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Long-Shelf-Life Food:                   Is It Nutritious?

The 'ConeHead Family Mass Consumables' skits by Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd, and Laraine Newman on 1970s 'Saturday Night Live' Shows comically anticipated what is now everyday processed food science. Do you recall Beldar, Prymaat, & Connie tearing open bags of chips, dumping the chips and eating only the bags?--or biting into 6-packs of beer while the beer poured out of the cans?

Modern food packaging has changed, including more plastics. And the food itself now is composed of tongue-twisting chemicals, some of which resemble or are related to industrial solvents and chemicals.

Processed foods have warped into an era of fantastical chemistry lab projects to enhance flavors, colors, and textures.

Much of this is done to increase 'shelf life', to increase sales, to increase profitability of longer-lasting food products. Marketed to food consumers in grocery stores, convenient stores, and other retail outlets, including fast food and other restaurants, these are now known as 'convenience foods'.

'Processed foods' are far beyond early concerns about the amount of simple or simpler sugars, sugar substitiutes, non-sugar sweeteners, and simple and complex carbohydrates.

Butter too has changed beyond sweetened or unsweetened, regular or low-salt, butter substitutes like margarine, vegetable oils, butter spreads, and naturally-occurring dietary fats and shortenings. These now are being replaced by unusual or chemically synthesized shortenings.

Domestic and foreign emulsifiers abound in convenience and other foods considered to be pantry staples.

Protein substitutes, often soy or more unusual vegetable protein, now are rivalled by meat-flavored varieties and petri-dish grown meat-flavored protein substitutes.

More mobile or transient lifestyles prevent many Americans from preparing and eating the simpler,  healthier home-cooked foods they grew up eating, in what were for many simpler and healthier lifestyles. 

But the need for food to fuel everyday lives remains. Sold as convenience foods, processed foods are likely to remain a significant part of the US food industry. Food consumers continue to rush into grocery stores, convenient stores, and fast food restaurants to buy and eat more complicated processed foods, many with surprisingly sophisticated chemical ingredients. There are many examples. Subway sandwich breads were identified by consumer food researchers as containing 'plasticizing' and 'foamizing' chemicals

(Continued in the column to the right.) 

--By Mary Krause, August 29, 2017. Copyright, Mary Krause at mkrause54@yahoo.com, 2017.

Email comments to Mary Krause at mkrause54@yahoo.com

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Long-Shelf-LIfe Food:          Is It Nutritious?

 such as diazocarbamazide.

This chemical makes sub sandwich breads appear bigger and better, to increaes sandwich sales. Subway did consider elimiating these chemicals from their bread. But there hasn't been much follow-up on this issue.

The irony about this bread additive is that Subway always has advertised as a 'fresh' sandwich shop. This of course is to bring more 'fresh-food'- oriented customers into the shop to increase sales.

'Freshness' has become a common theme in food marketing to increase sales. But products in this and many other stores are 'long-shelf life' items with additives, beyond simple preservatives, often in each component of the retail food item. As on grocery store shelves, items advertised the most vigorously as 'fresh' tend to have many chemical components as ingredients.

Another recent example of the chemistry of processed foods is the deliberate production of sour-tasting foods. Food industry surveys found that the French perceive sourness to be a more mature, more adult taste. So processed food manufacturers made acid glazes for sourness. These are similar to those used in making gelatin-based candies like 'gummy bears', now often found in vitamins too on grocery store shelves.

Malic acid, actually found in fruits, is used by Corbion Company to make 'a partially neutralized acid' for sour coating of powder articles. This is done to eliminate problems associated with fat coating, such as rancidity, while maintaining moisture. Food Navigator.com notes that these malic acid coatings also are used to add sourness to flavored coatings on marshmallows & in Latin American chewing gums.

(Contined in the next blog in this series, 2 Long Shelf-Life Food: Is It Nutritious?)

--By Mary Krause, August 29, 2017. Copyright, Mary Krause at mkrause54@yahoo.com, 2017. 

Email comments to Mary Krause at mkrause54@yahoo.com.