BAZA ZNANJA

Kurs: -- English - Upper-Intermediate

Modul: Past Modals

Autor: prof. Gordana Matorkić

Naziv jedinice: Additives in Food

Fresh fruit and vegetables, meat, it sounds wonderful and it also should have been brought from the nature to our tables but the truth is much worse. The meat and other foods sold at fast food restaurants bears little to no resemblance to actual freshly cut meat. Food scientists employ a number of very deceptive and clever techniques to fool the senses into thinking that such foods are tasty and healthy. Science has discovered many chemicals that can exactly emulate the smells of fresh foods found in nature.

For example; Ethyl-2-methyl butyrate smells just like an apple. Adding methyl-2-peridylketone makes something taste like popcorn. Ethyl-3- hydroxybutanoate makes something taste like marshmallow. On and on these combinations go and it can all be done without affecting the appearance or nutritional value of the processed foods. These ingredients can be listed as "natural flavors" on the labels, even on foods that are listed as "organic".

At the Lamb Weston plant in Idaho, Eric Shlosser saw how the French fries undergo an amazing amount of scientific testing and chemical tweaking to attain just the right taste, consistency, mouthfeel, cooking time and even after taste. At one point they had him close his eyes and he was asked to identify various foods just from their smell. When the first sample was brought him he said "hmmm apples". When the next sample was brought to him he said "French fries", the third smelled just like a hamburger. Upon opening his eyes and expecting to see each of the foods present, all he saw was a scientist in a lab coat holding small white pieces of paper under his nose. These were the samples of the chemicals used to make fast food taste and smell so good. Eric probably thought it couldn’t have been possible.

This process is certainly not limited merely to fast food or French fries. At plant in Dayton, NJ, Eric saw how chemicals that make nearly every single food or product sold on the market today taste and smell just as they do. Some of these products include; toothpastes, colognes, pop tarts, frozen and restaurant foods, ice cream, cookies, mouthwashes, potato chips, corn chips, breakfast cereals, soft drinks, bottled teas, beer, wine coolers, all natural juice drinks, frostings, dishwashing detergents, shampoo, soaps, furniture polish, and the list goes on and on.

Several salads at Mc Donald’s have either cilantro lime glaze, or orange glaze added. Along with many of McDonald's sauces, both the cilantro lime glaze and the orange glaze contain propylene glycol alginate which is not legal for use in cat food because the safety hasn't been proven yet.
 
Why such a focus on the aroma of food, because up to 90% of the taste of a food is actually linked to its aroma. Of course if the food is healthy and fresh, why do they need to add aroma and taste back into the food? Simple, because the food sold at most if not all fast food restaurants is so degraded, so old and of such poor quality that if you actually were to see it's colour and smell it before all of this chemical processing, you would never put such foods into your stomach. This is especially true of the meats that are sold at fast food restaurants.

This is a major reason why reading those labels and eating as much organic, unpackaged and unprocessed foods as possible is so incredibly vital to health and longevity. Too often even foods that are labelled as "natural" or "organic" will contain many of these chemical potions. Eating as much raw real foods such as fruits, vegetables is about the only way to make sure that you're not consuming foods with these myriad of chemicals in them.

What Colour is the Food?

Aroma is not the only tweaking that goes into fast foods. The colour of food also has a lot to do with its perception of flavour. This is by design because we know that colour often indicates whether a food is ripe or rancid. In the early 1970's an experiment was done where people were given an "oddly tinted" meal of steak and French fries that appeared normal under the coloured lights they were subjected to. Everyone thought that the food tasted fine that is until the lighting was changed. As soon as people saw that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, people were shocked and several even became ill.

If you have bought stand supermarket meats at anytime, you probably noticed that it has that bright red "healthy" looking colour in it. Well that meat is not much better than your typical fast food meats. The bright red colour is from the same kind of chemical food colouring and chemical wizardry and aroma as the food colourings used in the fast food industry. Food dyes can include many risks and some of them are hyperactivity in children, cancer (in animal studies) and allergic reactions.

With today's chemical farming, even the old adage that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" must be questioned. Chemicals are purposely added to food to change its colour, preserve it, prevent rancidity and foods stable. Most of the chemicals are synthetic compounds, some with known negative health effects. But more importantly, we don't really know what the long-term consequences of consuming such large amounts of additives are. It is therefore best to avoid all additives, with a few notable exceptions.

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