The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [50]
BUILDING PROCESSED FOOD out of a commodity like corn doesn’t completely cushion you from the vicissitudes of nature, but it comes close. The more complex your food system, the more you can practice “substitutionism” without altering the taste or appearance of the product. So if the price of hydrogenated fat or lecithin derived from corn spikes one day, you simply switch to fat or lecithin from soy, and the consumer will never know the difference. (This is why ingredient labels says things like “Contains one or more of the following: corn, soybean, or sunflower oil.”) As a management consultant once advised his food industry clients, “The further a product’s identity moves from a specific raw material—that is, the more processing steps involved—the less vulnerable is its processor” to the variability of nature.
In fact, there are lots of good reasons to complicate your product—or, as the industry prefers to say, to “add value” to it. Processing food can add months, even years, to its shelf life, allowing you to market globally. Complicating your product also allows you to capture more of the money a consumer spends on food. Of a dollar spent on a whole food such as eggs, $0.40 finds its way back to the farmer. By comparison, George Naylor will see only $0.04 of every dollar spent on corn sweeteners; ADM and Coca-Cola and General Mills capture most of the rest. (Every farmer I’ve ever met eventually gets around to telling the story about the food industry executive who declared, “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.”) When Tyson food scientists devised the chicken nugget in 1983, a cheap bulk commodity—chicken—overnight became a high-value-added product, and most of the money Americans spend on chicken moved from the farmer’s pocket to the processor’s.
As Tyson understood, you want to be selling something more than a commodity, something more like a service: novelty, convenience, status, fortification, lately even medicine. The problem is, a value-added product made from a cheap commodity can itself become a commodity, so cheap and abundant are the raw materials. That lesson runs straight through the history of a company like General Mills, which started out in 1926 as a mill selling whole wheat flour: ground wheat. When that product became a cheap commodity, the company kept ahead of the competition by processing the grain a bit more, creating bleached and then “enriched” flour. Now they were adding value, selling not just wheat but an idea of purity and health, too. In time, however, even enriched white flour became a commodity, so General Mills took another step away from nature—from the farm and the plants in question—by inventing cake mixes and sweetened breakfast cereals. Now they were selling convenience, with a side of grain and corn sweetener, and today they’re beginning to sell cereals that sound an awful lot like medicines. And so it goes, the rushing stream of ever cheaper agricultural commodities driving food companies to figure out new and ever more elaborate ways to add value and so induce us to buy more.
When I was in Minneapolis I spoke to a General Mills vice president who was launching a new line of organic TV dinners, a product that at first blush sounded like an oxymoron. The ingredient list went on forever, brimming with additives and obscure fractions of corn: maltodextrin, corn starch, xanthan gum. It seems that even organic food has succumbed to the economic logic of processing. The executive patiently explained that selling unprocessed or minimally processed whole foods will always be a fool’s game, since the price of agricultural commodities