Dr Samuel Furse » Geeky Foodie

 Emulsions Thursday, Nov 1 2012 

It is impossible to mix oil and water.  On the face of it, it almost seems peculiar that anyone should want to take an interest beyond that.  There are any number of occasions when mixing oil and water is clearly unnecessary (in the fuel tank of a car), or even dangerous (chip pan fires should never be put out with water).  However, a few minutes’ worth of Googling suggests that there are at least as many reasons why it is useful to mix oil and water.  Mayonnaise, paint, milk and even the humble pork pie would all be quite impossible without the principle of being able to combine water and oil; without emulsions.

A droplet of fat (orange) surrounded by emulsifying amphiphiles. Photo copyright: flatworldknowledge.com.

The hidden ingredient in mayonnaise is the vinegar; most people know that it contains oil and egg, and sometimes even mustard powder, but watery vinegar is guessed less often.  The inclusion of both oil and vinegar is the main underlying physicochemical problem with this food: to make it, you need to mix oil and water into a homogenous fluid.  This requires a third agent: an emulsifier.  In this case the egg yolk and mustard powder are the emulsifiers.  All that is required is that the oil, vinegar, egg and mustard are mixed together in the correct proportions, and a mayonnaise is formed.  The egg’s yolk contains a variety of lipids that are capable of encapsulating globules of fat that can then be suspended in the mixture of water and vinegar.

Emulsions used in paint are a bit more complicated, requiring several ingredients to work properly.  They are also quite different to other types of paint, such as oil-based or acrylics).  Emulsion paint relies upon particles that are dissolved in a medium containing water and another, minor, solvent.  It is these solvents that evaporate when the paint dries, during which the particles polymerise to form the skin we know of as dry paint.  The emulsion has been used as a sort of vehicle, to deliver the material we wish to use to create an opaque, coloured film on a surface.  However, the emulsion is not completely lost, as not all of the water leaves the mixture.  The layer is still capable of taking on further water in more humid conditions (e.g., in a bathroom), meaning the film cast on the surface is susceptible to water damage.  Paints that are suitable for more humid environments include masonry and enamel paints, that are based on oily systems that are designed to provide a waterproof seal for a given surface.

Pork Pies and Milk in front of a painted wall. How many emulsions are there?

Milk is a relatively simple and dilute emulsion, containing a mixture of fat, protein and water.  In this case, trace amounts of lipids, and milk proteins, are used to encapsulate the triglycerides (fat) that can then be suspended in the water.  It is therefore similar to mayonnaise in that amphiphilic species are used to create droplets that are then suspended in water.  However, milk uses amphiphilic proteins as well as lipids, whereas mayonnaise does not rely upon such proteins.

That just leaves us with the delicate matter of the pork pie.  This is really a fudge in terms of the basic principle of an emulsion, or rather, two fudges.  Firstly, the meaty part in the middle relies upon an emulsion so that the pork fat in it does not form unattractive blobs.  Secondly, the pastry relies upon a sort of emulsion in order to form an homogenous mixture.  The pastry requires the use of fat, partly because it was a useful source of energy in days gone by, but also so the pastry was edible.  The pastry made without fat in the middle ages was rather like stiff cardboard.  This was fine for keeping bugs and rodents off the meat, but was expensive and wasteful of flour.  This led to the accidental use of an emulsion for creating the pastry that holds it all together.  This is not uncommon in baking, batters and pastes are emulsions, nice and runny. Doughs are emulsions as well, but with fibrous protein in them.  If you fancy making an emulsion yourself, you might like to try one of James’ recipes from the final of the Great British Bake Off, for a Chiffon cake of a Union Jack (pp21).

 

 Another Great British Bake off. Seriously?! Sunday, Oct 21 2012 

There are, as you will have seen if you watched the tantalising final, plans for a fourth series of the Great British Bake off.  Auditions may even be under way already.  My initial reaction to this news was a petit mort.  A ‘little death’, just like the one the French refer to when they use this phrase, for the moment that some poor souls apparently suffer, of sang froid after sex.

I may be over-stating it to say that the final of the GBBO was orgasmically thrilling, as it clearly was not.  The Great British Bake off is struck deeply by the terrible flaw that the viewers cannot either taste or smell the baked goods being produced.  This is perhaps why the former is commented on blandly or briefly and the latter not at all.  This is in contrast to the appearance that gets a good deal of comment.  Inevitably, however, the food must be judged partly or even mainly on flavour.

It is perhaps vaguely peculiar therefore that the show works at all.  Of course it has beautifully able and contrasting judges, the tough-guy Paul Hollywood and the gentle but powerful Mary Berry.  The presenters number Sue Perkins, who provides witty wordplay and thinly-scripted narration clearly written by someone else, and Mel Giedroyc who does, well, something.  Not sure what.  Knows the names of tedious types of polish bun?  Talks in an unnecessarily dramatic tone about trivial occurrences?  I am not sure.

