Clipping Board » Illness Enters through Mouth ─ The information that has been made public is often just the tip of the iceberg...
Author: Michael Pollan
The industrialized food chain, which begins in the cornfields of Iowa, ends at McDonald's with a meal designed to be eaten while driving. This is the industrialized meal I chose. Countless tributaries of raw corn, processed and transformed into meat, converge into the meals of fast-food chains like KFC and Pizza Hut, as well as the ingredients found in supermarkets. We are surrounded by industrialized food; this industrialized food chain supplies most of what we eat and drink.
My 11-year-old son, Isaac, was thrilled to join me on this McDonald's trip—he rarely gets to go, so it was a treat for him (though for most American children, this is hardly special, as one in three eats fast food daily). My wife, Judith, was less enthusiastic. She is very particular about her diet, and a fast-food lunch meant abandoning a "real meal," which she found regrettable. Isaac suggested she try McDonald's new "Premium Salad," topped with "Paul Newman dressing." The business section of the newspaper reported that these salads were wildly popular—and even if they weren't, as long as they sounded good, they might stay on the menu.
For items like salads or veggie burgers in the fast-food chain, marketers have a term: "denying the denier." These healthier options allow children who crave fast food to effectively counter their parents' objections: "But Mom, you could just order a salad."
And that’s exactly what my wife did. She spent $3.99 on a Cobb Salad with Caesar dressing, the most expensive item on the menu. I ordered a classic cheeseburger, a large fries, and a large Coke. The large Coke now holds nearly a liter, but thanks to the economic miracle of upselling, it costs only 30 cents more than the small 500ml version. Isaac went for the new Chicken McNuggets made with white meat, a double vanilla milkshake, a supersized fries, and finally, a dessert with a frozen scoop of ice cream. Our orders were all different—a hallmark of the industrialized food chain, which breaks a family into individual consumers, markets different products to each, and often leads to us collectively eating more than we would at a shared meal. The three of us spent $14 in total, and our order was packed and ready to go in just four minutes. Before leaving the counter, I grabbed a densely printed flyer that read, "Providing complete nutrition to help you make the best meal choices."
We could have eaten in McDonald’s booth seating, but the weather was nice, so we decided to put the car’s top down and have lunch inside. Both the meal and the car’s design were remarkably well-considered. Today, 19% of American meals are eaten in cars, which come equipped with cup holders in both front and back seats. The entire process—ordering, paying, and picking up the food—can be done without ever opening the car door. And except for the salad, everything can be eaten with one hand.
In fact, that’s the brilliance of the McNugget—it liberates chicken from knives, forks, and plates, making it easy to eat without dealing with skin or bones. Like the pre-seasoned, no-condiments-needed burger, it’s perfectly suited for car consumption.
Though Judith’s Cobb Salad proved tricky to eat in the front seat, we managed at 90 kilometers per hour. Corn was the true star of this meal: the car was also consuming corn, as the fuel contained ethanol. While this additive worsens air quality in California, the corn-processing industry has successfully lobbied the federal government to mandate that gasoline in the state include 10% ethanol—a policy designed to use up surplus corn.When I was a kid, I ate a lot of McDonald’s—back in the pre-Wallerstein era, when ordering more meant getting a second small burger or small fries, and chicken nuggets hadn’t even been invented yet. I loved fast food then because each item came wrapped like a gift, and I didn’t have to share it with my three sisters. The best part was that everyone got their own portion. The familiar, rich aroma of fries filled the car, and with each bite of the burger came the soft, sweet bun, the crisp pickles, and the juicy, flavorful patty—pure delight.
Well-designed fast food has its own unique aroma and taste, one that can only be associated with burgers, fries, or other fast food. A homemade burger just doesn’t have that same flavor. Whatever this aroma and taste may be, for countless people in modern times, the scent of such fast food is an indelible part of childhood, giving it a comforting quality. Like other foods that soothe the soul, fast food offers nostalgia along with generous amounts of carbs and fat.
