I’m like the four year-old who’s just found out how to activate adults: by sneaking the word why into every sentence. And why am I so empowered? In a few days, I’ll be taking a course – not of antibiotics but a recommended antidote to help avoid illness. I’m to learn about food. Precisely, a short course on food writing. I’m hungry for how the many dishes of meals are processed from raw to print. How media cooks up itself. And back to why. Why am I eating what I’m eating now?
After reading only part way through the set textbook, I’m already deciphering the reverse label on my latest yogurt purchase, French Vanilla. The font size is best suited to eyes on a bacterium. A food with the fabric of liquid silk is now a mass of numbers and technical words like thickener and preservative.
Already I’m ringing a toll-free number to enquire what proportion of the sugar component is fructose, that sugar not triggering an insulin response in our bodies, that sugar which has been linked with the current diabetes pandemic. After graciously allowing my call to be monitored, I then forget to ask whether their fructose is from corn syrup. The operator consults his computer which is acting unfriendly. Sometime later he informs me, in plain vanilla, that the sugar information is commercial-in-confidence. I have rung a hotline which is running cold.
Of course, I could ring again but being served an empty answer and eating yogurt out of a fridge on highest cool, I am becoming cold on corporations. My atmospherics are later affirmed when, during discussion in the food course, even established journalists gripe how “Big corporations don’t want to talk”. If they won’t talk to journos…
But right now, I’m pre-course reading. This textbook is almost shouting at me, “Become hyper-aware of each mouthful.” Down past tonsils that survived childhood go fructose, whose origins I know not and Acidity Regulators keeping bacteria kicking. I’m listening to my inner clock ticking the reasons I choose industrial silk.
Firstly, yogurt is healthy, being strong in calcium punches to fight any shadow of osteoporosis. Secondly, it’s high in GI meaning it only sashays the intestinal tract rather than hiphopping. The final reason is … low food miles. My pedometer hardly registers when I open a tub of yogurt compared to when I walk to the fridge to remove cheese and tomato, untie a loaf of bread, find plate and knife, toast bread if stale, microwave bread with cheese, then pepper the lot with what appears as a minute dice of ants.
Please don’t misunderstand. I regularly eat melted cheese. It’s just that yogurt is a convenience food of low food miles, time and surprise. On certain days, foods need to be completely reliable. Supermarket yogurt will be just what the packaging projects and protects. A brandname. A corporation. And so remembering only a fraction of this textbook’s detail but much more of the taste, I greet my fellow eaters on the first day of the food course.
Back at home, I continue reading and eating. But I now know there are people, like myself, questioning foods. We may be links in the food chain but we’re not just consumers. Like shareholders, we are participants in a company’s life force. I return to my yogurt and list every ingredient. Then, using an Approved Additive List I had shoved sometime into a folder, I translate every number into a word. Additive number 440 is pectin. There’s a familiar word. Something in fruit, its cell walls. 330 is citric acid, 406 is agar. The yogurt is becoming a new, old friend.
With courage to investigate further, I ring the free line. Not wishing to provoke call centre staff into thinking “It’s that yogurt woman needing a preservative again”, I ask about colour. A female voice informs me there is no added colour. Later she corrects this, finding that ingredient 160b is Natural Colour or Annatto extract. The label states “No Artificial Colours”. This means the added colour is natural. I ask about fructose and no, she doesn’t know where it comes from, “It’s the sugar found in fruit”. I don’t correct her but glucose is also found there, in roughly equivalent amounts. Then I realise it’s all about how much of any one ingredient, proportions, portions.
A tablespoon swathed in vanilla silk with French connections confidently makes an entrance. Into my mouth. My brain. Passing as many visual and oral tests as I can imagine. All 20 ingredients, including live feed. The various media reporting from my stomach should be satisfied. I’ll be the grown-up four year-old in class next week, able to report for “show and tell” with no embarrassing bits. Well, not many.
Written by Margo Ruckert
