"The 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 hard-boiled in a long tube so they can be uniformly sliced like salami. Ideal for sandwiches.
Another, more disgusting, discovery I have 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 hand-in-hand with industrial food production. The packaging on your Beef in Black Bean Sauce might claim that it’s “wok-fried”, 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. ...
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 push-button processes.
As for the ingredients, they are not displayed, but will include such horrors as fatty acid diglycerides, “flour improvers” and enzymes which no self-respecting baker would add to bread.
'via Blog this'
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