The food industry claims there are no negative effects to processing
Of course, the food industry defends its processing techniques aggressively. I witnessed this firsthand in the auditorium at the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual meeting. The organization is dedicated to, in its own words, “a world where science and innovation are universally accepted as essential to a safe, nutritious, and sustainable food supply for everyone.”
The institute was giving a short course on food science, billed as a boot camp for people who want to learn about the food manufacturing industry. The narrative of trying to achieve a safe and nutritious food supply was certainly on display. Dr. Roger Clemens, past president of the institute, was speaking to several hundred people, and the subject of the talk was the role of processed foods in delivering nutrition. Dr. Clemens asked the audience if anybody liked Italian food. He warned that we would be better off opening a can of sauce, rather than simmering tomatoes in a cast-iron skillet, which, he said, leaches iron alluvia into the food. Clemens’s suggestion that store-bought marinara sauce was safer than what we might cook at home was part of his larger argument about the benefits of food technology.
It was also a way to mock how any food can be made to sound frightening. Dr. Clemens argued that if he showed you all the toxicants in food that occur naturally, you wouldn’t eat. In his view, any concern about food processing and food contamination was overwrought and misplaced.
Dr. Clemens grouped all forms of processing together, defining them in a slide as “deliberate practices used to change raw plant and animal products into food products we can eat.” Under that definition, he could argue that what manufacturers do to food is essentially no different from what we do at home by washing, chopping, heating, blanching, mixing, or freezing food, except that manufacturers do it in larger volumes.
He asked the audience what the difference was between preparing and processing. His answer: scale.
Food industry experts like to present their trade as a force for nutritional good. After all, food technology has given us gluten-free crackers, lactose-free milk, spreads with plant sterols that promote heart health, and flash-frozen string beans. Not surprisingly, what the industry deems as healthy always seems to be the more processed product. In its view, fresh is not always best. According to the International Nut and Dried Fruit Council, for example, the antioxidant content of dried fruit is much higher than fresh fruit because “the antioxidants are concentrated in a smaller volume during dehydration.”
Seeds, another form of fresh food widely prized by nutritionists, also earned Dr. Clemens’s ridicule: he asked if we were birds. He asserted that we don’t have the machinery to break down the seed shell, which is mostly cellulose, and thus the seed passes right through our bodies, resulting in no nutritional value. The advantage of processing, Clemens claimed, is that it does the chewing for you. People like processing, he said, for without it there is less variety and food would spoil.
He pointed to bread as another example of technology’s value. When chemicals like BHA, BHT, and TBHQ were used to keep bread soft, people were able to store the loaf in a breadbox, he said. Then what he called scare tactics about the use of preservatives came along and these chemicals began to be used less often. That meant that bread had to be stored in the refrigerator or freezer to prevent it from becoming moldy. Dr. Clemens implied that this was outrageous.
Increased food availability, choice, affordability, and convenience were all benefits of a modern food system. He pointed to other advantages that might be even greater. Technology, according to Dr. Clemens, allows us to reduce the risk of certain types of health conditions and improve overall health, not the other way around.
He went on to decry the food classification system used by the United Nations, called NOVA, which aims to identify ultraprocessed foods and drinks. Scientists have singled out such products as threats to public health worldwide. “These are not modified foods,” as researchers at the University of São Paulo have written, “but formulations mostly of cheap industrial sources of dietary energy and nutrients plus additives. . . . Ultraprocessed products are made to be hyper-palatable and attractive, with long shelf-life. . . . Their formulation, presentation, and marketing often promote overconsumption.”
Dr. Clemens apparently recognized a significant threat to the food industry in a system that wants to classify food based on processing. He expressed concern that there is a movement under way in certain countries—a freight train, as he called it—to so classify food. Dr. Clemens made it very clear that he did not want to do anything to compromise the food supply but clearly thought that this classification effort needed to be derailed.
After listening to some of his other talks, I know that he believes that both fresh and processed foods are important in everyone’s healthful diet. Yet the industry spends billions of dollars designing and marketing processed foods.
A food industry playbook lays out other messaging strategies. The industry understands and manipulates the public’s skepticism and confusion about nutrition and confronts it by, in its own words, trying to “reset” and “reframe” the conversation.
For example, marketing experts know that consumers are trying to limit their intake of sugars. These marketers also recognize that urging us to be “moderate” in our food choices only “reinforces the sense of harm” associated with some of those foods. They instead try to convince us that healthy living is about “balance” and getting all the nutrients we need from a variety of food groups.
On the surface, the industry’s focus on balance has appeal. If calories from sugars and starches affected our bodies in the same way as calories from spinach and broccoli, the industry’s argument would have merit. But as we have come to understand, not all calories are created equal.