All food is processed: fear not!
MOLECULES, MICROBES AND MEALS
By Alan Kelly
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS €25
‘THOSE who can, do. Those who cannot, teach.” I don’t know where I first heard that snarky comment, but I can use it at the start of this review because I know the author will not take offence. Anyone who is published by the OUP is secure enough to rise above envious sniping.
But I couldn’t but smile at Professor Alan Kelly’s admission that one of Ireland’s leading chefs once described him as “the food scientist who can’t even cook an egg”. Here is a man who knows how to poke fun at himself.
We live in an era in which many people are suspicious of the food they eat. They are concerned that it is processed, that is it full of preservatives, and that the “best before” date means they should throw it out once that date has passed.
However, unless these people are particularly conscientious readers of our weekly Grow It Yourself column, and practise what they read, they are likely to get much of their nutrition from the supermarket. This is even if they are weekly customers of their local farmers’ market — which I am myself.
In his book, Alan Kelly sets out some basic and not so basic facts about food, starting with the notion of processed food. Processing, he says, starts with peeling an apple or boiling an egg, and progresses from there through making butter and cheese and on to complex industrial processes which give us nutritious food that will last a long time and still taste full of flavour.
We are so used to eating safe food nowadays that we forget just how dangerous food could be in previous centuries, and how unscrupulous bakers and other producers of basic foodstuffs could be. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the abuses perpetrated in the Chicago meat yards of the early 20th century.
That we in the developed world are now spared from such depredations is due to the rise of food science, which is the subject Prof Kelly teaches in UC Cork.
What is now science was once tradition. Before humans had access to refrigeration, the food supply was erratic. Fruits and vegetables were seasonal, and while you could kill an animal and cook its flesh, within a few days the meat was rotten.
Ways had to be found to preserve food, among them smoking, salting and pickling. Cheese, for example, was discovered when someone stored milk in a calf’s stomach and the enzyme in the stomach, combined with a warm environment, turned the milk into soft curds floating in a liquid we now call whey.
However, such methods were limited, especially when you were catering for large numbers. Napoleon, who famously remarked that “an army marches on its stomach” offered a prize of 12,000 francs to the person who could perfect a method of preserving food.
The winner was a young chef called Nicolas Appert, who proposed sealing food in bottles and boiling it for up to 12 hours. His theory was tested on ships of the French Navy — the sailors came back alive, and the history of the canning industry had begun.
Mind you, while they changed over to metal containers pretty quickly, it took another 30 years to invent the tin-opener. Canned food remained the preserve of armies, navies and other organisations possessed of heavy-duty implements suitable for opening the containers.
Food will last for years in cans or tins, but even such products now usually bear a “best before” date. Prof Kelly points out that this practice is probably responsible for a lot of wasted food. “Best before” simply means that the manufacturer will not guarantee that the product will not have changed in flavour or appearance. He suggests that a second date, the “consume before” date, be added by manufacturers.
On the other hand, the “use by” date must be adhered to strictly. Any food past this date should not be eaten, cooked or frozen.
Staying with modern food labelling, consumers have learned over the years to be wary of E-numbers. Colourings, for example, were linked with over-stimulation in children. E100 to E199 refers to colour agents, but not all of these are articifial: saffron is E164. Others are naturally occurring substances, like E160d which is lycopene from tomatoes, and even oxygen — E948. Basically, anything that has an E number has been tested as safe to use in food under specified conditions.
So the message is, don’t be put off by E numbers — we have been using many of them for centuries, and modern food science has determined which and in what quantities should be used.
It is hardly possible to open a page of this book without coming across some interesting fact about food, what constitutes it, and what happens when it is processed by heating or cooling.
For example, when cooking a steak, we flip the meat over so that it cooks evenly from both sides to the middle. Is it better to cook for half the time on one side and then flip, or to flip more frequently? Science has proven that regular flipping heats the meat more quickly.
The microwave oven is a modern example of turning swords into ploughshares — check page 168 to find out why.
This book is a fascinating read for nerdy cooks and interested eaters, and an invaluable text for any budding food scientist. And it contains jokes, lots of jokes.