What it also has is someone a bit canny who does the auditions.  They know they have twelve contestants and they seem to think, probably rightly, that it will not work that will if the standard is too high or too low.  So they choose about six people who are a bit crap and will clearly be the first half to go (you can virtually write the list in week one) and about six who are competent but may or may not have the stamina to last it out.  Certainly they have some assessment system whereby they can ascertain whether potential bakers know their stuff or not.  There are clearly a number of people who are proficient in things I have never heard of and they cannot fail to check this before the whole thing kicks off.

Someone relatively senior of the production team, probably the director and the producer in fact, select rushes that edit together into something that manages to be both informative and watchably entertaining.  There are not endless tears and embarrassments, nor are there the sorts of humiliating and undignified scenes that appear in every other piece of reality television I have ever seen.  I call it reality television because the GBBO consists of amateurs doing a difficult thing, rather than a competition between seasoned professionals.  So much of the point of putting ‘ordinary’ people on television in a setting that some arse has called ‘reality’ is the schadenfreude for the viewer of watching someone who is at best ill-qualified and at worst as stupid than they are, fail or almost fail at something.  Those programmes are then designed to carry the supposed tension of the obvious outcome from the outset until some moment near the end, with an ‘emotional rollercoaster’ along the way.

Despite its faults, the GBBO manages to avoid any of this dross.  In that respect I find it a breath of fresh air.  It has made the celebrating of achievement by people who are able but not formally trained on television acceptable.  It means I can watch something that is not comedy, drama, documentary or crap, on live television, and for that I am grateful.  But where will it go next?  The flavour-flaw in the format can never be done away with and unless at least one of the judges or presenters dies, preferably during filming, the GBBO piping bag will flow steady for a while yet.  I am vaguely tempted to watch the next series, as long as it is not on too soon.  It is almost a compulsive urge: partly because it seems to be good television, and partly because I do like baking.  And eating.  Perhaps those things are the allure for me.  This sets up an uncomfortable paradox: the one place where those things can be satisfied is if I actually become a contestant on the programme itself.

I suppose that means I have a crème patissière to practice.  Just as soon as I find out what that is.

 

 How Hot is Hot? A Burning Question About a Hot Condiment Thursday, Jan 19 2012 

Plenty of people like a good hot curry. I am not one of them, but I think that most people have met, or know, someone who likes wolfing down the hottest curry in the house as a matter of pride. I do know someone who likes to munch on the same kind of hot curry but exquisitely slowly. Either way, it is safe to assume that pretty much anyone who has had a strong curry, and either enjoyed it or not, will remember the flavour forever.

There has even been a certain amount of study on this topic: some time ago, the compound capsaicin (Figure 1) was identified as the cause of the hotness. Several related compounds have also been identified, some of which are ‘hotter’ than others. This led to the desire to measure the ‘hotness’, resulting in the Scoville Heat Unit, and the Scoville Scale.

There is also the well-known opportunity for a schadenfreude with curry flavours. As it can be a strong flavour, when someone bites on something unexpectedly teeming with chopped jalepeños, the shock on their face is palpable. However, this shock can also be turned on its head with respect to public order. Recent anti-capitalist protests in America have given rise to some disturbing images of people sprayed with a capsaicin formulation (commonly known as pepper spray) either intentionally, or apparently not.

While these are shocking, and the mental and physical distress caused by the use of this ‘riot-control agent’ are readily understood, other factors are also important. The use of pepper spray as a weapon of self-defence, against a rapist or criminally violent attacker for example, seems not unreasonable. However, the link between pepper spray and deaths in people exposed to it who also have compromised respiratory function, increases the interest in managing the use of pepper spray, both politically and scientifically.

Figure 1. The structure of capsaicin, showing a more polar section (left) and a more lipophilic one (right), giving rise to a comparison with lipid structures.

One way of taking things further is to understand the science behind what is happening when pepper spray is used. A judgement can then be made about safety and appropriate conditions for use. The structure of capsaicin (Figure 1) suggests that it has a lot in common with what we know about lipid structure – a relatively polar (hydrophilic) section as one end, and a lipophilic hydrocarbon chain as the other. However, it is not just the lipid-like properties of capsaicin and its related compounds that give rise to the effect we remember so readily – after all, we eat lipids of one sort or another in almost every mouthful and most do not have the same effect as a vindaloo on our taste buds. This hot sensation is due to an effect of the capsaicin on nerves that feel heat (thermoception) and pain (nociception).  Recent work has suggested that there is a direct impact on the activity of calcium channels in nerves and earlier work has found that such exposure was responsible for permanent damage to the cells involved.This is quite sobering when looked at from a riot-control angle. If a chemical is able to cause innervation, as measured by pain, it is arguable that it is a drug. If it is a drug, strict licensing laws would apply. This also influences the dose(s) that can be used legally. Perhaps we need to reflect on the use of pepper spray of indiscriminate dose, as a crowd control agent?

 

 E Numbers: Emulsifiers Sunday, Oct 16 2011 

Figure 1. Mayonnaise, something that necessarily requires the emulsification of fat and water.

Emulsification is the word scientists give to mixing liquids together. Specifically, it is the process by which immiscible liquids, liquids that cannot normally mix, are mixed together. The chemical agent used is called an emulsifier. Emulsifiers are not unique to food, we use emulsifiers to clean ourselves (soap), and in order to produce medical injections.

Emulsifiers in Food

The most familiar emulsifier is probably the egg. Eggs are used as an emulsifier in everything from cakes and custard, to mayonnaise (Figure 1) and from hollandaise, to soufflés. What the egg is doing chemically is allowing the other ingredients to form a stable emulsion (mix). Interestingly, egg itself actually contains two types of emulsifier: one is protein, the other is lecithin (Figure 2). They both have chemical properties that are shared by both water and fatty substances. This helps mix things up sufficiently well to make a homogeneous mixture of water, fat and lecithin, that looks not unlike baby sick. There are others that are used regularly in cooking too. As well as the egg in mayonnaise, mustard powder is also added to many recipes. This also helps it to stay homogeneous.

Figure 2. The structure of lecithin. The blue section is water-liking.

 

Industrial Emulsification

In industrial food production, several harmless emulsifiers, not common-place in the home, have been used for some time. One such is xanthan gum. The name is perhaps misleading as it is not a gum as such when bought, but an off-white powder that is usually accused of being either cocaine or flour. The usage of the word gum is perhaps clearer when we consider the properties it has on being mixed with fat and water. Figure 3 shows the transformation. Here, I include weights and volumes so you can do this yourself if you want to.

Figure 3 – mixture of oil, water and xanthan gum (E415) forming an emulsion that is also thickened. A: oil and water, B: xanthan gum as available commercially, C: xanthan gum with oil and water before shaking, D: water, oil and xanthan gum mix after shaking, showing solidification, E: solid mixture as compared to xanthan gum.

In part A we see the oil (clear yellow layer, 10 mL) above the water (colourless layer, 25 mL).  Adding the xanthan gum (B, 5 g) appears to do little initially (C), however a brief agitation of the system leads to homogenesis of the three substances (D).   Not only do we have an homogenous mixture, but also one that is thicker than it was previously – squeezing it out gives the appearance of an off-white turd (E).  Said turd goes brilliantly with a sprig of basil or rosemary and glass of chilled white Sancerre.

 

 

 

 E Numbers: Preservatives Saturday, Oct 1 2011 

Preserving is probably the oldest intervention humans have wanted to make to food.  That is not to say that when man first donned a loincloth and dragged his nominal wife around by her hair he was wondering how to make the butchered elk leg go an extra day, but certainly historical evidence suggests it was a present and pressing concern at least as far back as the ancients.  It does not have to be primarily a chemical process; it can be a physical one.  For example, for the last several thousand years, several types of food have been dried in order to preserve them.

Drying

The drying process can significantly extend the life of vegetable and fruit foods as well as meats. In parts of the world they even dry out tarantula spiders in order to preserve them (Figure 1).  There are several ways of drying foods.  Sunlight can be used – we have all seen, if not  bought, sun-dried tomatoes – but also wind.  Carpaccio, although it sounds like a cheap fortified wine, drunk only as shots by pissed-up Australians, was originally wind-dried Italian beef1.

Figure 1 – Tarantula spiders that are dried and eaten in some parts of the world*.

Probably the earliest attempts at chemical preservatives employed salt.  Although later mined, this was first isolated from the sea using tidal flows that filled small pools at high or possibly spring tides, and the water evaporated in the sun.  In Western Europe and other places, pork and beef were routinely packed into salt, which preserved them.  In fact this was the chief method of preserving these meats until at least the end of the middle ages. The discovery of nutmeg as a meat preservative became more widespread in use from around this time, allowing meat to be eaten all year round, but also to be taken on sea voyages.  In fact, the utility of nutmeg in particular in preserving meat was so keenly observed and was unique to it for many years that with a geographically limited supply, human conflict
resulted.  The conflict between the Netherlands and Portuguese in the 18th Century was fought more or less directly over nutmeg.  Although pork with nutmeg is a seemingly odd combination today, it is a delicious one.

What Does Drying Do, and Why Does it Work?

Drying, whether with salt or not, works in the same way that adding sugar and heating to make jam works as a method of preserving food.  You will know from experience that eating salty or very sugary (rather than just sweet) food makes one thirsty.  The same is true of microbes exposed to high concentrations of sugar or salt.  The sugar and salt draw the water out from them, too.  However when the sugar or salt content is sufficiently high, so much water is drawn out, it kills them.  This is how to spot poor-quality jam: mould will grow on it.  The same principle can be applied to dried beef: the salts and other things within the meat fibres have reached a concentration that prevents microbes from living on them.

There is a secondary reason why covering a pork joint in salt will preserve it.  It also forms a barrier between the meat and the air.  This prevents the air-borne bacteria and fungi from ever reaching the food in the first place – it is a barrier between the food and the outside world. Today the principle barriers in use are plastic films and canning, as part of sealed packaging, and so on for just this purpose.

Preservatives: The E Numbers’ Finest Hour

The E numbers we use to preserve foods are plentiful, in fact there are two groups for this job.  There are the numbers E200-299 (general preservatives) and E300-399 (anti-oxidants).  The E300s are perhaps the most interesting because of how they are misunderstood. ‘Anti-oxidants’ are, to a lot of people, something to do with hand cream and young-looking skin.  Perversely, the same chemicals that give these creams their anti-oxidant (preservative) properties are often the same ones that appear in food.  And while a bit of vitamin C (ascorbic acid, otherwise known as E300) is not going to turn a shrivelled apricot into a peachy baby’s bottom, it will delay the fats in that cream from going rancid.

If you want to test this experiment at home, take a bottle of lemon juice and a fresh apple.  Halve said apple, put the face of one half in the lemon juice and the other on a windowsill and leave for a couple of hours. Compare the state of the two after this time.

References and Notes

1     A. de Conte, ‘Amaretto, Apple Cakes and Artichokes’, Vintage Books, 2006.

 

 

 

 E Numbers: Flavouring Saturday, Sep 24 2011 

Although the idea of chemical flavourings is well known, individual chemicals that add a particular flavour to a food rarely exist in pure form.  For example, a lot of things that smell quite nice taste disgusting.  It works the other way around as well: chloroform, for example, has a wincing smell that is cold to the touch, and heavy to lift and carry.  I did not think much of it, but from the screams and dramatic throes of every other victim in Agatha Christie novels, I was never sure I wanted to get close.  However once in the laboratory as a postgraduate I breathed it in by accident, onto my tongue, and found it tasted quite sweet.  Conversely, molasses for animal feed smells delicious, rather like treacle.  I am reliably informed that the taste of this feed fails to match its odour however.  The evidence for this was a fit of vomiting by a friend who dared, one cold Sunday morning, to taste the molasses used in her horse’s breakfast.

Flavour Options

The traditional reason that chemical flavourings have not assumed a big place in food manufacturing is that we can flavour food with herbs and spices, and have done for probably thousands of years.  These, however, are not flavourings as chemists would understand them.  The flavour of nutmeg, cinnamon or tarragon, are the result of a variety of compounds present.  Indeed, several may be shared between any two flavours.  Generally, known flavours like tomato or cranberry are not supplanted directly into foods, but chemicals that enhance the flavours can be used on top of ingredients that are already there.  We use many of these flavour enhancers without thinking about it.  Sugar, salt, lemon juice, vinegar and mustard are all ordinary kitchen ingredients but good enhancers of flavour.  Of course they can be flavours on their own, but are often used simply to enhance flavour.  Thus in putting the flavour back into our cooked carrot for selling on, we might add a little sugar and/or salt to do this.

The Colour-Flavour Confusion

Like our colour perception, our flavouring sense is also fallible.  For example, if you buy strawberry jelly from the supermarket, and make it up according to the instructions, it will be a nice red colour (as we expect, it being of the strawberry persuasion), and smell sweet and fruity.  Most of us will dive into eating it quite happily if we are hungry.  However, if you stop for a second and compare the smell of said strawberry jelly to the smell of fresh strawberries from the same supermarket, both the smell and flavour are rather different.  Fresh strawberries actually have little smell most of the time and taste quite sour.  The sourness is why we add sugar to them – to make them palatable.

This is the basis for my demonstration of strawberry jelly, which we started above with the analysis by colour.  I split the audience up into four groups, giving them one each of the jellies, one red, one orange, one blue and one green.  They are to smell the jelly and decide without saying anything, whether or not they think they have the strawberry one.  The response is different every time.  However, as well as all of them having ‘the strawberry jelly’, none of them do.  What we observe, is that it is strawberry flavouring, and not real strawberries, that are used to make it.  This has been exploited in some creative ways.  One of Heston Blumenthal’s more famous dishes is an orange and beetroot jelly.  There are two blocks – one is red and one is orange.  However blood orange is used so that the orange-flavoured one looks beetroot coloured, and paprika beetroot is used so that the beetroot-flavoured one looks orange.    

