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March 1, 2013 |
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue deep inside the
$1-trillion-a-year "processed-food-industrial complex," we turn to look
at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most
abundant, most addictive and most nutritionally inferior food in the
world. And the vitamins and protein added back to this processed food?
Well, you might be surprised to know where they come from. That’s the
focus of a new book by longtime food reporter Melanie Warner, author of
Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal.
Melanie, welcome to
Democracy Now! She’s
joining us from Denver, Colorado. Vitamins, vitamin-added food. You
think you go to the grocery store, and you want to get a little added
punch, and you want to ensure that your kids, that your family, has
added vitamins. What’s the problem with that?
MELANIE WARNER: You
know, one of the things with processed food that I found while doing
this book, is not only that it has an abundance of the things that
Michael was talking about—salt,
sugar, fat—it’s also what it’s lacking, which, it turns out, is
naturally occurring nutrition, in many cases. So that’s vitamins and
minerals and fiber and things like antioxidants.
So, you take
something like cereal—you know, you walk down the cereal aisle, and
you’re bombarded with health messages: It’s high in vitamin D, a good
source of calcium, fiber, antioxidants. You see these things all over
the package. And one of the things—one of the questions I asked myself
when I was starting to work on this book was: Why is it nearly
impossible to find a box of cereal in the cereal aisle without vitamins,
added vitamins and minerals, in the ingredient list?
And it turns
out, because most cereal has very little inherent nutrition. And this
is in part because of processing. The processing of food is very
intensive. It’s very—it’s very technical, and with cereal, can be very
damaging to naturally occurring nutrients, especially vitamins and
oftentimes fiber. So, what manufacturers do is they add back in
vitamins. So, essentially, you see all these wonderful claims on the
package, but essentially—and you look at the panel, and you’re getting
35 percent and 40 percent of your recommended daily allowance of these
vitamins, but they’re essentially added in like a vitamin pill, which
many people maybe are already taking in the morning.
And I was
really surprised to learn where some of these vitamins come from. I
never really thought about it in much detail, as probably most people
don’t. But it turns out that they’re—these vitamins are not coming from
the foods that contain them. Like vitamin C does not come from an
orange, and vitamin A does not come from a carrot. It’s very far from
that. They come from things that really aren’t actually foods. Vitamin
D, for instance, was probably the most shocking. It comes from sheep
grease, so actually the grease that comes from sheep wool. You have
giant barges and container ships that go from Australia and New Zealand
over to China, where most of—a lot of our vitamins are produced. About
50 percent of global vitamin production comes from China inside these
huge factories, very industrial processes. A lot of vitamins are
actually chemical processes.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait.
MELANIE WARNER: And they’re very technical and complex.
AMY GOODMAN: A
lot of people, if they’re with someone, they’re looking at them right
now. Wait a second. So, China gets all these shipments of sheep wool
from Australia, and they’re pulling the sheep grease off of them to make
vitamin D?
MELANIE WARNER: Yeah, sheep grease is
actually very useful for a lot of things. It can be used to make
moisturizer in lip balm. It can be used for industrial purposes, for
lubricants for engines and machines and things like that. But one of its
uses is to be converted, through a number of chemical steps and
chemical processes, to vitamin D, which is added to our food and used in
supplements. So, yeah—
AMY GOODMAN: What about—
MELANIE WARNER: —it’s just one of—
AMY GOODMAN: What about nylon, Melanie? What does nylon have to do with vitamins?
MELANIE WARNER: Yeah,
it’s one of—it’s one of these chemicals that goes into the making of
one of the B vitamins. It’s many—there are many food additives,
actually, that are used in food but actually also have industrial
purposes associated with them. One of my favorites is a chemical called,
a food additive called azodicarbonamide, and that’s actually used quite
extensively in bread and bread-type products, and it’s used as a dough
conditioner and a manufacturing aid. And its main use outside of the
manufacturing of bread is for creating foamed plastic, so things like
yoga mats.
And I encountered some news articles a number of years
ago where a tanker truck overturned on the Dan Ryan Expressway in
Chicago carrying azodicarbonamide. And city fire officials had to issue
their highest hazmat alert and evacuate everyone up to a half mile
downwind because of this chemical spill. So you look at something like
that, and you wonder: Is this something that we really want in our
morning toast and our—the bread that goes on our turkey sandwiches?
