Olives are “stuffed with minced pimentos.” However, the list of ingredients includes not minced pimento but “pureed pimento.” Thus it is hardened pimento mush that is stuffed into the olives.
You can always try Café Français, an instant coffee that captures the famous flavor of the French recipe by using vegetable oil, corn syrup solids, sugar, instant coffee, sodium caseinate solids, trisodium citrate, dipotassium phosphate, mono- and diglycerides, silicon dioxide, artificial flavors, lecithin, and tetrasodium pyrophosphate. Of course, if you take “cream” in your coffee, there’s always your choice of Coffee-Mate, Cremora, Coffee-Rich, Coffee Dream, or any number of other brands of “non-dairy creamers” containing such nondairy ingredients as corn syrup, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, and one or more of the following oils: coconut, cotton seed, palm, and soybean. They also throw in some mono- and diglycerides, sodium caseinate, disodium phosphate, sodium citrate, and potassium stearate. But, don’t worry; your fake cream has been “ultrapasteurized.” I wonder when plain old pasteurization stopped being good enough?
The side panels on the package of Arnold Italian Crispy Croutons explains how, in the early 1800s, the French made croutons by cutting long loaves of bread into small pieces, drying the pieces, and then frying them in butter or oil. Then you read that “The delicious crunchy-crisp croutons in this package are directly derived from the original French dish, but the method of preparation has been adapted to modern lifestyles and standards.” The modern method of preparation includes adding such tasty ingredients as ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, calcium propionate, potassium bromate, disodium phosphate, artificial flavor, and other touches to improve on the classic French recipe.
But at least bread is bread, you think, and the label on a loaf of bread is pretty straightforward. You’d better think again. According to the Code of Federal Regulations there are twenty- seven chemicals that can be added to bread, but the food manufacturer doesn’t have to list any of them on the label. Even for the ingredients that do have to be listed on the label, the manufacturer can use a little doublespeak. In 1985, the Center for Science in the Public Interest revealed that the source of “fiber” in a number of popular “high-fiber” breads was nonnutritional wood pulp. To reduce the number of calories and increase the amount of fiber in the bread, some companies had replaced some of the flour with alpha cellulose, which was sometimes listed as “powdered cellulose” among the ingredients on the package. None of the companies listed wood pulp among the ingredients. All of the companies defended their labeling as “not deceptive.”
The food companies have never let up in their efforts to use words that mislead. On the NBC-TV ‘Today” program on September 9, 1987, Richard Frank, speaking for the Committee for Fair Pizza Labeling, a food industry lobbying group, argued for the use of a “low-cholesterol cheese alternate” on frozen pizza. In other words, Mr. Frank wanted Congress to approve the use of fake cheese on frozen pizza, and he wanted to use it without calling it fake cheese.
At least you don’t have to read a list of all those ingredients on a bottle of wine. In 1981 the Wine Institute convinced the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to adopt a regulation that allows wine companies not to list all the ingredients in a bottle of wine. Now they can omit mention of such additives as grape juice, grape must, grape concentrate, yeasts, water, eggs (albumen or yolks), gelatin, casein, isinglass and pectolytic enzymes as clarifiers, ascorbic acid or erythodbic acid to prevent darkening, and sulfur dioxide and potassium salt of sorbic acid as sterilizing and preservative agents. Anyone for a glass of wine?
You can’t even say you’re getting a lemon when you buy foods like lemon pudding or lemon cake mix, because the lemons in these products are fake. In fact, you don’t need any lemons to make lemonade. In 1982 the Food and Drug Administration denied a petition asking that the word “lemonade” be restricted to products containing real lemon juice. Howard N. Pippin, speaking for the FDA, said that “we don’t know how much lemon juice it takes to make lemonade.” He conceded that, under FDA regulations, a product could appear with a label reading “lemonade,” yet contain no lemon juice. That’s just what’s happened, because General Foods’ Lemonade Flavor Drink contains no lemon pulp, lemon peel, or lemon juice. It does contain citric acid, gum acacia, and “nutritive sweetener.” When a consumer wrote to General Foods and asked how they could make lemonade without lemons, the company wrote back that “the aromatic or essential component of all citrus fruits is also referred to as ‘natural flavor’ and is derived from the oil sacs in the peel and not from the juice.” Anyone want to buy “lemon oil sac component pudding and pie filling”?
If you look at all those products that use the word “lemon” on their packages, you’ll find few if any lemons were used to make any of them. General Foods’ Lemon Deluxe Cake Mix contains citric acid, while Royal Gelatin Lemon Dessert has fumaric acid, and Jell-0 Lemon Pudding Mix contains fumaric acid and adipic acid for tartness. You also won’t find any lemons in any of those lemon-scented ammonia cleaners, oven cleaners, furniture polishes, furniture waxes, air deodorizers, toilet bowl fresheners, or detergents that have the word “lemon” in big letters or a big picture of a lemon on their packages. Search as hard as you can, but you won’t find a lemon in the whole bunch. How does Lemon Freshened Borax or Lemon Fresh Joy differ from non-lemon products? Since they don’t contain real lemons, we are left guessing what ingredient they do contain that makes them different.
Fake Food
One of the fastest growing segments of the food industry is fake food. What, you ask, is fake food? Fake food looks and tastes like the real product (or so the manufacturers claim), but it is made from a cheaper substitute and sells for a fraction of the cost of the real thing. To be more accurate, the fake-food industry sells its products to the retailer for a fraction of the cost. Consumers usually end up paying as if the fake food were the real thing.
Some “food technologists” (as fake-food inventors like to be called) don’t even call their products food; they call them “food systems.” Food technologists develop such things as “cheese analogs” (fake mozzarella) and “restructured muscle products” (fake steaks). When these “food systems” are used in restaurants, there’s no requirement that customers be told what they’re buying and what they’re eating.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture allows food processors to combine 135 parts of water with one part meat stock and still use the words “beef stock” instead of water on their ingredient labels. You can buy such fake foods as California Foolers, which are non-alcoholic versions of alcoholic drinks; and fake flavors (known as flavorgeins and flavor enhancers) such as butter, Mexican, Oriental, and Italian flavors. You can even get combinations such as nacho-flavored fortune cookies. Companies are even developing a fake barbecue sauce flavor and a fake mesquite smoke flavor. Soon you will be able to buy barbecue- flavored and mesquite-flavored food without the food ever having been near a real grill.
A number of Japanese companies ship large amounts of fake frozen crab meat (or, more precisely, a “surimi-based crab analog”) to the United States. Surimi is a fish paste made by pressing and repeatedly washing deboned fish. The fake crab comes in the form of sticks or shredded meat and is made from cheap cod plus starch, salt, chemical seasoning, “essence of crab” (which is derived from boiling down crab shells), and polymerized phosphate. Sales of imitation crab meat exceeded $100 million a year in 1984 and were growing rapidly.
There are many other fake foods. Fake scallops are made from codfish with “essence of scallop,” then compressed into cylinders and sliced to look like scallops. Canned red salmon is produced by using 30 percent real salmon plus cod with starch, salt, chemical seasoning, and synthetic red coloring added. Fake salmon roe consists of little orange-red colored balls made from seaweed gelatin, filled with salad oil.
Japanese fake-food manufacturers have also gone beyond fake seafood to fake beef. Using cod or sardines, the fake-food makers add salt and knead the mass until it takes on a gluey consistency. This mass is then put
