often by the fermentation of GM corn, by triggering a series of chemical reactions. So the ascorbic acid that draws attention away from the woeful nutritional profile of fruit ‘drinks’, or nutrient-denuded breakfast cereals and breads, is a one-dimensional, man-made copy of natural vitamin C found in whole foods, such as oranges and kale. While vitamin C in real food is always accompanied by other micronutrients that act in synergy to enhance its effect, ascorbic acid is an isolated, man-made chemical, and as such, is unlikely to have the same health-boosting effects as natural vitamin C. The same reservation applies to another group of antioxidants, tocopherols: alpha-tocopherol, gamma-tocopherol, delta-tocopherol, mixed tocopherols. These chemically manipulated, synthesised versions of natural vitamin E are usually derived from petrol. Synthetic vitamins are not as well absorbed in the body as natural ones.
The antioxidant line-up looks uglier still when you glimpse other lower profile personalities skulking in the ranks, additives that turn up like clockwork in crisps, crackers, chips, margarine, processed meats, and foods fried in oil, such as chicken Kievs, falafels and fish fingers. Meet butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), which is also an ingredient in embalming fluid and jet fuel, butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA), a common component of rubber and petroleum products, propyl gallate, often used to make glues, and tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), which finds another purpose in the making of varnish. A lively scientific debate surrounds these antioxidants because several studies have found they have adverse effects on laboratory animals – cancer, disruption to hormones and the nervous system, and more. However, in their infinite wisdom, our regulators have concluded that the presence of these additives, at the levels permitted, represents no risk to human health. The need of food processors to postpone the evil hour when their products start showing their age trumps public health concerns every time.
You can see why acronyms are necessary – these additive names don’t exactly trip off the tongue. Nor do they inspire consumer confidence. And why should they? The knowledge that many food additives have the capacity to shorten the lives of humans, as well as extend use-by dates, is built into European law. This is why regulators have set a maximum ‘acceptable daily intake’ for each one, based on the ‘no-observed-adverse-effect level’ which, we are told, is a ‘safe’ limit based on animal experiments. Researchers observe what dose laboratory animals can take of a substance before showing obvious signs of illness, or dying, and then extrapolate from this the likely effects on humans. But this is an informed estimate; no one really knows how much of a carcinogen it takes to cause cancer, or how much of a toxin it takes to poison your nervous system.
According to the European Food Information Council (EUFIC) – a body that presents itself as a ‘science-based’ information body on food, but which functions as a food industry lobby group – acceptable daily intakes include ‘a large margin of safety and refers to the amount of a food additive that can be taken daily in the diet, over a lifetime span, without any negative effect on health’. Fine and dandy, if you take on trust assurances from the food industry’s men in white coats, but then many of us don’t. The public appetite for an alphabet soup of additives has shrunk.
Much more effective in softening up doubting consumers has been the fiction, fostered by the processed food industry, that the main reason for using preservative additives is to make foods safer. In this storyline, preservatives are presented as front-line fighters protecting us from poisoning and death. This is how the EUFIC frames the argument:
The greatest threat to consumers is that of food being spoiled, or from becoming toxic by the effect of micro-organisms (e.g. bacteria, yeast, moulds) occurring in them. Some of these organisms can secrete poisonous substances (‘toxins’), which are dangerous to human health and can even be fatal.
This ‘use a toxin to kill a toxin’ propaganda has been tacitly reinforced by the health and safety establishment. It has groomed us to see natural, unprocessed food as a seething mass of sinister bacteria that can only be rendered safe by the controlling hand of technology. Case in point, under the tabloid-style headline ‘Kitchen sink squalor’, NHS Choices warns us that ‘most people think of the toilet as the most contaminated part of the house, but in fact the kitchen sink typically contains 100,000 times more germs than a bathroom or lavatory’. Scary or what? This is typical of the tone of government food hygiene advice, wherein home cooks are portrayed as dangerously ignorant, exposing their nearest and dearest to life-threatening hazards. In government food hygiene campaigns, no mention is made of the much more extensive food poisoning risks routinely run in factory food production, or of how the modern food distribution system can facilitate the spread of a problem to thousands of homes, thousands of miles away, in a matter of hours.
The effect of this slanted emphasis on domestic food poisoning risk is to undermine the confidence of home cooks in our ability to prepare safe food. It makes us crave the apparent safety of processed, manufactured food and drink. In the opinion of one Twitter correspondent, ‘A factory is what we call a hygienic, efficient place to prepare food. It’s safer than a farmhouse kitchen.’ Such sentiment is widespread amongst generations that have never learned to cook and so are heavily dependent on processed food and takeaways. Bring on those protective additives please! But the truth of the matter is that with the exception of the nitrate and nitrite preservatives used in cured meats such as bacon, there is no overarching food safety reason to use preservatives or antioxidants in fresh food, unless, that is, you want to extend its natural life. And that, quite candidly, is the main function of preservative additives in processed food: to feed the illusion that food is fresher, and newer, than it actually is. Why bother? There’s money in it, as one purveyor of ‘shelf-life enhancement solutions’ says: ‘The ability to extend the shelf life of a food or beverage is all-important for manufacturers and retailers. By extending shelf life, the profitability is directly impacted in a positive direction.’ If that sounds a bit woolly, this balder reasoning from another such company makes the financial motivation a whole lot clearer: ‘There are no improvements that you can make to your food or beverage product that will boost your customer [retailer] satisfaction and increase your bottom line as much as shelf-life extension.’
