Busted
Got milk?

Pete and I were talking in the car earlier on about a programme he’d watched on the iPlayer last night that he thought I might like – the second episode in Jimmy’s Food Factory series, What’s in my sandwich? (available online for another month).

In this series, Jimmy looks at what it takes to put some of the processed foods we rely on onto supermarket shelves. Pete thought I might enjoy this one because it involves a giant greenhouse of tomatoes and fields and fields of salad vegetables.

First up, though, Jimmy tried to recreate the Chorleywood process that is used to make supermarket bread that is soft and bouncy and lasts for a week or so after you buy it. The secret lies in whipping a lot of air into the dough and adding some additives so that the air bubbles stay put.

In the giant tomato greenhouse, a UK grower is able to supply tomatoes all year round through keeping them in a climate-controlled environment. But as fuel prices rise, how do they keep the heating bills down? They’ve settled on a novel solution – they use tonnes of waste fruit and vegetables, biodigesting them to produce methane, which is then burned for heat. And all the carbon dioxide that produces is piped into the greenhouses to increase tomato production. Which all sounds like a wonderful way to keep waste organic material out of landfill, but as Jimmy pointed out a lot of this ‘waste’ food is perfectly edible and could be feeding people directly rather than being used to keep tomatoes warm out of season.

Out in the salad fields, a war is being waged against insects. Firstly, yellow sticky traps are deployed – a low tech, ‘high tack’ solution to finding out what’s living in the fields. Bat boxes encourage bats into the fields (who can eat 3000 bugs per night), and flowering plants are used to attract an army of beneficial insects. Which reduces, but does not eliminate, the need for pesticides. And high tech machinery is used to separate any remaining bugs from their dinner before it’s bagged to become ours.

And then it’s on to cheese slices – apparently processed cheese is only 60% cheese. The rest is water, milk powder and ‘melting powder’ that helps to stick these non-sticky ingredients together. Which is why processed cheese is rubbery. Yum.

Jimmy’s excitable delivery is part pride in his achievements as he recreates these processes in his barn (mainly using power drills) and part wonder at the achievements of the food scientists who make all this possible. But, I have to say, watching all this food processing really does bring it home to me what we do to our ‘food’ and how far removed it has become from what we used to eat.

Highly processed food may be convenient, and cheap, but I certainly don’t fancy it much when I’ve seen how it has been made. Out of morbid curiosity I went back and watched the first episode in the series, ‘breakfast‘, but I wish I hadn’t. Robot milking machines that get a yield of 30 litres of milk per cow per day (as opposed to a ‘traditional’ system that gets 20 litres) and cornflakes that have all the goodness removed and then added back in (iron filings, yum!) make the process for getting sugar crystals from sugar beet look quite tame. But I am glad I don’t drink instant coffee ;)

It’s about as far removed from Slow Food and permaculture as you can get.