 

 

 

 E Numbers: Colouring Saturday, Sep 10 2011 

Tartrazine, as mentioned above, is one of the colourings.  It colours food yellow, though when concentrated it is rather more orange (Figure 1).  It has the designation E102 in the classification and it is still licensed for use in food products in the UK1 and also in America2.  Despite this, it is hard to find any product with it as an ingredient.  As you may imagine, there are many other colourings.  This group is classified with the numbers E100-199.  Others of which you may have heard may include cochineal (E120), also known as carmine.  This is made from a crushed up beetle, dactylopius coccus, whose natural environment is in South
America.  It is believed to be this ingredient that makes the “red ones taste better” in a certain chocolate-based confectionery.  We can only imagine the horror suffered by ardent vegetarians when this beetle-based ingredient was made public knowledge.  Not surprisingly, it is not designated as ‘vegetarian friendly’ by the Vegetarian Society of The United Kingdom (VSUK)3.  The company that produces this particular confectionery has since discontinued the use of it, having replaced it with an Hibiscus extract, E163, referred to as anthocyanin.

 

Lycopene: A Case Study

Another red dye that is acceptable to the VSUK is E160.  This is a group of compounds related to vitamin A and includes lycopene (E160d).  When I first heard of it, I thought it was a stretchy elastic material worn by ardent runners, cyclists and people who do fitness videos – some sort of hideous combination of Lycra and neoprene.  Fortunately, it is a red colouring found in various plants that can also be used as a preservative.  Although it is found in a variety of vegetable sources, in practice tomatoes are the principle source for most humans.  A really potent source is the Gac fruit, though there are many others (Table).  Lycopene is also one of the carotenes.  As the name carotene suggests, it is related to derivatives of vitamin A (first found in carrots) and so has similar properties to them.  It is not necessary to understand the precise chemistry of lycopene to make sense of its uses, or understand why it does what it does.  However, if we examine the structure of the compound (Figure 2) we can see that there are obvious similarities between it and fatty acids (Figure 3).  Rancidity occurs when parts of the fatty acids (Figure 3) react with the oxygen in the air, which is what makes them go rancid.  Rancidity, by the by, is more to do with decaying flesh than has-been celebrities. 

So, in wanting to make foods containing fats last longer, we need to do something that will avoid fatty acids becoming rancid.  Lycopene ‘takes the hit’ instead of the fatty acids doing so; it reacts with the nearby oxygen instead of the fats.  This is rather like a left-wing tax system in which a richer person’s money is used to protect a poorer person’s, even though it has the same value.  However, unlike the traditional view of rich and poor, these two are as fat as one another.  The similarity in structures has a more general aspect, something that scientists call a physical property.  Not only do the two compounds behave in a certain way when exposed to the air (chemical property) but the structural similarity also means lycopene dissolves better in fatty foods than watery ones.  This ability to dissolve in one another is their similarity in physical properties.  Sadly the fact that vitamin A and similar things can dissolve in fats is not the tempting justification for eating fatty foods I had hoped for.

 

Is Colouring Worth the Hassle?

You may be wondering why we need to use colouring at all though.  After all, food has plenty of colour – all sorts of plants are green, many fruits are red and so on.  The problem comes with two main processes.

First, cooking.  Boiling carrots affects the colour.  This may seem a trivial problem at home; if you bought decent carrots and cooked them yourself, and under the dubious light of a dinner time/party, no one really notices.  The trouble is that for someone who wants to manufacture and sell this carrot, in a jar for example, they find it will be judged much more harshly than at a vegetable-infested soirée.  The consumer has not seen the glorious fresh carrots that went into making the mashed carrot.  Nor has he, or she, seen the delicate simmering in the pan.  They have also not seen the unidentifiable stain on the saucepan either, but that is still the first rule of catering service: ‘What the eye don’t see, the chef gets away with’.  Either way, as you may expect, the consumer will judge it only on what is in front of them.  If plain cooked carrot is put in a jar, in the supermarket this will fall short of what consumers expect from the fresh carrots they will have from fresh carrots two aisles away.

Second, is ageing of food.  Like humans, shrivelling, shortening,  wrinkling and varicose veins are all part and parcel of the ageing of food.  Well, not the varicose veins, but you could be forgiven for thinking that when you see the reduced sections of some supermarkets.  Either way, as a fruit passes senescence, i.e., the point at which it is at its most ripe, the compounds that give the fruit its colouring are destroyed chemically (broken down).  This can happen in a variety of ways.  For example, the group of compounds related to vitamin A can be broken down by light4 or by exposure to oxygen in the atmosphere5.  Food manufacturers therefore need to do something so that their food may be perceived as attractive-looking.  Sadly the normal methods of presentation used in advertising, i.e., putting a picture of a woman with her breasts half-showing on the front, are not quite enough.  The solution to this is two-fold.  First, they must prevent the degradation processes from happening (preserving, of which more below), and also add something to put the colour back in.  It is done with chemical colourings.  This immediately makes many people suspicious.  They feel cheated or even lied to, almost poisoned.  Though of course they have not been lied to really, assuming all the ingredients are listed on the packet.  What the manufacturer has done is provide what the customer wants – whether the customer is aware of these preferences and their obedience to them is less clear.  Why some customers want bright blue biscuits or green icing is a mystery to some, but when people are hungry, it is amazing what dross will sell.