Supermarkets constantly lean on manufacturers to put longer ‘best before’ dates on chilled products. This helps to feed the consumer myth they encourage that it isn’t necessary to shop fairly frequently for food if you want it to be fresh. In 2013, Kathryn Callaghan, from the UK FSA’s Hygiene and Microbiology Division, warned the Royal Society for Public Health that ‘in the past 20 years, there has been an increasing trend’ for longer shelf life. She was talking in the context of ready-to-eat meats, one of the highest food poisoning risk categories, and said: ‘I actually visited a couple of smaller manufacturers and they told us there’s a lot of pressure on them … to put a long shelf life on their products.’
Appreciating that it is losing the argument with consumers over E number additives, and keen to be seen to be responding to ‘clean label’ pressure from supermarkets, and driven by the desire for a long shelf life, the processed food industry has come up with newer techniques to make ‘fresh’ food last longer in less obvious ways. The name of the game is to lose artificial additives and replace them with those that sound more natural, but to do so is technically challenging. In the absence of straight like-for-like substitutes, manufacturers are adopting a belt and braces approach, using modern cocktails of shelf life-stretching substances to produce the desired effect, often in tandem with modified atmosphere packaging (MAP).
Few of us notice the now extensive use of this preservation method in the chilled food aisles. By altering the composition of air in plastic packs so that it contains significantly less, or no, oxygen, MAP keeps all sorts of ‘fresh’ products looking young longer, just like Sleeping Beauty, who went to sleep for years but woke up exactly the same age. In conjunction with refrigeration, MAP is the technological fix that allows the surface of meat to remain ruby red when otherwise it would darken. It prevents young cheeses from developing moulds and stops ready-to-cook vegetables from appearing dry. In packs flushed with MAP, sliced meats and ‘fresh’ pasta won’t curl up at the edges. The breath of air you feel as you peel open a wedge of Parmesan, a bag of grated cheese, or a lunchtime salad bowl? That’s modified atmosphere.
MAP used to be a technology that was utterly invisible. Now foods packaged using MAP must be labelled. In the tiniest writing, eagle-eyed consumers will spot the cosseting phrase ‘packaged in a protective atmosphere’. This form of words is a classic case of the processed food industry presenting its intervention in a favourable light. Alternative terminologies for MAP in the trade are ‘gas-flushed’, ‘gas-packaged’, ‘gas-shocked’, or even plain old ‘gassed’, but they don’t sound so nurturing.
Compared to preservative chemicals, MAP is low down the list of consumer concerns. Many of us find it handy to have one of those stiff packets of pitta breads as a stand-by; few appreciate that they are packed in modified air. Using MAP, pre-baked pitta breads, and for that matter, bagels, wraps and tortillas stored at room temperature will see an increase in shelf life from around 5 to 20 days. Some bakery goods can be given a shelf life of up to 6 months if so packaged. MAP can add 5 or 6 days to the shelf life of a sandwich; just the job for petrol station forecourts and corner shops with a sluggish trade.
Sealed in a modified atmosphere, the use-by date of a ready meal can be increased from between 2 and 5 days to between 5 and 10 days. Few of us would put a home-cooked meal in the fridge and eat it 10 days later; we would worry that it was too old. But a factory-made ready meal flushed with MAP can reach that age and still seem fresh. And bear in mind that the meat and fish in many processed foods – things like chicken salads, prawn sandwiches, chicken tikka, battered fish fillets – will more than likely have been bought by the manufacturer frozen, defrosted for the production process, and then sent out, gas-flushed and chilled, as ‘fresh’. Working out the age of many of the component ingredients in processed food would require the services of a very sharp detective, if not Interpol, but it is fair to assume that key ingredients are a whole lot less youthful than we like to think.
MAP performs another service to ready meal manufacturers: it delays the onset of what is known in the factory food trade as ‘warmed over flavour’ or WOF, an off-taste likened to ‘damp dog hair’ that develops in pre-cooked fish, meat and poultry. Think of the heated caskets or ‘coffins’ filled with tepid meals that are sent out to hospitals and schools from far distant institutional kitchens, overlay it with the wet cardboard odour that hangs around a box of breaded fish that has spent too long in the freezer, add a pinch of trace metals from factory cooking and processing equipment, and you have a whiff of it.
At the typical supermarket ‘butcher’s’ counter, no real butchery takes place. What’s on sale will most likely have arrived from the abattoir cutting line as pre-cut, ‘case ready’ meat in large containers filled with modified air. Meat imported frozen to the UK from abroad, New Zealand lamb for instance, can be defrosted at a processing plant, then flushed with MAP. Why? Counter staff don’t need to be properly trained butchers and it buys the retailer time, as one company active in MAP technology explains: ‘Using the correct modified atmosphere packaging conditions, shelf life of red meat can typically be increased from around 2–4 days to between 5 and 8 days under refrigeration, while that of poultry can be increased from 4–7 days to 16–21 days’.
Chopped up chicken that’s 3 weeks old? It’s not the acme of freshness or food safety, but then no one in the food processing business dreams for one minute that it is, as Dansensor, a company specialising in MAP, makes plain: