he food journalist Joanna Blythman has a brilliant new book out, Swallow This, on the murky world of convenience food, such as the billions of ready meals that we eat every year. Did you know, for example, that eggs are hardly ever used by food manufacturers in the form in which we would recognise them? They’re either powdered – and sugared, bizarrely – or they come fused together and hardboiled in a long tube so they can be uniformly sliced like salami. Ideal for sandwiches.
Another, more disgusting, discovery I made recently is what they do to “wraps”. I realise Telegraph readers may not necessarily eat wraps (and won’t want to after reading this) but you might be intrigued to know that the first thing the sandwich smearers on the production line do to wraps is slather them in a revolting-looking starchy jelly. It glues the wrap together.
More worrying are the deceptions that go handin-hand with industrial food production. The packaging on your Beef in Black Bean Sauce might claim that it’s “wokfried”, but according to Blythman the food makers do precious little cooking of raw food – it comes in frozen or dried from all over the world.
Amazingly, stuff can be called “British” even if it isn’t. Ingredient lists are riddled with dishonesty, too. So-called “clean labels” conceal weird additives that you would never use in your kitchen under homely sounding names, such as “cultured vinegar” for a bacteriainhibiting agent.
Even if you wouldn’t touch a ready-meal with a barge pole, you have probably bought bread from an in-store bakery, where the worst fraud of all is perpetrated. Bread, the staff of life, is a potent symbol of wholesomeness, and yet these pretend bakeries are little more than “tanning salons” (in the Real Bread Campaign’s clever phrase) for buns, doughnuts and the like, which may have been part-baked or deep-fried months ago before being frozen and then reheated in a series of pushbutton processes. As for the ingredients, they are not displayed, but will include such horrors as fatty acid diglycerides, “flour improvers” and enzymes.
Can we blame the manufacturers, though? We want to believe that the de luxe sandwich we’re eating is made from “farmhouse” bread and lettuce leaves freshly plucked from the garden, even if deepdown we know that it came from a factory and the bread is spongy Chorleywood-Bread-Process pap. It’s more palatable if we swallow the fantasy.
Nearly everything in our consumer society works on this basis of voluntary self-deception. The shampoo I used this morning boasted that it was enriched with “horse chestnut extract”, as if the juice had been hand-squeezed by a maiden in the woods – rather than what it is: sodium laureth sulphate, a hefty industrial detergent.
This is the bargain we make in industrialised society. Sell us your dreams, we say to the marketers, and we’ll be happy to buy them. Ours is a world of simulacra. If manufacturers told us what was really in their products and how they were made, we’d be so nauseated we’d never buy them.
Mind you, Joanna Blythman would probably say that would be no bad thing. For her, cooking our own food is a daily act of resistance. ŠToo busy to prepare food from scratch, we are also too impatient (80 per cent of us) to brew tea for long enough, or so says Professor Mark Miodownik of University College, London.
That is no doubt true. But can the British Standard Institute be right that tea should be steeped for six minutes? That seems awfully long. Most tea, after all, is made with tea bags now, which are filled with “fannings”, tiny particles of tea that release their flavour almost instantly. Brewed for more than a few minutes they start to taste cheek-puckeringly tannic and bitter. Fannings bear no comparison to the whole leaves found in a grade such as orange pekoe, which certainly takes four or five minutes to brew.
Tea is still the best drink of the day – and the most popular, after water. Incredible to think that something as innocent as tea should have caused wars but of course it did. In the 1820s we British were shipping more and more Indian opium to the Chinese, to balance the vast amounts of tea the Chinese were selling us. But the Chinese didn’t want to be flooded with opium and that led to the opium wars.
In one respect, though, I agree with the Professor: what you make tea in matters, and it certainly tastes better when brewed in a pot.