Crossing the Line

 

     The line I want to talk about crossing is one described in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, in which he pointed out that a major problem with “modern” food is that the food is first broken down into component chemicals in a factory, and then reconstructed into something not quite resembling food (such as Twinkies), in a different factory.  He said that in eating such things we were losing touch with something important about the food chain, and in later work he associated this process with a variety of health, environmental and economic problems. I began wondering exactly how long we have been doing that, and whether it was quite as much of a problem as described.  In fact, just what separates “cooking” food, a procedure he would describe as wholesome, from “processing” food, which sounds in some way industrial and corrupted?

 

   I’d like to look at a couple of historical examples of food processing, and then compare them to the more modern mischief behind Ho-Ho’s and Cocoa Pebbles. About three thousand years ago, when agriculture started to yield certain types of food surpluses, it became obvious that storing food was at least as important a problem as growing food.  Grain was produced in abundance in the Nile and Tigris valleys, and animal husbandry assured a decent supply of meat, at least for the wealthy, but grain rots in storage, and even dry baked bread corrupts after a few days. Flour does little better in hot weather, and there are always rodents and insects in the storage areas.  Meat can be cured, but without refrigeration is a risk in warm weather. Dried it lasts a while longer.  The processes of baking, curing, smoking and drying probably count as cooking rather than processing, but the intent is the same, and fish were dried before distribution (i.e. by a processor), to make the transportation easier.  Socrates wrote that you had to be very rich to eat fresh fish. The usual commodity was dried.

 

     Edging closer to the line is fermentation.  Here food (grain) is definitely broken down into component chemicals (carbohydrates) and these are converted to other chemicals (alcohol) for enhanced shelf life. Beer is made from roughly the same ingredients as bread, but sealed beer can be stored for months, while bread… well maybe a week. The Celts used to refer to beer as “liquid bread”. To sell this product further, much like modern marketing, a number of health advantages of dubious validity were attached to beer.  Ancient texts describe it as providing courage in battle (though I doubt if it made you more likely to survive the fight).  It was widely believed to be an aphrodisiac, though even Shakespeare observed it was more helpful to the desire than the performance.  It was thought to be a digestive aid, to the same Romans who coined the term “vomitorium”.  And it was used in medicine as a soporific and analgesic, by doctors who failed to notice the addictive properties. Beer preserved the grain the way wine preserved the grapes, which otherwise could only be eaten at the end of summer.

 

     Animal husbandry also gave us something hunter-gatherers had never known – milk.  It is extremely nutritious, and provides essential nutrients hard to get elsewhere.  But before refrigeration, it was a huge risk after 24 hours.    Thousands of years ago we learned how to break milk down into components with increased shelf life, calling the parts cream, and curds and whey, millennia before these would be called lipids and proteins and the aqueous phase. Butter keeps for weeks, if cool, and cheese for an entire season or more. A desperate farmer with lots of cheap labor could make these on his own, but in cities, these products came from dairies, where a savings of scale could appear.  Remember, nature has no “food” similar to beer, or cheese or sour cream – these are from factories, not kitchens.  You could make these things at home, just like you could shoe a horse or dig a well, but they come from processing, not cooking.

 

     The domestication of the soy bean in Asia provides another example of ancient food processing on an elaborate scale.  Soy beans can be mashed, separated into oil and protein meal portions, and then reassembled into myriad products, all discovered hundreds or thousands of years ago.  Bean curd resembles no natural food, but it is awfully good for you, and tastes a lot better than boiled soy beans. Add soy sauce if it seems bland. But don’t try to make it at home; that would involve a long and complex process.

 

     To return to the original question, what separates Chateau Margeaux from Budweiser, or Kraft American singles from Stilton, or a Saint Honore cake from a Ding-Dong?  Are dried matzoth from a factory, Saltine crackers or potato chips really different? Matzoth was once made in homes, crackers resemble hardtack, which used to be made in homes, while potato chips resemble, I don’t know, overcooked potatoes? I think the differences are more in form than substance, and some of my answer is food elitism.  Preparing food should be a highly skilled art, done by individual artists. Like the difference between hand made and factory furniture, removing the artist reduces the value, though not necessarily the utility and substance.  Factories are gauche because they are factories, but not evil because of it. There is no spiritual difference between mass producing beer and converting food into sweetened pastry-esque objects with a moist soft (notice I didn’t say cream) filling and an infinite shelf life.  Stilton cheese crafted by hand from milk happens to taste better (to me, my latest date won’t eat it) than Kraft cheese made from corn oil. But they use similar methods to increase the storage life of food products.  I could quibble and say that Kraft makes an artificial cheese, but we have already agreed that cheese is an artificial chemical construct made from milk solids, albeit a time honored one. It would be just quibbling.

 

    And finally, I would debunk the “grandmother test”.  Eat only what your grandmother would have recognized as food.  My grandmother ate freely of Sugar Frosted Flakes and Oreo cookies, both around from before her birth at the turn of the century. She would not have known tofu from laundry soap. She also saved up all cooking fat into a big jar, and reused it for frying – homemade lard. Surprisingly, she lived a very long time.

 

    I think what I’m trying to say is this. Processing food to increase its usefulness is not always bad, when the purpose is to avoid waste, prevent famine, or for a little bit of fun, like beer and soy sauce.  It becomes evil when the fake imitates the real, and is passed off as such.  Beer isn’t fake bread, it’s something new.  Bean curd isn’t fake soybeans, it’s something new.  Velveeta processed cheese spread is fake cheese, and it’s sold to the public as cheese. Twinkies are fake pastry. Potato chips are fake snack crackers for dipping, which in turn are fake pastry. Corn chips are fake potato chips, and so on.  Cold breakfast cereals, in the old days, were legitimate new forms of corn and grain.  Clearly marketed for convenience rather than economic need, they were still legitimate food.  Granola was the earliest form, and it doesn’t bother me.  Unsweetened corn flakes were a high fiber health food made in factories in the 1870’s, and not having to fire up a wood stove at 5 AM to make breakfast is more than a little convenient. It allowed families to have two wage earners.  But when they started adding sugar and shapes, marshmallows and chocolate, it started being desert in breakfast disguise; when they added vitamins, then it became a junk food passed off as a health food. Truly execrable. They even shape children’s cereals to look like deserts. One looks like chocolate chip cookies, another like donuts. Fake, fake, fake. This is over the line.

 

     Greensgal would add that making unwholesome changes in food, not for storage or variety or even convenience, but for increasing sales, compounds the felony.  The company that makes Cocoa Pebbles knows eating pure sugar before school is bad for kids. They put the sugar in because it’s addictive, and it increases sales. They disguise the corn flakes as donuts to increase sales.  I’m not suggesting that Anheuser-Busch changes bread into alcohol as a humanitarian gesture of good will. But at least the people who buy beer aren’t lured into it because they think it will be good for them. Or that it’s more nutritious than ordinary bread. They wanted beer, and presumably couldn’t afford the better tasting varieties from abroad. People who buy Twinkies think they’re food, whereas they are just non-toxic chemical glop disguised as food. They are clearly more than one toke over that line.

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