 

Colour perception

It is possible to unlock this perception of colour versus flavour in a double-layered manner.  My demonstration on this when I am lecturing on the chemistry of food is to present four colourless-glass beakers with jelly in them.  One jelly is green, one is red, one orange and one blue.   I ask the audience which they think is the strawberry jelly.  If they have not spent too much time watching QI, they plump for the red one: strawberries are red and thus food containing strawberries is something we also expect to be red.  Perfectly sensible.  However, we revisit these four jellies when looking at flavouring.

 

1  ‘Current EU additives and their E numbers’, Food Standards Agency, 2010.

2  ‘Summary of Colour Additives for use in United States Foods, Drugs, Cosmetics and Medical Devices’, United States Food and Drug Administration, 2010.

3  ‘Fact Sheet: E numbers’, Vegetarian Society of the United Kingdom, 2011.

4  L. J. Whited, B. H. Hammond, K. W. Chapman, and K. J. Boor, J. Dairy Sci., 2002, 85, 351.

 

 E Numbers: An Introduction Saturday, Sep 3 2011 

E numbers have been the subject of much controversy. Although the palaver has started to subside, opinion is usually very much weighted towards E numbers being unnatural, unhealthy and artificial (at best). At worst, the media-led belief is that the faintest whiff of an E number will make any small child destructive on the scale of a cross between a hurricane, and a kitchen-seeking missile. Although much of this latter observation has since been attributed to dubious parenting, the grain of truth that started it all is still licensed for food use in the UK and in America.

In the late 70s and early 80s it was found that tartrazine (Figure 1) could elevate the symptoms of hyperactivity in children who were already prone to the condition1-5.  It has not been found to cause the condition in healthy children, thus separating the effects of such scurrilous indulgences as television, the Internet, and worst of all, pocket money, from the attention deficit condition. The problem for the food industry became that tartrazine and a small handful of others were recorded in the popular press as being both ostensibly bad for human health and representative of E numbers in general. This has led to an apparent disappearance of E numbers from our foods comparable in speed to the ejection of a celebrity magazine from a nunnery.


Figure 1–Tartrazine, E102.  Chemical structure (left), with a bottle of the compound in concentrated form (right).

It should be noted however that the ‘E’ of this name stands for ‘European’ and so although many of these compounds are used elsewhere in the world, in America and in China for example, they are not classified under this system. Wherever you live in the world, at least some of these compounds appear in your food be you fruitarian, fatty or a face in between.
 

Deceptive labelling

However, food manufacturers, those most cunning of foxes, are not that easily put off from using the established tools of their trade. They had a set of ingredients that have been tested in every orifice of every rodent known to man. And probably in man as well, though those tests are not recorded. This set of raw materials for producing food could not be changed drastically if the manufacture of these products was still to be economical. So what they did was simply list the name of the compound instead of its E number. Despite how it may come across, it is legally sound, and despite the media dislike of E numbers that has precipitated their removal by name from lists of ingredients on foods, they are still there; even in ones that are openly touted as natural and healthy. For example, if you compare the lists of ingredients by name with the lists of currently licensed additives in the EU, in many foods the majority of the ingredients will also appear on the list of E numbers or food additives. Two examples are shown in Table 1.

Table 1.  A tabulated form of the ingredients of two pieces of confectionery available in the UK.  Although perfectly safe, the majority of ingredients are E numbers, though none are named as such on the packet.

Although it may seem a slight-of-spatula to use the names alone, arguably, an ‘E numbering’ code is not the most explicit way of referring to a compound. No one would expect a consumer to memorise this 1,500-strong list, less still be able to recall it when buying jelly, cheap cider or meals for one in a supermarket. Even with a smartphone to hand, it is hardly accessible. Equally, the names of the compounds are probably as much a mystery to anybody who has not seen more of a laboratory than a nightclub. Also, as we can imagine, referring to E number categorisations is also not in keeping with the idea of ‘natural’ or ‘healthy’ that many food companies wish to promote.

