2

BETTER EATING
THROUGH CHEMISTRY

Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly
wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!

—ROALD DAHL, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Like McDonald’s restaurants everywhere, the chain’s outlets in Hawaii sell a truckload of Egg McMuffins and hash browns every morning. But they also go through a large amount of something few other McDonald’s even sell: Spam. Aside from the usual breakfast fare, Hawaiians can choose from several items that incorporate the canned meat, the most popular being the Spam, eggs and rice platter. The meal features a fried egg, like the one found on a McMuffin, with rice and a cooked slice of the meat. The chain’s biggest rival, Burger King, also offers a Spam platter of rice and scrambled eggs with two slices of the meat. For both companies, having Spam on the menu is a no-brainer, because Hawaiians love Spam. Despite having a population of only 1.2 million people, Hawaii leads the United States in Spam consumption, with more than seven million cans a year, or about six per person.¹ McDonald’s sells more than three thousand Spam items in Hawaii every day and has expanded the offering to other Pacific islands, including the Philippines, Saipan and Guam.² The Guamese even put the Hawaiians’ heavy consumption to shame by eating 2.5 million cans a year, or sixteen per person.³

Why do Pacific Islanders love a food that is reviled by so many others? A food so hated that when it came time to name annoying unwanted email messages, nothing but “Spam” would do?

The love affair started during the Second World War, when the American military imported tons of the canned meat to the islands. To properly understand Spam, though, we have to go back several centuries. Despite being commonly derided as a poor-quality meat, Spam is actually a brilliant application of food technology that traces its lineage back to Napoleon. The French emperor, who famously said that an army marches on its stomach, was faced with the problem of keeping his soldiers fed and well nourished while in the field. In the eighteenth century, a time before any significant food preservation and processing, this was a big challenge. So in 1795 Napoleon announced a contest: he would personally award 12,000 francs, a king’s ransom at the time, to anyone who could invent a food-preservation technique that would help feed his troops. Many tried and failed until Nicolas Appert, a confectioner from a small hamlet east of Paris, answered the call.

In 1810, Appert discovered a process whereby food, generally meat or vegetables, could be preserved when it was sealed in a glass jar, covered with canvas and then boiled. The process greatly lengthened the shelf life of the food by sealing it in its own juices, which emerged during cooking. Appert was not a scientist and didn’t understand the principles behind his discovery, but he knew it worked. His find won him the reward and the emperor’s praise and was soon refined by fellow Frenchman Pierre Durand, who used a tin can instead of a glass jar, which cooked and preserved just as well but had the added bonus of extra durability for transport. Even so, Appert became known as the father of canning and the inventor of modern food preservation and processing. From then on, the history of food processing evolved in virtual lockstep with the history of war.

Appert’s heir apparent emerged more than a century later across the Atlantic. In 1910 Minnesota-based Hormel was a mid-sized meat-packer with distribution centres in five states and an exporting business to Britain. Jay Hormel, son of founder George, earned his stripes during the First World War, when he served in France as a quartermaster responsible for supplying troops with clothes and provisions. When his superiors complained about the time and effort it took to ship meat across the Atlantic, he came up with a simple suggestion: rather than pack entire sides of beef, why not debone them first? Hormel flew back to the packing plants in Chicago to demonstrate and, before long, small packages of boneless beef were being shipped to Europe, saving time and money. Most importantly, the troops were happy because they got to eat meat more frequently.

After the war, Hormel went to work developing new products for his father, including the first canned ham, using techniques similar to Appert’s. By 1929 he was company president. His big hit, however, came in 1936 while he was searching for a use for pork shoulder, a pig part that was not selling well. Pork shoulder meat, when removed from the bone, came in small chunks that consumers didn’t like—they were used to large chops, the bigger the better. Removing the meat from the bone was also expensive and time-consuming, which compounded the problem. Hormel experimented with additives to make the shoulder pork tastier. Like a modern-day Doctor Frankenstein, he combined it with different parts of the pig before settling on ham, which comes from the animal’s rear thigh. When the two meats were ground together and mixed with water and salt, they formed a pink paste. Hormel squirted the concoction into a twelve-ounce can, sealed it and cooked it using the Appert method. The result was a tangy ham-like meat. After adding sodium nitrite, a powder added to many meats to prevent them from turning an unappetizing grey, Hormel had his masterpiece. He called it Hormel Spiced Ham, a versatile canned meat that could sit on the shelf for years and not go bad. (The only thing missing from this Frankenstein-like scene was the mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers outside the door.)

His creation, however, didn’t sell. People were suspicious of meat that came in a can. In Napoleon-like fashion, Hormel held a contest at his New Year’s party to come up with a new name. Kenneth Daigneau, a New York actor and brother to one of his company’s vice-presidents, won bragging rights and a crisp $100 bill for thinking to contract “spiced ham” to Spam. Under the more marketable name, the company ran a flood of magazine and newspaper ads that touted the meat’s versatility. “You’ve never known a meat like Spam, Hormel’s miracle meat of many uses for many occasions,” one read. “Slice it cold for Spamwiches, salads, snacks. Serve it hot as Spam and eggs or baked Spam. Any way you eat it, Spam hits the spot.”⁴ Thanks to the marketing blitz, the product enjoyed modest sales until the war broke out. Then it really took off, which was ironic given that Hormel was fiercely opposed to the United States joining the conflict.

Naturally, Hormel soon changed his tune. As one of the larger meat packers in the United States, with military connections and export ties to the United Kingdom, he had an easy time landing a job as a major supplier to the United States-Britain Lend-Lease program. Aside from weapons and ammunition, the United States had provided Britain with more than a billion dollars in aid by 1941, including food.⁵ Spam was selected by the U.S. military as the perfect war food—portable, light, cheap and virtually unspoilable—and it was shipped to Britain for consumption by soldiers and civilians alike. After the United States entered the war, tons more were shipped to troops stationed in Hawaii and other Pacific islands, where it was packaged into rations. By 1944 about 90 percent of Hormel’s Spam output was going to military forces, doubling the company’s overall revenue. Hormel was gobbling up so much tin for cans that supplies for home use were curtailed and civilian Americans were forced to use glass jars.⁶ By the end of the war, civilians and soldiers worldwide had consumed 100 million pounds of Spam, or 113 million cans.⁷

Soldiers had a love-hate relationship with the meat. Some, who were forced to eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, despised it as “ham that failed its physical.” Others were more appreciative. “I know there were a lot of jokes about Spam,” recalled one infantryman, but “it probably saved lives in the field. It was easy to transport and it could last for a long time.”⁸ Despite the revulsion, Spam remained popular after the war. Sales reached one billion cans by 1959 and by 2007 it was available in more than a hundred countries.⁹ Pacific Islanders, meanwhile, adopted it as their native cuisine. For many, Spam is the ideal “comfort food.” Indeed, Spam musubi—a strip of the cooked meat sitting on a block of rice, held in place by a sushi-style band of seaweed—was sold in Hawaiian 7-Eleven stores long before McDonald’s thought to get in on the action.

By using simple chemistry in combination with a proven Napoleonic-era preservation technique, Jay Hormel had come up with the original “Frankenfood.” He showed his peers that easily spoiled natural foods could be made more durable with the application of some basic science. Moreover, just as Raytheon had shown other electronics makers how to get rich from government contracts, Hormel too had cashed in by supplying the military at home and abroad. Spam showed other foodmakers what such contracts could mean to their bottom lines.

The Long, Long March to Nutrition

Spam is not and never has been a healthy food. A small, two-ounce serving contains about one-third of the daily recommended total fat and sodium intake. Too much Spam can raise your blood pressure and make you fat. Back in the forties, however, what little information the U.S. military had on Spam’s nutritional quality was set aside in the quest for quick, inexpensive and durable meat. During the war, the Food and Nutrition Board—formed in 1941 to investigate issues that affected national defence— developed the Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA) list to spell out the components of a healthy diet. The list, which was influenced by wartime shortages of certain foodstuffs including meat, was first published in 1943 and revised numerous times afterward. Regulations requiring processors to disclose what percentage of the RDA their foods provided, however, were a long time coming because the industry fought such moves every step of the way.

In the early twentieth century there were few rules governing food; American processors were subject only to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, administered by the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry. The act prohibited the manufacture and sale of poisonous and “adulterated” foods, a vague definition that applied to fillers of reduced quality or strength, colouring to conceal damage or inferiority, injurious additives and the use of “filthy, decomposed or putrid” substances.

In 1927 the bureau was reorganized into the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration, which dropped insecticides from its name in 1930 to finally become the FDA. The 1938 Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act did little new other than expand the 1906 legislation to include cosmetics and authorize factory inspections and spell out acceptable food colourings. It wasn’t until 1958 that significant food safety requirements were established, when the Food Additives Amendment banned the use of additives found to cause cancer in humans or animals. A similar amendment two years later outlawed cancer-causing colourings. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1966 required that all consumer products be honestly and informatively labelled, while 1975 produced a landmark FDA ruling that finally required processors to display nutrient information on their foods. The new rule, however, only applied to products that made nutritional claims and was not expanded to include all foods for nearly two decades, in 1992. Regulations in other developed countries followed similar trajectories and timelines.

By that time, however, Pacific Islanders were thoroughly hooked on Spam. Like Native American populations afflicted by the diseases brought by colonizing Europeans, the Islanders were exposed to the unhealthy food imported by American armed forces. Spam and other canned meats have had a devastating effect on the region in what has been called a “raging epidemic” of diabetes, stroke and heart disease. In 2008 eight of the world’s ten most obese countries were Pacific islands. Nauru, northeast of the Solomon Islands, fared the worst with 95 percent of inhabitants over the age of fifteen considered obese by the World Health Organization. “What is unfolding here is a physical disaster and a fiscal disaster,” said Carl Hacker, the director of economic policy and planning in the Marshall Islands.¹⁰ Experts said Spam and other fatty canned meats such as corned beef were squarely to blame. But for the rest of the world, Spam has proved to be only a small contributing factor to obesity, when compared with some of the other food products that came about as the result of war technology.

Potato Diplomacy

By the time the Second World War broke out, John Richard Simplot had put Idaho on the map as the potato heart of the United States. His company was already the largest shipper of fresh potatoes in the country and ran a side business selling dried onions, which he dehydrated in a modified prune dryer. Like sides of beef, potatoes were difficult to ship to troops because of their weight and tendency to spoil. But Simplot, who had dropped out of school in the eighth grade and gone into business for himself at fourteen, was every bit as inventive as Jay Hormel and knew the solution lay in processing. He took his cue from the ancient Incas, who were the first to grow potatoes, in the high Andes more than four thousand years ago.¹¹ In between herding llamas and getting high chewing coca leaves, the Incas discovered that storing potatoes at high altitudes caused them to lose much of their moisture, which increased their longevity. Simplot’s scientists discovered that the higher air pressures and lower temperatures of the Andes enabled a natural form of freeze-drying, an effect they then duplicated using their prune dryer back in Idaho. They took the resultant dried spuds and diced them into flakes, which could then be reconstituted into mashed potatoes by adding water or milk. Simplot packaged the flakes in boxes and sold them to the army, a move that ended up making the already-rich Idahoan wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. After the war, he bought his own potato farms, cattle ranches and fertilizer plants, as well as lumber mills and mining claims.

As with radar, demand from the army for dehydrated potatoes dried up after the war, leaving Simplot to find new lines of business. Clarence Birdseye, a Brooklyn native, had pioneered flash-freezing in the twenties but his fish products sold poorly because few grocery stores—and fewer homes—owned freezers to store them. That changed during the war when shortages of fresh foods led to a boom in refrigerator and freezer sales.

The first successful frozen food was orange juice, invented by the Massachusetts-based National Research Corporation during the latter part of the war. NRC’s early attempts to dehydrate orange juice by boiling the water out of it didn’t work because the process destroyed the flavour. The company’s founder, Richard Morse, found a suitable alternative with a high-vacuum process he had created to dehydrate penicillin, blood plasma and antibiotics. Morse was able to suck the moisture out of the juice using a giant vacuum machine to create an orange powder which, when reconstituted with water, retained some of its flavour and vitamins. The breakthrough won him a hefty contract with the army in early 1945.¹² NRC formed the Florida Foods Corporation and began building a plant in Florida in the spring, only to have the army cancel its contract when the war ended that summer. The company scrambled to reorient itself to the consumer market, renaming itself Vacuum Foods and beginning to sell frozen orange juice concentrate, an intermediate step in its process. The slushy concentrate was more expensive to produce than the powder, but it also produced a more real-tasting juice. A Boston marketing firm came up with the name “Minute Maid,” a brand that reflected the amount of time the juice took to make and which referenced the heroic Minute Men militia of the American revolutionary war. The company’s frozen concentrate hit stores in 1946 and sales were immediately good, then exploded over the next few years. Vacuum Foods saw revenue go from under $400,000 in its first year to nearly $30 million just five years later.¹³

The company changed its name once again, finally settling on Minute Maid in 1949. Frozen orange juice proved to be immensely successful, and by the end of the decade Minute Maid was competing for space in grocery stores against sixty different imitation labels. Company president John Fox proclaimed that Minute Maid had single-handedly saved the Florida citrus industry—in 1946 it was appealing to the government for subsidies, but by 1950 it was overwhelmed with demand for oranges.¹⁴ Powdered orange juice, meanwhile, resurfaced in several forms during the fifties, including Tang (1959), but many of these products were full of sugar and other additives to make up for the taste lost in processing.

Minute Maid’s success was not lost on Simplot, who had scientists trying to figure out a way to freeze french fries. After a number of attempts that resulted in poor-tasting and mushy fries, one of his researchers, Ray Dunlap, discovered a method that kept the potatoes’ flavour intact. Dunlap first pre-cooked the fries in hot oil for two minutes, then immediately blasted them with super-cooled air. This flash-freezing technique brought the temperature of the fries down to around -30 Fahrenheit in a manner of minutes and had a major advantage over previous attempts. Slow freezing over a longer period of time caused the water molecules inside the fries to expand, which made the fries mushy when they were eventually thawed. Flash-freezing, on the other hand, didn’t give the water the opportunity to gather, so when the fries were thawed they retained the same moisture as before. The result was a frozen fry that, when re-cooked in oil for another two minutes, tasted the same as a fresh one. Dunlap presented his invention to Simplot, who took one bite and said, “That’s a helluva thing.”¹⁵

Simplot sold the frozen fries to grocery stores in 1953, but they didn’t take off right away. Although the fries could be cooked in any home oven, they tasted best when made in hot oil, a method few households had the equipment for. The trick lay in the moisture inside the fries—hot oil caused the water molecules to evaporate, leaving gaps that were then filled by the oil itself, which added to their taste. Simplot sought out restaurants that were equipped with oil cookers, such as the fast-rising McDonald’s. He was already a major supplier to the chain, accounting for about 20 percent of its potatoes. He took his idea to McDonald’s president Harry Sonneborn, who gave him a frosty reception. “He laughed at us,” Simplot said. “The only thing he was interested in talking about was fresh potatoes.”¹⁶

Still, potatoes posed a big problem for McDonald’s. Because of their high solid content, the Idaho Russets the chain used were available fresh only nine months out of the year. They were harvested in the fall and kept in cold storage throughout the winter, but tended to go bad during the hot months, so the restaurant chain was forced to switch to California white potatoes during the summer. The white potatoes didn’t produce as crisp a fry, though, which gave McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc quality-control headaches. Fresh fries were also McDonald’s most time-consuming menu item to prepare since the potatoes needed to be peeled, cut and cooked. Finally, the fast growth of Kroc’s chain—it had about 725 restaurants at the time and would have more than 3,000 by the end of the decade—was making it difficult to maintain potato uniformity. “The sugar content of the potatoes was constantly going up and down, and they would get fries with every colour of the rainbow,” Simplot said.¹⁷

The potato baron used his clout with the chain to go over Sonneborn’s head to meet directly with Kroc. Appealing to his obsession with quality, Simplot convinced Kroc to take a chance on frozen fries and, with a handshake, the two changed potatoes forever. Kroc agreed to try the frozen fries and, when customers couldn’t tell the difference, McDonald’s began a large-scale conversion, a move it completed in 1972. Other fast-food chains followed McDonald’s lead, leading to an explosion in consumption. In 1960 the average American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen fries. By 2000 that had changed to forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes and more than thirty pounds of frozen fries, 90 percent of which were bought at fast-food restaurants.¹⁸

Simplot became immensely wealthy and spread his money into other investments. Some, such as his mining endeavours, did poorly while others, including a $1 million stake in Idaho-based microchip start-up Micron Technology in 1980, paid off handsomely. Micron is now a Fortune 500 company and, in an apparent tribute to the war ties that made Simplot rich, goes out of its way to employ military veterans, whom it actively recruits. In 2006 the company employed more than 3,500 veterans, comprising about 16 percent of its workforce.¹⁹ Simplot also expanded into other frozen foods such as meats and vegetables and even bought Birdseye’s companies in several countries, including Australia and New Zealand. His continued expansion and growth was paced by the frozen food industry itself. In the United States alone, frozen food sales had reached $40 billion—one-third of total food sales—by the turn of the new century.²⁰ In 2007 the industry posted global sales of more than $100 billion.²¹

At the time of his death in May 2008, Simplot and his family were worth more than $3 billion. His legacy to the world will always be the technologically engineered french fry, now a major contributor to what the World Health Organization calls an obesity epidemic. One of the main causes is the “increased consumption of more energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods with high levels of sugar and saturated fats,” such as french fries.²² The rising obesity numbers are not surprising given that one large portion of fries—and in the United States, one in every four vegetables consumed is a fry—constitutes nearly half your recommended daily fat intake.²³

Powder More Valuable Than Cocaine

Other technological developments during the Second World War helped diminish the overall nutritional value of food. The process of spray-drying, for example, is a method that strips vitamins and minerals from many foods, including milk and eggs. Food processors had been using several different methods to create dried milk since the late nineteenth century, but few met with much success.

Before the Second World War, the most popular method involved a process similar to NRC’s juice dehydration technique, where moisture was sucked out of milk, but the costs of running the heavy machinery proved too high, especially given that sales were low. Indeed, dried milk, which came in powder form, was a new substance that was mistrusted, particularly by bakers. When processors first tried to sell milk powder, bakers “looked first at the product, then at the man attempting to make the sale with suspicion. Believing it was some foreign substance to be substituted in place of milk, they would not accept it and thus it required very hard work and education to get them to use it in even a small quantity.”²⁴ As a consequence, by 1939 about one-third of the 600 million pounds of dried milk produced in the United States went to feeding animals.²⁵ The war changed all that. With a sudden need for milk that would not go bad, demand for the powder skyrocketed and food processors followed suit by investing in the relatively new and expensive spray-drying technology.

The spray-drying process, largely unchanged since its inception, takes several steps. First, the bacteria in the milk are removed through pasteurization, a heating process similar to the method in which Spam is baked. The fat is then removed by spinning or “skimming” the milk in a centrifuge. The pasteurized skim milk is then put into an evaporator silo, where more moisture is removed through further heating. From there, the milk—now about 50 percent solid—finally hits the spray dryer, a large metal cylinder, where it is again heated and blasted with highly pressurized air. The air evaporates whatever water remains and mixes with the milk to form a powder, which then drops to the bottom of the dryer to await cooling and packaging.

The process was relatively new during the Second World War, so the resultant powder still had a chalky taste when rehydrated with water, but it was cheaper, longer-lasting and more efficient than other methods, and it was deemed good enough for bread making. American production of spray-dried milk took off and reached about 700 million pounds by 1945, more than double pre-war levels.²⁶ Food processors, led by Carnation, found a veritable bonanza in the technology after the war with a slew of new milk-related beverages. Swiss giant Nestlé, which ended up buying Carnation in 1985, released the ever-popular Quik chocolate milk powder complete with spokesrabbit—because everyone knows that rabbits like milk—in 1948, followed by a strawberry version in 1959. By 1954 sales of non-fat dry milk solids had grown from around two million shortly after the war to 120 million pounds, leading some industry observers to wonder if the long-lasting and unspoilable powdered milk might entirely replace its liquid counterpart.²⁷ (Obviously, it didn’t.) Spray-drying wasn’t just limited to milk. In 1942 General Foods used the process to create instant coffee, which it supplied to American forces. When the war ended, the company sold the product to the general public as Maxwell House Instant Coffee, which also proved to be a hit.

By the time war broke out, Detroit-based C.E. Rogers was a mid-sized player in the spray-drying industry. Eager to give his company a leg-up over competing milk processors, CEO Elmer Donald Rogers perfected the process of spray-drying eggs. The method was similar but the spray dryer was horizontal and box-shaped rather than vertical and cylindrical, like its milk counterpart, and the eggs weren’t heated, because doing so resulted in prematurely scrambled eggs.²⁸

Howard Rogers, the company’s current president and grandson of Elmer Donald, boasts about how lucrative selling the machines that made powdered eggs was. His company, run at the time by his grandfather, was assigned a priority “second only to the Manhattan Project” for obtaining the materials needed to build spray-dryers, including stainless and carbon steels. “They made a hell of a lot of money around World War Two,” he told me. “I know this because my grandfather built a home in Northfield, Michigan that was monstrous.” The move may have paid off handsomely, but the company reverted back to milk production after the war, likely because of the universal revulsion soldiers had for powdered eggs. “Ugh,” one naval officer said, “our engineering officer ... could eat a half dozen of those powdered items and squirt half a bottle of ketchup on them. No one else at the wardroom table could stand to watch him.”²⁹ Larger food processors, including Carnation and Nestlé, furthered research after the war and improved the taste by adding artificial flavours, thereby establishing a commercial market. Today, one in ten eggs is consumed in powdered, frozen or liquid form.³⁰

Mass Processing

The advances in dehydration, freezing and drying, however, paled in significance to the advent of the mass spectrometer, a scientific instrument that virtually no one outside of a laboratory has heard of. The spectrometer, which measures the mass and relative concentrations of atoms and molecules, was arguably the most significant technological invention of the twentieth century, next to the atomic bomb. In fact, the bomb itself might not have been possible without the spectrometer.

The field of mass spectrometry was created by Manchester-born physicist Joseph John Thomson in the early part of the century. In 1913 Thomson, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his experiments on the conductivity of gases, was investigating the effects of magnetism and electricity on atoms. He believed that if he shot a stream of electron-charged neon gas through a magnetic field, the particles would deviate from their straight path and curve. He used a photographic plate to measure the angle of deflection and his hypothesis proved to be more accurate than he anticipated: the plate showed two different patches of light, indicating that his stream hadn’t just curved, it had split off into two different rays. Thomson took this to mean that neon gas was actually composed of atoms of two different weights. He had discovered the isotope: a chemical twin of a natural element that had a different atomic weight than its brethren.

His system was improved upon and by the war had evolved into the mass spectrometer, a device that allowed scientists to accurately identify different molecules and isotopes by their atomic weight. During the war, the spectrometer was used to find uranium isotope 235, the key element in the atomic bomb. The uranium isotope was particularly dense, which gave it maximum explosive power when split. Mass spectrometry, one of two methods of producing elements that could be split, was used at the giant government facility built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to create the uranium-based atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. (The second method, used at the DuPont plant in Washington, produced plutonium—a derivative of uranium—through a chemical-splitting process. The plutonium-based bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima.)

After the war, the mass spectrometer was widely adopted by scientists across a broad range of fields and industries, including pharmaceuticals, energy and electronics. Food processors were particularly enthusiastic about the new technology because it took a lot of the guesswork out of their jobs by allowing them to study their products at the molecular level. Scientists could now see how adding one molecule or altering the chemical composition of another affected a given food. In wartime experiments with orange juice, potatoes, milk and eggs, scientists found that processing often deprived food of its taste. The mass spectrometer now allowed them to correct those problems on a chemical level.

This introduced a number of new phenomena to the food industry. First, it led to the birth of the flavour industry. With the capability to mix and match molecules, chemical makers were now able to synthesize any aroma or taste. This was a godsend for food processors, because it meant that they could do whatever they wanted to food and not worry about how the end product tasted—artificial flavouring would take care of that. Not surprisingly, the flavour companies that sprung up saw no shortage of demand from food companies. Today, the global flavour market is worth more than $20 billion and is led by companies such as Swiss duo Givaudan and Firmenich, New York-based International Flavors & Fragrances and Germany’s Symrise.³¹

Mass spectrometers also allowed food processors to dissect their competitors’ products. If company A came out with a particular food that was a big hit, company B could easily replicate it. Some long-held and zealously guarded formulas, like Coca-Cola’s, were no longer secret. Scott Smith, the chair of the food science program at Kansas State University and an expert in mass spectrometers, explains that the device took much of the guesswork out of food production. “If you’re looking at coffee and you want to know something about coffee—like are you seeing some differences in the coffee beans from different parts of the world or different types of roasting—you can use taste panels, but you can also use a mass spectrometer to give you more of a subjective analytical approach.”³²

The devices have also become indispensable in ensuring food quality, particularly when something goes wrong. Smith recently used a spectrometer to analyze a chocolate-covered nut product that had been brought to his lab because it “tasted like cardboard.” He found heavy oxidization in one of the product’s compounds, a problem that was solved by simply eliminating that compound. With food problems, the spectrometer “will usually give you an idea of where to start looking,” Smith says. “At my lab, we live and die by it.”

The fifties and sixties thus saw an explosion of new food products, many of which were full of new preservatives, additives, flavours and colourings. Pop Tarts, processed cheese slices, Frosted Flakes, TV dinners, Cheez Whiz, Rice-A-Roni, Fruit Loops, Cool Whip, Spaghetti-O’s, prepared cake mixes and many other products hit grocery stores and became popular with consumers. Chemical intake shot up dramatically—between 1949 and 1959, food processors came up with more than 400 new additives.³³ The FDA couldn’t keep pace; in 1958 the regulator published a list of 200 “Substances Generally Recognized as Safe,” but by then more than 700 were being used in foods.³⁴ In the rush to provide the world with products that wouldn’t spoil but tasted just as good through additives, little attention was being paid to the nutritional value or the potential long-term effects of these technologically engineered foods.

Vitamin B52

Luckily, it wasn’t a total downward spiral into nutritional ignorance. Although the science wasn’t conclusive yet, people did suspect that processed foods weren’t as healthy as the fresh variety, and studies were under way.

An early breakthrough came in 1928 at the University of Wisconsin, where scientists irradiated canned and pasteurized milk with vitamin D, a nutrient it did not naturally have. The effect was soon duplicated with cheese. Many companies, sensing that their ever-growing list of processed foods would eventually come under regulatory scrutiny, began funding vitamin research. At the same time, scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota were performing vitamin experiments on teenagers. After putting them on a diet low in thiamine, or vitamin B1, researchers found their four subjects became sluggish, moody and “mentally fatigued.”³⁵ They repeated the experiment with six female housekeepers, who found their ability to do chest presses greatly diminished. When two of the six were put on a diet high in thiamine, their abilities recovered.

Russell Wilder, one of the doctors, argued that Hitler was using vitamin deficiency as a weapon in his domination of Europe. The Nazis were “making deliberate use of thiamine starvation to reduce the populations... to a state of depression and mental weakness and despair which will make them easier to hold in subjection.”³⁶ Thiamine, Wilder declared, was therefore the “morale vitamin,” a vital part of any military effort, not to mention a balanced breakfast.

Thiamine is naturally found in beans, legumes and whole-wheat flour, but in 1940, Americans hated whole-wheat bread—it accounted for only 2 percent of the bread sold.³⁷ Milling removed between 70 and 80 percent of wheat’s thiamine to produce the white bread Americans loved, so Wilder believed some sort of government intervention was needed. Having joined the Council on Foods and Nutrition of the American Medical Association in 1931 and the Committee on Medicine of the National Research Council in 1940, he was already a food authority and in a strong position to proclaim his views on vitamins. In 1941 he organized and became the first chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council, which put him within earshot of the most powerful American politicians.

In 1942 he finally convinced the government to decree that all flour used by the armed forces and federal institutions should be “enriched,” with nutrients such as thiamine mixed back in. The ruling took immediate effect, and by the middle of 1943 about three-quarters of the bread being produced in the United States was enriched with B1.³⁸ The British military came to the same conclusions. After finding that 41 percent of the young men drafted for service during the First World War were medically unfit, mainly because of poor nutrition, the government also ruled that its flour had to be enriched.³⁹ The move to counter the bad effects of food-processing technology with good food-processing technology had officially begun. Following the war, processors cashed in on the emerging trend toward health consciousness by expanding enrichment practices to other foods, including rice and cereals. They also took it a step further by “fortifying” products, or adding nutrients to foods that did not naturally have them. (The trend went overboard in the fifties, when even chewing gum was imbued with vitamins.)

Enrichment was one step forward to good nutrition, but by the end of the fifties the world had taken a number of steps back. Mass spectrometers, used today by just about everybody—from sports bodies in detecting the use of performance-enhancing drugs to mining companies in finding gold deposits—allowed food processors to alter the chemical make-up of foods. Tastes, textures, shapes and colours could be changed and moulded as desired. Canning, dehydration, freezing and drying techniques, as well as packaging made possible by new plastics, all improved the longevity of food, preventing spoilage and allowing for transportation across vast distances. The road was paved for truly international foods and, with them, international food-processing companies.

The wartime boom in refrigerator and freezer sales also continued into the fifties and sixties and, combined with the advent of the microwave oven and plastics, gave households new and easier ways of storing and preparing foods. In the span of three decades, the creation, sale and consumption of food had changed more dramatically than it had over the previous three centuries.

All of this was the product of the emerging prosperity-driven consumer culture. Again, after total war came total living, and food was an integral part of that maxim. Food was no longer the precious commodity it had been during the Great Depression and the wars; time was now at a premium. Food producers, armed with an arsenal of new technologies, were more than happy to cater to these desires. As with plastics and their eventual environmental harm, when it came to the potential negative health effects of these new processed foods, the collective thinking was, “To hell with them, let’s eat.”

From Lab to Drive-Thru

Wartime processing advances were only half the food revolution story, though. The second part wasn’t taking place in home kitchens and grocery stores, but in restaurants around America. Just as the accelerating pace of post-war life was creating demand for domestic foods that were faster to prepare and easier to store, the same was happening outside the home. Before the war, eating at a restaurant was a rarity for the typical family, but the economic boom led to a wave of new restaurants focused on getting people their meals quickly, cheaply and efficiently. And technological engineering was at their core.

The first fast-food chain to achieve international success, Dairy Queen, was centred on an invention that solved the two biggest problems of the ice cream business: the hardness of the product and the time-consuming manual labour that went into scooping it. The new machine stored ice cream at temperatures just above freezing, so it was cold but soft, and dispensed it with the simple opening of a spigot. This allowed Dairy Queen outlets to pump out hundreds of cones an hour, vastly increasing their volume of business.

Burger King was also founded on a similar volume-enabling machine. The restaurant’s contraption cooked four hundred burgers an hour by automatically moving them through a broiler in wire baskets, which was significantly faster than cooking them manually. Kentucky Fried Chicken, meanwhile, used a new type of pressurized deep fryer to cook drumsticks and breasts in one-third the time of conventional deep fryers. Now titans of the industry, all of these chains relied on technology to mass-produce food, achieve ever-increasing sales volumes and drive large-scale expansion.

Of course, none were as successful as McDonald’s. In the fast-food industry’s early days, no other chain saw as much potential for technology, science and engineering to deliver sales speed and volume, and no one profited as much from investing in innovation. The original McDonald’s was started by Richard “Dick” McDonald and his older brother Maurice “Mac,” the sons of a shoe factory foreman in New Hampshire. The brothers had moved to California at the height of the Depression in 1930 in search of riches. After trying their hands at managing a movie theatre, they opened a drive-in hot dog stand in Pasadena in 1937. The stand was a success but the brothers wanted a higher volume of customers, so they relocated to the nearby boom town of San Bernardino, where they opened the first McDonald’s drive-in restaurant in 1940 on busy Route 66. It too was a hit, particularly with teenagers, who used the drive-in as a hangout. By the mid-forties McDonald’s, like many of the dozens of other drive-ins dotting California, was raking it in. Together the brothers had created a new style of restaurant, one that was driven by the post-war economic boom, the growing ubiquity of automobiles and an increasing desire for speedy service.

But the operation still wasn’t fast enough or achieving the sort of volumes the McDonalds wanted. They were frustrated with the traditional tools and systems of the restaurant business and wanted to apply the assembly-line technology that Henry Ford had used to speed up car manufacturing. The brothers invented their own equipment and “became enamoured of any technical improvement that could speed up the work,” as one McDonald’s historian put it.⁴⁰ In the fall of 1948 they closed down the restaurant to refit it purely for speed. They replaced the grill with two bigger custom-built versions and hired a craftsman to design new equipment, much of which is still used in the fast-food business today, such as the broader metal spatulas that allowed for several burgers to be flipped at once, and the handheld stainless steel pump dispensers that squeeze precise amounts of ketchup and mustard onto buns. The McDonalds also purchased four Multimixers, each of which made five milkshakes at a time. The move turned out to be fateful, as it eventually brought them into contact with Ray Kroc.

Besides the gear, the brothers also made major changes to their system. The menu was pared down to just eleven items, and all china and flatware was scrapped in favour of paper bags, wrappers and cups. The carhops, who had served customers at their cars, were fired; customers now had to walk up to the window to place their order. Jobs were regimented into simple tasks, so that two employees were responsible for making milkshakes while another two did nothing but cook fries. The new-and-improved McDonald’s, featuring the “Speedee Service System” complete with a sign depicting the cartoon chef “Speedee,” re-opened in December as a finely tuned machine, the perfect blend of human and technological efficiency. Sales took a hit initially as the teenagers were scared away, but they soon rebounded and surpassed previous volumes as families discovered the new McDonald’s.

By 1954 the brothers were swimming in money and had sold a handful of franchises before their fateful meeting with Kroc. The fifty-three-year-old Chicago native had been a lifelong entrepreneur who had done moderately well, first by selling paper cups and then milkshake machines. His largest customers were using no more than two Multimixers, so he was intrigued by the tiny California operation that had four going at any given time. He travelled to San Bernardino to meet the McDonalds and was awestruck at the lunchtime crowd. Ever the entrepreneur, he knew he had to get on board.

Kroc struck a deal with the brothers for national rights to their restaurant and kicked McDonald’s franchising—and its use of technology to build volume—into high gear. Kroc enlisted Jim Schindler to help design his own test franchise in Des Moines, Illinois, near Kroc’s Chicago home base. Schindler had trained in electronics in the Army Signal Corps during the Second World War and designed tools for munitions manufacturing, but his most important skills, as far as Kroc was concerned, came from his experience in designing kitchens for submarines. Besides accounting for the cramped environment, submarine kitchens needed to be rugged, easy to clean and standardized, so that one design could be plugged into a variety of ships. Kroc had the same need for his planned high-volume kitchens, so Schindler, who designed much of the plug-and-play stainless steel equipment found in the growing chain’s restaurants, was the perfect fit.

As Kroc’s franchising juggernaut gained steam—over four hundred restaurants by 1963—so too did its quality-control problems. McDonald’s quickly found it difficult to serve burgers and fries that tasted the same in Los Angeles as they did in New York, and year-round to boot. Kroc turned to the same kind of food science being employed by big processors such as Hormel, Carnation and Nestlé, and in 1957 McDonald’s became the first fast-food company to open a research lab. One of the lab’s first tasks was perfecting the french fry. Converting to Simplot’s frozen potatoes was only one step in the quest. The McScientists also experimented with curing potatoes so that their sugars were converted into starches, and studied the spuds’ solids content with new, complex machinery. They found that only potatoes with a solids content of at least 21 percent were acceptable, so they equipped suppliers with hydrometers, devices that measured a potato’s gravity and thus its solids content. Few potato farmers had ever seen a hydrometer before, let alone used one, but if they wanted to supply the growing food giant, they had to incorporate the new technology. McDonald’s even invented the “potato computer,” which was really just a sensor that detected when the oil in the fryer hit the correct temperature. The sensor, which beeped when the fries were perfectly cooked, was later used with all fried products, including Chicken McNuggets and Filet-o-Fish, and is now standard across the industry. McDonald’s quest for the perfect french fry, an endeavour that cost the company an estimated $3 million in its first decade, was not unlike unlocking the secrets of the atom.⁴¹

The company put the same amount of scientific and engineering effort into ensuring the quality and uniformity of its other food offerings. To speed up milkshake production and save space in restaurants, Kroc introduced a new machine that mixed a concentrated liquid mix rather than a frozen ice milk base. The liquid mix was poured into the machine, frozen and automatically dispensed, much like Dairy Queen’s soft-serve ice cream. The new system was faster than the old, which required making milkshakes manually, and the cans the liquid mix came in—similar to concentrated orange juice cans—took up less storage space than the frozen ice milk.

Before McDonald’s, hamburger was the meat industry’s poor cousin, a veritable repository of meat packers’ unwanted parts. That didn’t suit Kroc, who not only wanted reliability from his burgers, but also preferred to avoid the sort of large-scale lawsuits that would follow if he served people mystery meat. So the company’s labs dissected and experimented on ground beef as if it were an alien from another planet. The result was a fifty-item checklist that was passed on to franchisees, who could then test the meat they received from suppliers to see if any shortcuts had been taken.

By the late sixties, McDonald’s restaurants received hamburger shipments three times a week from a variety of the company’s 175 suppliers. With that much movement coming from so many sources, it would have been easy for some shipments to be overlooked for inspection or for some suppliers to cut corners, a fact that deeply frightened Ray Kroc. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night from dreaming that we had bad beef and thousands of customers with upset stomachs. I wondered how the hell we’d get over something like that.”⁴²

The solution was to shift the chain’s focus on technological innovation from the store level up to the supplier level. In the late sixties, a trio of small meat suppliers formed a small company called Equity Meat with the goal of solving McDonald’s beef problem. They came up with a process that was similar to freezing fries—the beef patties were flash frozen cryogenically to below two hundred degrees, which sealed in their juices. The group experimented with different coolants, freezing speeds, meat-grinding techniques and cooking times, and even came up with the first computerized system for ensuring that the right blend of meat went into the burger. While McDonald’s executives scoffed at using frozen patties initially, much as they had with frozen fries, after testing they found that the burgers tasted just as good if not better than fresh ones, and shrank less when cooked on the grill.

All of a sudden, the company’s quality-control problems with meat were solved. By 1973, just two years after testing Equity’s burgers, almost every McDonald’s restaurant had converted to frozen patties. As per its agreement with McDonald’s, Philadelphia-based Equity was required to share its technology with any other supplier the chain saw fit. Four other meat packers were chosen and in one fell swoop McDonald’s pared its beef suppliers down from 175 to 5, creating huge efficiencies by consolidating its quality-control management to only a few points. The company was thoroughly grateful to Equity and gave it a good chunk of its burger business, rapidly transforming the small company, now known as Keystone Foods, into one of the biggest beef suppliers in the world. Today, Keystone employs more than 13,000 people and services 30,000 restaurants worldwide, handling 388 million pounds of beef and 1.6 billion pounds of poultry products a year.⁴³ The other beef suppliers who got Equity’s technology, including Golden State and Otto &Sons, also became industry giants in their own right.

McDonald’s ushered in a similar transformation of the chicken business. In the late seventies, after realizing there was growing customer demand for poultry, the company hired Rene Arend, an acclaimed chef from Luxembourg, to come up with a chicken product. Arend actually happened upon the chicken McNugget by accident. His Onion Nuggets, which were battered and deep-fried chunks of onion, failed to catch on, but McDonald’s CEO Fred Turner suggested he try the idea out with chicken. Arend cut some chicken into bite-size pieces, then battered and fried them up. Turner loved them, but both he and Arend knew that mass-processing chicken in the numbers McDonald’s needed was difficult because there was no automated way of removing the bones. KFC might have been selling chicken by the bucket-load, but the rival fast-food chain wasn’t chopping its poultry up into the little bits required by McDonald’s, which meant the burger chain would have to innovate once more.

Keystone again came to the rescue by modifying a hamburger patty machine so that it cut deboned chicken into the now-familiar McNugget shapes. The poultry still had to be deboned by hand, but the invention greatly sped up production lines.

Chicken McNuggets entered test stores in 1980 and were an immediate hit, rolling out company-wide a year later. Keystone shared its technology again, this time with Tyson Foods, which was already one of the largest chicken producers in the world.

Tyson introduced its own improvement to the McNugget process by creating an entirely new breed of chicken. “Mr. McDonald,” as the breed was dubbed, was nearly twice as large as traditional broiler chickens; its size didn’t just mean more meat, it also made the deboning process much easier. Within three years of their introduction McNuggets accounted for 7.5 percent of McDonald’s U.S. sales, and they brought in more than $700 million in 1985, making them one of the most successful products in the company’s industry.⁴⁴ McDonald’s is now the second-largest purchaser of chicken in the world, after KFC.

The poultry industry jumped on the bandwagon and reaped the benefits. The McNugget contract helped Tyson surpass rival ConAgra as the largest U.S. chicken producer in 1986. Deboned chicken, once the ugly duckling of the poultry business, took off and others piled on. KFC jumped on board with its own nuggets a few years after McDonald’s. Tyson rivals, meanwhile, responded to this shift in the market by growing their own bigger chickens, a trend that continues to this day as suppliers try to get more bang for their buck with ever-larger birds. As Bud Sweeney, one of the developers responsible for coming up with McDonald’s deboning process, put it back in the eighties: “We absolutely revolutionized the chicken business.”⁴⁵ The trend has angered animal rights activists, though, who are horrified by images of the bloated chickens, unable to support their own weight.

The technological innovations, however, helped McDonald’s build big sales volumes and profits, which attracted franchisees eager to make a fortune. McDonald’s easily outpaced its competitors in the early days and is now the biggest fast-food operation in the world, with more than 31,000 locations.⁴⁶ While Kroc is often praised for his business acumen and his ability to sell and manage franchises, he rarely gets credit for his recognition and use of technology. Without all of the advances Kroc pioneered—he even had Schindler build the world’s first rooftop heating and air-conditioning unit—McDonald’s may never have grown past the handful of restaurants set up by its founders. Moreover, Kroc’s use of technology did more than just drive McDonald’s growth, it created a measuring stick for the rest of the industry. While some chains understood that innovation was the chief driver of sales volume, some did not. Those that fell in line prospered while those that failed to grasp the concept either dropped off or remained small. Kroc established the bottom line in the fast-food industry: innovate or die.

McDonald’s also revolutionized supply logistics by pioneering the “just-in-time delivery” model that would later be attached to companies such as Walmart and Dell Computer. In 1970 a typical McDonald’s restaurant received about twenty-five shipments a week from two hundred different suppliers, ranging from burgers and potatoes to paper cups and straws. As a result, restaurants were becoming mini-warehouses. The company responded by encouraging suppliers to consolidate and become “one-stop shops” that could provide all of its needs, from foods to dry goods. These consolidated companies could then set up their own regional distribution centres and storage warehouses, which would in turn supply all of the nearby McDonald’s restaurants whenever supplies ran short. McDonald’s was thereby able to cut its network of distributors down to about ten companies, and by the mid-eighties, shipments to restaurants were down to about two a week. The new system meant more efficiency, less paperwork, tighter control over purchasing, less waste and fresher food.⁴⁷ Virtually the entire food production system in the United States subsequently followed this model.

Critics have raised concerns over this McCentralization of distribution. With large suppliers responsible for entire geographic regions, an outbreak of contaminated food is likely to be more widespread than it would be if smaller companies were dealing with smaller territories. While those arguments have proven to be partially true, McDonald’s has carefully preserved competition between its suppliers by steadfastly demanding improvements in quality, and it has not been shy in switching when it catches a supplier cutting corners. The company didn’t hesitate to move its sauce-production business from Conway to Golden State, for example, after quality complaints began to mount. The threat of losing a large McContract, which often accounts for much of any supplier’s business, has usually been enough to keep them honest. As for contamination issues, while large-scale outbreaks certainly do happen, many food scientists believe such events would be far more frequent, albeit smaller in scale, without the centralized food system McDonald’s helped usher in. The proof may very well be in the pudding, or meat and produce—anyone who has taken a vacation in a developing country, where food is grown locally without much inspection, knows how easy it is to get food poisoning. While such infections are usually not serious, they can certainly turn a person off eating.

By the sixties, the food revolution was complete. In the grocery store, consumers could choose from a plethora of ready-to-eat meals—instant soup, TV dinners, frozen fries—that they could heat up with their microwave ovens and store as leftovers in their Tupperware containers. Outside the home, families could drive to the local McDonald’s, Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken and eat without spending a fortune or taking a long time. Both scenarios gave consumers more time and money to spend on the things they really wanted to do, whether it was hobbies, travel or other leisure activities. With the biggest real necessity—eating—taken care of, consumers were free to indulge themselves in ways they never had before. Is it a surprise that the sexual revolution soon followed?