AMY GOODMAN: Well,
that’s a very important question. Now, of course, the processed food
industry, the gross sales are enormous, but you may have redefined
"gross" sales. Let’s talk about some of the experiments the scientist
Melanie Warner conducted. Talk a little about chicken tenders.
MELANIE WARNER: Yeah,
I’m not much of a scientist, but a number of years ago, when I started
covering the food industry, I became curious about expiration dates that
are printed on packages. Pretty much you to go into the supermarket,
and every package in the store will have an expiration date on it. And I
wondered: Well, what will happen? What do these expiration dates mean,
and what will happen after this date has come and gone? Some of these
dates are actually quite far out; they’ll be six to nine months or even
more.
So I started collecting a number of food products, and I
saved them in my office. And then I would open them after the expiration
dates had passed, sometimes long after the expiration dates had passed
because I had forgotten about them. And what I found out over time—I
collected all kinds of products: cereal, cookies, Pop-Tarts, fast-food
meals, frozen dinners, I mean, you name it. I have all kinds of gross
stuff in my office at this point.
And what I found—there were a
few exceptions—but what I found was that most of this food did not
decompose or mold or go bad, even after long, long periods of time. I
mean, I started this seven, eight years ago, and I still have slices of
cheese that are perfectly orange, processed cheese.
AMY GOODMAN: From years and years and years ago?
MELANIE WARNER: Years and years and years ago, yeah. And they’re—
AMY GOODMAN: And what keeps their color? And what keeps them looking completely preserved?
MELANIE WARNER: There
are a variety of reasons for this, depending on the product. Sometimes
it’s because of powerful chemical preservatives that are in it.
Sometimes it’s because of additives that lower the acidity of products,
so that no microorganisms can grow. And sometimes it’s because food
manufacturers very intentionally remove all the water from products.
That’s the case with cereal and cookies.
AMY GOODMAN: Melanie, right now, for our TV viewers, we’re showing images of guacamole, bought in a store, presumably—
MELANIE WARNER: Yes, right.
AMY GOODMAN: —you know, maybe even a Whole Foods-type store, you know, a natural food store—
MELANIE WARNER: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —and your own guacamole, and the difference how long it’s preserved.
MELANIE WARNER: Yeah,
I think this was an unusual tub of guacamole, and it had an unusual
dose of food additives. My husband came back from the store with it one
day and said, "Oh, they announced—made an announcement that they made it
fresh over at the deli." So I thought, "Oh, this is great." And I
looked at the ingredients, and there were some ingredients on there that
I had never even heard of. And I was spending a lot of time doing
research on food additives. So I kind of—I put it away, I stored it in
the fridge. And I thought, "Well, I’ll look into this later and see what
these additives are."
And then, an interesting thing happened
about nine months later. I completely forgot about it in the back of the
fridge. My mom, who lives with us, she announced that she had tried
some of the guacamole. And I thought she was referring to a recent
purchase that I had made at a different store that we had bought for a
party. But I thought, you know, I think a lot of that’s—that’s gone. And
it turns out that she had tried the old guacamole, the nine-month-old
stuff. And I was horrified, because she’s an older person, she’s in her
early eighties, and food-borne illness in older people is no small
thing. So I was terrified that she was going to be horribly ill. In
fact, she wasn’t. She was—
AMY GOODMAN: Because the guacamole was how old?
MELANIE WARNER: Nine
months. It was nine months old, yeah. So—and she had eaten it because
it had no mold on it, it didn’t smell bad. It was a little bit—when I
looked at it, it was a little bit discolored around the edges, you know?
So some people might have thought, "Oh, maybe I’m not going to eat it."
But she looked at it and thought, "Oh, this is a nice guacamole." So...
And in the end, thankfully, she had only had a little bit, and she was
totally fine. She had no effects whatsoever.
AMY GOODMAN: Melanie, 15 seconds before we end part one of this discussion. What most surprised you?
MELANIE WARNER: I
think just the overall extent to which the technology and food science
has merged with food production, and the level of engineering that goes
and the level of technology and the level of processing that goes
into—that goes into our food. And also, the extent to which the FDA is
not watching over what goes into our food in terms of food additives
very closely.
Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated news program,
Democracy Now!.
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