 

The most poisonous things on Earth…

Both of these words, ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’, although they sound good in the context of food, are sadly misguided. The most poisonous things on this Earth are from ‘natural’ sources – poisoned ivy, curare (poison-tipped darts), botulism and reality television. Fortunately the last one is not edible. However, ‘healthy’ is more subtly misleading. What is healthy or nutritious for a three-year-old child, a lactating woman, or a man in his 70s is demonstrably different. What we might regard as fine for someone of average weight, might be dangerous for someone who puts Sumo wrestlers to shame. It will also be different if any one of those has a medical condition of certain kinds. For example, some cases of elevated blood pressure have been found to be stabilised or reduced if the patient’s intake of salt is reduced. This is pleasingly irrelevant to anyone not sensitive to such in-take, however it has led to a national panic about anything with salt in it. Sufficient water will allow the body to wash away pretty much anything it does not want, including salt – curare and reality television excepted, however.

This washing of the system is a normal occurrence, and is one that allows us to maintain life within our bodies, a situation known as homeostasis. This word just means a consistent set of conditions within the body. This applies to things like body temperature and the concentration of the blood. The upshot of the salty-food thing is, that if you have not been medically advised to cut down your salt intake, you do not need to if you are drinking sufficient water regularly. In fact it is fair to say that your body needs the sodium and chloride ions found in table salt in order to function.   Medical conditions that are sensitive to salt intake include high blood pressure (hypertension), and certain kidney and heart problems.

 

REFERENCES

1              D. W. Schab and N. T. Trinh, J. Dev. and Behav. Paed., 2004, 25, 423.

2              B. Bateman, J. O. Warner, E. Hutchinson, T. Dean, P. Rowlandson, C. Gant, J. Grundy, C. Fitzgerald, and J. Stevenson, Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2004, 89, 506.

3              P. A. Eigenmann and C. A. Haenggeli, The Lancet, 2004, 364, 2.

4              B. Weiss, Food and Chemical Toxicology, 1988, 26, 575.

5              F. Levy, S. Dumbrell, G. Hobbes, M. Ryan, N. Wilton, and J. M. Woodhill, Medical Journal of Australia, 1978, 1, 61.

 

 The Barbarians are at the Gate… Monday, Aug 8 2011 

Everyone thinks Morrisons is for cheap northerners. At least, according to a recent report, Morrisons think that people think that they are for cheap northerners. So, they have started selling black Italian truffles.

Said truffles are a mere snip at £99/kg. Well outside the budget of the average cheapo lard-arse from the north east. Outside the budget of the average cheapo lard-arse from anywhere in the Western world, come to that. Is there a burning desire for black Italian (got to be Italian) truffles in Kirkstall? And sufficiently more there than in York, Harrogate, or Hull, to require they stock it there only? Of course not. Perhaps it is because the competition in those other cities is too strong. Certainly they undercut Waitrose whose truffle effort costs a hair’s breadth under £400/kg, and they are not even fresh. Selfridges do nothing at all in that way (at least not online), and neither do Harrods. Although as far as the latter is concerned, you will be pleased to hear that you can get a truffle shaver from them, should there be such an emergency.

Perhaps I am barking up the wrong tree slightly though. Perhaps they have researched their market really carefully and there really is a demand for fresh truffles in Kirkstall. I cannot really say whether that squares with my own ideas, as I have never heard of the place. So when I say this is clearly a marketing gimmick, I may be wrong. But I do not think I am. The fact that it has been reported in at least one national newspaper and also in this article has got to be worth a couple of hundred quid of anyone’s marketing budget. And in order to achieve that, what have they had to do? Buy in 2 kg of truffles (make it the plural for appearance’s sake), at a cost of probably less than £200 and email a press release to a few news desks. Suddenly the idea of Morrisons wanting to go upmarket seems a bit less likely?

As ever there is another perspective. The competition nationally amongst supermarkets does not make things easy for them. Tesco have traditionally been the standard cheap supermarket, and remain so. They probably do some nicer things and they are very consistent, but they are not going for higher-end shoppers and probably never will. There are food halls, Harrods and Selfridges, who do the highest end. One below this is John Lewis food halls and Waitrose, the two of which are owned by the same company. Their delivery arm is separate, but it is the same stuff.  In between Waitrose and Tesco there is a ‘lower middle class’ gap that is filled in by Sainsbury’s. At the very cheapest end there are Aldi and Lidl. Apparently these, both German in origin, are not micro-budget supermarkets everywhere; they are better-than average quality in parts of Germany. Either way, we appear to have quite a well-defined order with food halls at the most expensive end, then Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and finally Aldi/Lidl being the cheapest. Thus, there is not a lot in the way of space to slide into for a supermarket like Morrisons, that is traditionally regional, but upon buying Safeway (as was) went national.

