The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [48]
Corn, a species that had been a modest beneficiary of the first two ages of food processing (having taken well to the can and the freezer), really came into its own during the third. You would never know it without reading the ingredient label (a literary genre unknown until the third age), but corn is the key constituent of all four of these processed foods. Along with the soybean, its rotational partner in the field, corn has done more than any other species to help the food industry realize the dream of freeing food from nature’s limitations and seducing the omnivore into eating more of a single plant than anyone would ever have thought possible.
In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a late-model processed food that isn’t made from corn or soybeans. In the typical formulation, corn supplies the carbohydrates (sugars and starches) and soy the protein; the fat can come from either plant. (Remember what George Naylor said about the real produce of his farm: not corn and soybeans but “energy and protein.”) The longer the ingredient label on a food, the more fractions of corn and soybeans you will find in it. They supply the essential building blocks, and from those two plants (plus a handful of synthetic additives) a food scientist can construct just about any processed food he or she can dream up.
A FEW YEARS AGO, in the days when “food security” meant something very different than it does today, I had the chance to visit one of the small handful of places where this kind of work is done. The Bell Institute, a leafy corporate campus on the outskirts of Minneapolis, is the research-and-development laboratory for General Mills, the sixth-largest food company in the world. Here nine hundred food scientists spend their days designing the future of food—its flavor, texture, and packaging.
Much of their work is highly secretive, but nowhere more so than in the cereals area. Deep in the heart of the heart of the Bell Institute, down in the bowels of the laboratory, you come to a warren of windowless rooms called, rather grandly, the Institute of Cereal Technology. I was permitted to pass through a high-security conference room furnished with a horseshoe-shaped table that had a pair of headphones at every seat. This was the institute’s inner sanctum, the cereal situation room, where General Mills executives gather to hear briefings about new products.
The secrecy surrounding the successor to Cocoa Pebbles struck me as laughable, and I said so. But as an executive explained to me, “Recipes are not intellectual property; you can’t patent a new cereal. All you can hope for is to have the market to yourself for a few months to establish your brand before a competitor knocks off the product. So we’re very careful not to show our hand.” For the same reason, the institute operates its own machine shop, where it designs and builds the machines that give breakfast cereals their shapes, making it that much harder for a competitor to knock off, say, a new marshmallow bit shaped to resemble a shooting star. In the interests of secrecy, the food scientists would not talk to me about current projects, only past failures, like the breakthrough cereal in the shapes of little bowling pins and balls. “In focus group the kids loved it,” the product’s rueful inventor told me, “but the mothers didn’t like the idea of kids bowling their breakfast across the table.” Which is why bowling pin cereal never showed up in your supermarket.
In many ways breakfast cereal is the prototypical processed food: four cents’ worth of commodity corn (or some other equally cheap grain) transformed into four dollars’ worth of