Processed Foods Revealed for what they really are – by the Food Industry itself
Cheez-its that taste medicinal. Metallic cornflakes. Eggo waffles that remind you of “stale straw”. Meat that calls to mind cardboard or damp dog hair.
If the recent government effort to reduce salt in processed foods is successful, this is what we will have to eat. Or so says the food industry according to an astonishing front page article in yesterday’s New York Times (free subscr reqd).
Compared to reducing fat and sugar, for which substitute ingredients have been found, eliminating salt and sodium is turning out to be a major challenge for these companies. Why is that? It turns out that without salt – lots and lots of salt – we eaters might discover that the stuff that is being sold to us as delicious, tantalizing and even healthy “food” is really nothing of the sort.
It’s a marketing problem. Without salt to hide the true nature of these products, we might not buy them. Why not? It turns out they don’t taste very good:
As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.
“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.
They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.
“Salt really changes the way that your tongue will taste the product,” Mr. Kepplinger said. “You make one little change and something that was a complementary flavor now starts to stand out and become objectionable.”
Let me be clear: I cook, and I use salt in my cooking. Salt is about as natural a substance as you can find. There is nothing wrong with salt – in reasonable amounts. It is a useful seasoning. It’s an important preservative, going back to Bible times. Salt was so common that it makes an appearance in Jesus parables and his followers are even told that we are “the salt of the earth“. Salt is one of the things that you must have for your body to function normally.
On the other hand, we also know that too much salt causes all kinds of problems, most significantly, hypertension or high blood pressure. Again from the Times article:
By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.
Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.
But the question here is not “to salt or not to salt”. It is somewhat simpler than that: We now know from the food companies themselves that without salt their food is not really very good. This is not a diatribe from a health nut. The industry itself is pleading with the government: “Our food is so bad that if we aren’t allowed to load it up with salt, people won’t eat it. You have to let us keep the salt. How else can we sell the stuff?”
The question is this: If the companies themselves think the product is this bad, why are we still buying it?
Instead, get yourself out to that Farmer’s Market this week. Then come home and cook some real food!
To explore this topic further, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s short book, “In Defense of Food” – available here from Amazon or at your library.
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