The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [51]
The other problem with selling whole foods, he explained, is that it will always be hard to distinguish one company’s corn or chickens or apples from any other company’s. It makes much more sense to turn the corn into a brand-name cereal, the chicken into a TV dinner, and the apples into a component in a nutraceutical food system.
This last is precisely what one company profiled in a recent issue of Food Technology has done. TreeTop has developed a “low-moisture, naturally sweetened apple piece infused with a red-wine extract.” Just eighteen grams of these apple pieces have the same amount of cancer-fighting “flavonoid phenols as five glasses of wine and the dietary fiber equivalent of one whole apple.” Remember the sixties dream of an entire meal served in a pill, like the Jetsons? We’ve apparently moved from the meal-in-a-pill to the pill-in-a-meal, which is to say, not very far at all. Either way, the message is: We need food scientists to feed us. Of course, it was fortified breakfast cereal that first showed the way, by supplying more vitamins and minerals than any mere grain could hope to. Nature, these products implied, was no match for food science.
The news of TreeTop’s breakthrough came in a recent Food Technology trend story titled “Getting More Fruits and Vegetables into Food.” I had thought fruits and vegetables were already foods, and so didn’t need to be gotten into them, but I guess that just shows I’m stuck in the food past. Evidently we’re moving into the fourth age of food processing, in which the processed food will be infinitely better (i.e., contain more of whatever science has determined to be the good stuff) than the whole foods on which they’re based. The food industry has gazed upon nature and found it wanting—and has gotten to work improving it.
Back in the seventies, a New York food additive manufacturer called International Flavors & Fragrances used its annual report to defend itself against the rising threat of “natural foods” and explain why we were better off eating synthetics. Natural ingredients, the company pointed out rather scarily, are a “wild mixture of substances created by plants and animals for completely non-food purposes—their survival and reproduction.” These dubious substances “came to be consumed by humans at their own risk.”
Now, thanks to the ingenuity of modern food science, we had a choice. We could eat things designed by humans for the express purpose of being eaten by people—or eat “substances” designed by natural selection for its own purposes: to, say, snooker a bee or lift a wing or (eek!) make a baby. The meal of the future would be fabricated “in the laboratory out of a wide variety of materials,” as one food historian wrote in 1973, including not only algae and fungi but also petrochemicals. Protein would be extracted directly from petroleum and then “spun and woven into ‘animal’ muscle—long, wrist-thick tubes of ‘filet steak.’” (Come to think of it, agribusiness has long since mastered this trick of turning petroleum into steak, though it still needs corn and cattle to do it.)
All that’s really changed since the high-tech food future of the sixties is that the laboratory materials out of which these meals will be constructed are nominally natural—the relative prestige of nature and modern chemistry having traded places in the years since the rise of environmentalism. And besides, why go to the trouble and expense of manufacturing food from petroleum when there is such a flood of cheap carbon coming off the farm? So instead of creating foods whole cloth from completely synthetic materials, the industry is building them from fortified apple bits, red-wine extract, flavor fractions derived from oranges, isoflavones from soy, meat substitutes fashioned from mycoprotein, and resistant starches derived from corn. (“Natural raspberry flavor” doesn’t mean the flavor came from a raspberry; it may well have been derived from corn,