Celebrity chefs sell us the dream of whipping up daily, home-cooked dinners using the freshest ingredients. It pricks our consciences just enough to steer clear of obviously processed food and slip nicely designed meals labelled “fresh”, “healthy” or “natural” into our shopping baskets. The problem, explored by Joanna Blythman in this outstanding investigation into how our food has been manipulated by scientific process, is that those claims are a triumph of obfuscation and spin, dreamed up in nameless factories that are more like oil refineries than “scaled-up domestic kitchens”.
She gains access to some of these plants, where, like a horribly real Willy Wonka story, “equipment clunks, spurts, grinds, ploughs and agitates” stinkingly sweet sauces by the tonne. At an industry food fair she discovers that the “fresh” cut fruit she buys as a healthy option has been sprayed in an acid solution to add 21 days to its shelf life.
And yet Blythman is never holier than thou – she recognises that people, herself included, need and want convenience food. Her argument is simply that we have a right to know what’s really in it, right down to the minor chemical processes that have known toxic properties.
Sadly, most of us aren’t blessed with time, or a thoughtful and inexpensive butcher or greengrocer, or a local bakery that doesn’t sell bread with fertility-destroying phthalates in it. In years to come, Blythman worries, the cocktail of toxins built up in tiny doses every day may well lead our bodies to “abandon resistance and get ill”. Food for thought.
