21.1: Evolution of Food Processing

Imagine what eating must have been like in the days of the caveman. You would feast on meat when an animal hunt was successful. Between times, you’d eat what edible plants could be found. Worrying about your next meal was a constant thing. Too often, it was a cycle of feast and famine. What, you might ask, could you do to save some of the feast to avoid the famine?

We might imagine that the first food preservation discoveries were accidental. Perhaps a scrap of meat or a piece of fruit, leftover from the feasting, may have been overlooked. You find it days later, on a boulder in the sun, all dried out. Hungry, you tear off a piece with your teeth, and find it quite edible. Ways to preserve food were among our first discoveries.

The Egyptians of the First Dynasty, about 3000 B.C., not only knew much about drying and salting and cooking, but had learned to preserve milk by making cheese. By 2000 B.C. they were baking bread and brewing beer. In the ancient world, alcoholic beverages were as important for food preservation as for revelry. (But keep in mind that beer then was a thick, nutritious brew.) And indeed almost every primitive culture seems to have developed a preservative use for fermentation.

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Whole grains of salt were known as “corn” in England, and were used make “corned beef.”

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The relatively recent American pioneers extended this use for fermentation. In Kentucky and thereabouts, the land along the Ohio River was fine for growing corn. But it grew more than they could use. How could they utilize the leftover corn so it could be transported to a buyer elsewhere? The answer was to make it into corn whisky, which was shipped on rafts down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, and thence around the world. Kentucky still produces fine bourbon.

Warfare and empire-building have been important factors in the evolution of food preservation and processing—creating the need to supply armies on the march. Modern food preserving is often said to have begun with Napoleon’s forays. In 1810, the French brewer, Nicholas Appert, was awarded a grand prize for developing canning. He had sealed food in jars and then heated them in boiling water, a process which was believed to work because the food was shut away from air. It wasn’t until later that science understood that the process actually worked because the heat destroyed microbes present in the food, and the sealing prevented new infections.

During World War II, demand went beyond merely edible food for the troops, to nutritionally adequate food—an impetus for the first set of Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs). Then, military demand went beyond nutritionally adequate food, to pleasurable food. In the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S. troops were even provided with chocolate bars specially made for desert eating.

Food processing as we know it today, goes far beyond mere preservation. We have a vast array of such things as convenience foods (e.g., frozen dinners), health foods (e.g., bran-fortified breakfast cereals), and fabricated foods (e.g., meatless “hamburger meat” made from soybeans).

Perhaps the ultimate in fabricated food is the diet soft drink. This drink raises the ultimate question asked of some processed foods: Is it really food? After all, any nutrient in a diet soft drink is unintentional. We might say that food processing has also given us “fun foods,” foods eaten mainly to please our senses.

So we ask a lot of food processing, and sometimes the result is nutrition confusion.

Industry’s Desire to Please

Much of our nutrition confusion is blamed on the food industry. The food industry is in many ways a passive force—amoral but not really immoral—trying simply to turn out a decent product and make a profit. Basically, industry responds to what we think our needs are. It’s very expensive to try and create public demands. It’s much cheaper simply to find out what people want to buy and give it to them.

For example, the broad food-industry use of added vitamin C is a recognition of the public’s distorted idea of the need for this vitamin. Tang (an orange-flavored sugar mixture) is touted as having “twice as much vitamin C as orange juice.” It does so because the public believes that vitamin C is badly needed, and the more the better.

Meanwhile, the Florida citrus industry markets its oranges as having “natural vitamin C from the Florida sunshine tree.” It does this because so many people mistakenly believe that there is a health difference between “natural” and synthetic vitamin C. Both are identical molecules.

Taking this consumer confusion a bit further, Sunkist sells tablets of synthetic vitamin C in a colorful bottle adorned with juicy oranges and emblazoned with Sunkist Vitamin C. The implication, of course, is that this synthetic vitamin C is more “natural”—and thus more healthful and desirable—than other synthetic C tablets on the vitamin shelf.

While these sales efforts may be somewhat misleading, they are realistic to the extent that they give the public what the public thinks it needs. The industrial reality is that, while production methods are controlled by technologists of great sophistication, the businesses are guided by marketers. Their training is in the economics of producing and selling. Their information about nutrition may be minimal. Their primary interest lies in what will sell, and this is determined by what the public wants. Their foremost research effort is to determine public wishes and to meet them.

Figure 21-1: Methods of preparing food for safe consumption.

The industry’s marketing people often know even less about nutrition. Their aim is to express as dramatically as possible the idea that the product furnishes what the buyer thinks is important. Essentially their sales message is that “What you want is what we have to sell.”

To see how ironically this system works, look down the aisle of breakfast cereals. Most of the “natural” cereals are made by the same companies that sell the regular ones with the usual additives. One part of the company heralds its “natural” cereals by implying that additives and such are unhealthful, and “natural” products are superior. Another part of the same company spends millions to sell us its other cereals with the added colors, vitamins, preservatives, flavors, etc.

In an individual, such behavior might be described as “schizophrenic.” In food companies, it’s simply a matter of market identification and market penetration—in two markets.