By Alan Kelly
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS €25
‘THOSE who can, do. Those who cannot, teach.” I don’t know where I first heard that snarky comment, but I can use it at the start of this review because I know the author will not take offence. Anyone who is published by the OUP is secure enough to rise above envious sniping.
But I couldn’t but smile at Professor Alan Kelly’s admission that one of Ireland’s leading chefs once described him as “the food scientist who can’t even cook an egg”. Here is a man who knows how to poke fun at himself.
We live in an era in which many people are suspicious of the food they eat. They are concerned that it is processed, that is it full of preservatives, and that the “best before” date means they should throw it out once that date has passed.
However, unless these people are particularly conscientious readers of our weekly Grow It Yourself column, and practise what they read, they are likely to get much of their nutrition from the supermarket. This is even if they are weekly customers of their local farmers’ market — which I am myself.
In his book, Alan Kelly sets out some basic and not so basic facts about food, starting with the notion of processed food. Processing, he says, starts with peeling an apple or boiling an egg, and progresses from there through making butter and cheese and on to complex industrial processes which give us nutritious food that will last a long time and still taste full of flavour.
We are so used to eating safe food nowadays that we forget just how dangerous food could be in previous centuries, and how unscrupulous bakers and other producers of basic foodstuffs could be. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the abuses perpetrated in the Chicago meat yards of the early 20th century.
That we in the developed world are now spared from such depredations is due to the rise of food science, which is the subject Prof Kelly teaches in UC Cork.
What is now science was once tradition. Before humans had access to refrigeration, the food supply was erratic. Fruits and vegetables were seasonal, and while you could kill an animal and cook its flesh, within a few days the meat was rotten.
Ways had to be found to preserve food, among them smoking, salting and pickling. Cheese, for example, was discovered when someone stored milk in a calf’s stomach and the enzyme in the stomach, combined with a warm environment, turned the milk into soft curds floating in a liquid we now call whey.
However, such methods were limited, especially when you were catering for large numbers. Napoleon, who famously remarked that “an army marches on its stomach” offered a prize of 12,000 francs to the person who could perfect a method of preserving food.
The winner was a young chef called Nicolas Appert, who proposed sealing food in bottles and boiling it for up to 12 hours. His theory was tested on ships of the French Navy — the sailors came back alive, and the history of the canning industry had begun.
Mind you, while they changed over to metal containers pretty quickly, it took another 30 years to invent the tin-opener. Canned food remained the preserve of armies, navies and other organisations possessed of heavy-duty implements suitable for opening the containers.
Food will last for years in cans or tins, but even such products now usually bear a “best before” date. Prof Kelly points out that this practice is probably responsible for a lot of wasted food. “Best before” simply means that the manufacturer will not guarantee that the product will not have changed in flavour or appearance. He suggests that a second date, the “consume before” date, be added by manufacturers.
On the other hand, the “use by” date must be adhered to strictly. Any food past this date should not be eaten, cooked or frozen.
Staying with modern food labelling, consumers have learned over the years to be wary of E-numbers. Colourings, for example, were linked with over-stimulation in children. E100 to E199 refers to colour agents, but not all of these are articifial: saffron is E164. Others are naturally occurring substances, like E160d which is lycopene from tomatoes, and even oxygen — E948. Basically, anything that has an E number has been tested as safe to use in food under specified conditions.
So the message is, don’t be put off by E numbers — we have been using many of them for centuries, and modern food science has determined which and in what quantities should be used.
It is hardly possible to open a page of this book without coming across some interesting fact about food, what constitutes it, and what happens when it is processed by heating or cooling.
For example, when cooking a steak, we flip the meat over so that it cooks evenly from both sides to the middle. Is it better to cook for half the time on one side and then flip, or to flip more frequently? Science has proven that regular flipping heats the meat more quickly.
The microwave oven is a modern example of turning swords into ploughshares — check page 168 to find out why.
This book is a fascinating read for nerdy cooks and interested eaters, and an invaluable text for any budding food scientist. And it contains jokes, lots of jokes.