can be used in hamburgers and other products.
Another process used to make fake beef takes internal organs, diaphragms, and waste meat from real beef and glues them together with adhesives made from egg white, starch, and gelatin. After a strip of real beef fat is glued along the edges, the product is frozen into the shape of a sirloin steak, a filet mignon, or a similar product. Food technologists boast that these products have the “mouthfeel” of real steaks. Ah, yes, beef is real food for real people.
You can also get surimi versions of lobster and shrimp, and the fake-food makers are busy working on surimi-based cheese, hot dogs, potato chips, and luncheon meat. The idea of fake hot dogs and fake luncheon meat is right up there with real virgin vinyl and genuine imitation leather. Surimi manufacturers protest that their products are not imitations. “Surimi isn’t an imitation anything,” says James Brooker of the National Maritime Fisheries Service. “It’s a seafood. It’s a blended-seafood product.”
One triumph of “food technology” (as the fake-food business is discreetly called) is the “gourm-egg,” developed by Ralston Purina and now ten years old (the technology, not the egg). A “gourm-egg” is a foot-long rod of hard-cooked egg suitable for slicing into seventy-five perfect center slices. Through the genius of food technology, the yolks of these slices do not slip out of the white rims, even if the slices do have the texture of gelatinous rubber and a vague, sulfurous near-egg aftertaste. But then think of all the work involved in shelling seventy-five real hard-boiled eggs.
Then there are “seafood curls,” developed by Griffith Laboratories. Using fake shrimp fried in “microwavable” batter, Griffith serves them crisp with a spicy dipping sauce. Such mouth-watering treats will soon be outdone, if Professor Endel Karmas, a food chemist at Rutgers University, has his way. He is developing “fish chewies,” a chocolate-flavored fish-based concoction with the texture of a soft Tootsie Roll. And you thought the greatest tragedy to befall American cooking was the death of the real hamburger.
Food technologists are not a humorless group. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal in 1986, a group of food technologists once concocted what they called “trash soups,” just for fun. The soups were made almost entirely of by-products: minced cod, scallop mantels (which are the greenish, rubbery protective lips found in scallop shells), and a broth made from the effluent of a clam-processing plant that, after using the water to clean the clams, had simply dumped the water as sewage. The soups, called New England and Manhattan Clam Chowders, were a big hit in taste tests and sold very well. In fact, the soups sold so well that the clam company, after the food technologists were finished with their little experiment, bottled the water it used to clean the clams and sold it as clam juice for $8 a bottle.
The fake-food business is so big that even the Riverfront State Prison in Camden, New Jersey has a program in which inmates produce “restructured beef,” which turns beef chuck into pieces looking like strip steak, chuck roast, and other cuts. The inmates process fifty tons of meat a month.
How successful are these fake foods? Japanese manufacturers claim that consumers are convinced they are eating the real thing. There may be some truth to this claim, since fake crab exports to the United States went from over twenty-two hundred tons in 1981 to more than forty-five thousand tons in 1986. Fake crab and other fake foods are used by U.S. restaurants in salads, sandwiches, soups, casseroles, and other dishes. So, the next time you dine in a restaurant, you might ask, Where’s the crab?
FOOD LABEL QUIZ
Now it’s time to test your taste buds, and your ability to read a food label. Take this short quiz and see whether you can identify some popular food products just by reading the list of their ingredients. Match the number of the product with the letter of the list of ingredients.
The Doublespeak of Everyday Things
I still haven’t learned to call “Directory Assistance” when I need a telephone number that’s not in the telephone book. I want to call information. But then I still use a toothbrush, and not an “oral hygiene appliance” or a “home plaque removal instrument.” In our everyday lives we encounter more and more doublespeak like these examples.
Plain thermometers have become “digital fever computers,” while the bathroom scale has become an “ultra-thin microelectric weight sensor.” The modern bathroom doesn’t have a bathtub, sink, and toilet, it has a “body cleaning system,” a “pedestal lavatory,” and a “water closet tub.” Should your “water closet tub” become clogged, you can always use a “hydro blastforce cup” (or plunger) to clear it.
Pacific Gas & Electric Company doesn’t send you a monthly bill these days, now it sends you “Energy Documents.” Hallmark doesn’t sell greeting cards, but “social expression products,” while Sony sells blank videotapes that come in the “Extra Standard Superior Grade.” Videotape stores will sell you “previously viewed videos” or used videotapes. You don’t buy ink, you buy “writing fluid.” A calendar is now a “personal manual data base,” while a clock is a “personal analog temporal displacement monitor” and a used wristwatch is a “pre-owned vintage watch classic, an estate quality timepiece.” Seiko sells “Personal Time Control Centers” not wristwatches. What was once a vacuum cleaner is now Hoover’s “Dimension 1000 Electronic Cleaning machine with quadraflex agitator.”
Automobile junkyards have become “auto dismantlers and recyclers,” and they sell “predismantled previously owned parts.” Secondhand or used furniture stores now sell “second-choice furnishings.” Spoiled fruits and vegetables are now “distressed produce,” while discount stores have become “valued oriented” stores. When you buy popcorn at the Strand movie theater in Madison, Wisconsin, you go to the “Patron Assistance Center,” not the refreshment or candy stand. And if you want to exercise, you can always go, not to the gym, but to the “fitness center.”
A company advertises that you can place your order by “electronic information transfer.” What they really mean is that you can telephone your order to them. Undertakers, some of whom now call themselves “perpetual rest consultants,” will sell you an “underground condominium” or cemetery lot, or an “eternal condominium” or mausoleum. Graves, by the way, are never dug but are “prepared” by those specializing in “internment excavation.” You can even make “pre-need arrangements.”
Beware of the Polls
Statistical doublespeak is a particularly effective form of doublespeak, since statistics are not likely to be closely scrutinized. Moreover, we tend to think that numbers are more concrete, more “real” than mere words. Quantify something and you give it a precision, a reality it did not have before.
We live in an age where people love numbers. Computer printouts are “reality.” You identify yourself with your Social Security number; your American Express, MasterCard, or Visa number; your driver’s license number; your telephone number (with area code first); your zip code. Three out of four doctors recommend something, we are told; a recent poll reveals 52.3 percent are opposed; Nielsen gives the new television program a 9.2; the movie grossed $122 million.
Baseball produces not just athletic contests but an infinity of statistics, which all true fans love to quote endlessly. Crowds at football and basketball games chant, “We’re number one!” while the Dow Jones index measures daily our economic health and well-being. Millions of people legally (and illegally) play the daily number.