Plenty of people try to equate class with choice of supermarket. This seems like a weak structure to apply if you ask me, given how much else there is to look at. When I last checked, apparently £1 in every £8 that is spent in Britain, is spent in Tesco. I do not think that is a good thing, and I cannot get the ingredients I want, so I do not shop there. Food halls are too far away and I cannot be faffed with their expense when I am experimenting with a recipe anyway. And Sainsbury’s and Waitrose do me very well. I have never been into a Morrisons, and PR stunts like this one do not encourage me to. Of course, I can get what I want elsewhere and know a man who can do me a good price on black Italian truffles should I ever need them, which means I need not get the train to Kirkstall. But if I were running Morrisons and wanted the firm to stay competitive I am not sure what I would come up with to get them heard of by the widest possible market. If you were running Morrisons, what would you do?

 

This article was published in The Felix on 8th August 2011, and can be found in the on-line version here.

 

 It’s a red light for fat bottoms Sunday, Jul 10 2011 

Healthy eating is desperately over rated. It is not that I believe we should not think about what we eat. Or that we should not do something about it if we are obese, or plan things so we ensure we eat all the things we need to. What I am referring to is how we measure ‘healthiness’ in eating. You may be nursing doubts that the following is another boffin about to bang on about some obscure point that does not really concern anyone. But, in the immortal words of Miranda Hart, “Bear with…”

Going to a large supermarket, where surely most people do most of their shopping, can be bewildering for the uninitiated shopper. One of the turmoils facing many a student who is out shopping for the first time is the question of how to choose between Sainsbury’s Basics and the cheapest branded product. The array of types of baked beans is frankly dizzying. More generally, I have seen many a shopper tight with anguish about which sugar to buy or which milk will be best. (Supermarkets are great places for watching people. You just have to make sure you are doing enough yourself such that if you are being watched, you do not arouse the suspicion of the security staff). But the problem can go a stage further. What if the shopper has it in mind that they should eat less salt or more fibre? Or, more complicatedly, less saturated but more unsaturated fat, with less fat over all? Difficult stuff. In Britain we are lucky and well organised that the food packaging we have tells us what is in something – both the ingredients and the nutrition information. This may seem obvious but it is far from universal: the Americans have a list of ‘nutrition facts’ which is manifestly token, and say very little. However, even though we have all the information, this does not necessarily make it easier to judge what we should or should not buy.

Enter, the ‘Wheel of Health’ from Sainsbury’s and the less pretentious but equally useless ‘Guideline daily amounts’ on Tesco packaging. In case you cannot recall them, these little note-diagrams comprise 5 of the entries from the Nutrition Information listThis list is: calories, fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt. I imagine the list has been chosen quite carefully by marketing types and focus groups. It certainly has not been chosen by scientists. Typically, the information is also used to give the listing a colour code – apparently red is dangerous, amber is not that good for you, and green is fine. Despite my blustering tone you might be wondering what all the fuss is about – it is perfectly reasonable to want to advise and inform people on what they are buying. And that is fine. If it is that. But it is not.
 
The trouble with telling people how low in fat or amazingly sugarless a product is, especially with a crass colour-coding system, is that the logical outcome is that a set of five green wedges in the Wheel of Health is something to aspire to. Now these quintupletly-green-wedged foods may or may not be more profitable than others (fat is cheap, emulsifiers are not), but there is seemingly no understanding of where this leads. Their website (See here) explains the Wheel of Health (also called the traffic light system) very breifly, and suggests rather patronisingly that we should “Try to go for more greens and ambers, and fewer reds”. Yes. Well. Should we, though?
 
It has been true for years that people could do with eating less fat and doing more exercise. Various gimmicky inventions have been marketed to help with this. My favourite is the caffeine tights. Though, in the words of Stephen Fry, they are “not going to dissolve a fat arse”. Do these colourful labellings help with that? Of course not. The trouble is that this system presents the ‘healthiest’ foods as being the ones that contain the least of anything: five green wedges means no energy, fat, sugars or salt. This makes about the healthiest thing in the supermarket a 250 mL bottle of soda water. What a load of tosh! Soda water is great but if it were to disappear it would not be a great loss to humanity. A loss to the drinks cabinet perhaps, but we would survive pretty well. What it would not be would be a loss of the healthiest food in the cupboard. 

An opposing argument might be that people probably do not take much notice of these diagrams. I have not done any research on that—much as I would love to stand in a supermarket with a clipboard and a nauseating market-research-type-jolly manner, obviously—but a lassez faire attitude, or simply not having the time for them is believable. And obviously someone on a diet or who is geeky (myself included) will probably ignore such parts of the label and repair immediately to the full nutrition information list. In which case it begs the question of why it is there at all. This is redoubled if we factor in seeing a nice-looking lemon tart that has been reduced in price and we buy it irrespective of the fact of having gone in to the supermarket only to buy the ‘healthiest’ thing in the shop in our jodhpurs. Or is that just me?
 
Either way, these systems are long over-due for a re-think. The list of nutrition information is a great idea, and even things that make this information accessible to consumers is also good. But it is only good if it has a point. This does not.