Isaac said his McChicken nuggets tasted great, definitely an improvement over the original flavor. The McNuggets have faced criticism lately, which might explain why the recipe was tweaked.
In 2003, a group of obese teenagers sued McDonald’s. Federal Judge Sweet in New York dismissed the case, but his ruling shamed the McNuggets: “It’s not just fried chicken in a pan. It’s a McDonald’s monster made from ingredients no home cook would ever use.”
After listing the 38 ingredients in McNuggets, he argued that McDonald’s marketing bordered on fraud because the product wasn’t what it appeared to be—just a piece of fried chicken. Contrary to consumers’ reasonable expectations, a serving of McNuggets actually contained more fat and calories than a cheeseburger. Because of this lawsuit, McDonald’s changed the nugget recipe, using chicken breast and distributing a “Full Nutritional Disclosure” flyer. According to it, a six-piece McNugget now has 10 fewer calories than a cheeseburger.
I asked Isaac if the new nuggets tasted more like real chicken than the old ones. He looked confused: “No, they taste the same—like nuggets.” Then he gave his dad an eye-roll, as if to say it was a dumb question.
At least in this consumer’s mind, the connection between nuggets and chicken is abstract at best—or maybe nonexistent. Isaac handed one to Judith and me to try. It looked and smelled good, with a nice crust and a white interior reminiscent of chicken breast. Its appearance and texture did evoke fried chicken. But when I took a bite, all I tasted was saltiness—the flavor common to all fast food. Well, maybe a hint of chicken broth too.
In short, the nugget feels more like an abstract substance than real food, and the “chicken” aspect could use some work.
The ingredients listed on the flyer made me think a lot about nuggets and corn. McNuggets contain 38 ingredients, and I counted 13 that could be derived or cultivated from corn: corn-fed chickens, modified cornstarch (to bind the ground chicken), mono-, di-, and triglycerides (emulsifiers to keep fat and water from separating), dextrose, lecithin (another emulsifier), chicken broth (to restore some flavor lost in processing), yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (to turn the mix into a paste), cornstarch (filler), vegetable shortening, partially hydrogenated corn oil, and citric acid (a preservative).Additionally, McNuggets contain other plant-based ingredients, such as flour (to increase viscosity). As for hydrogenated oil, it may sometimes come from soybeans, rapeseed, or cottonseed rather than corn, depending on current market prices and supply.
According to the leaflet, McNuggets also contain several entirely synthetic ingredients. These seemingly edible substances do not originate from cornfields or soybean fields but from oil refineries or chemical plants. These compounds ensure that organic ingredients do not lose their flavor or appearance after months of freezing and transportation, making modern processed foods possible. Listed first are leavening agents, including sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These compounds act as antioxidants, preventing the various animal and vegetable fats in the nuggets from developing a rancid taste. Next are defoamers like polydimethylsiloxane, primarily added to cooking oil to prevent starch from bonding with air molecules, thus avoiding foam formation during frying. The biggest issue, however, is that such toxic substances are permitted in food.
According to the *Handbook of Food Additives*, polydimethylsiloxane is a suspected carcinogen and is confirmed to cause mutations, tumors, and reproductive issues. It is also flammable.
Yet the most shocking ingredient in McNuggets is likely tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ). This petroleum-based antioxidant is sprayed directly onto the nuggets or the inside of their packaging to "preserve freshness."
Per the *Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives*, TBHQ is a derivative of butane (the same fuel used in lighters). The FDA allows processors to use it in food in small quantities, not exceeding 0.002%. Consuming one gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse," while five grams can be fatal.
With so many strange molecules organized into such a complex food, you can appreciate that the brilliance of nuggets lies not only in their appeal to children but also in their ability to fill them up without costing much. Tyson Foods invented the nugget in 1983 at McDonald’s request. Thanks to nuggets, chicken surpassed beef as America’s most popular meat.
Compared to Isaac’s nuggets, my cheeseburger was much simpler. According to the "Total Nutrition Facts" leaflet, this cheeseburger contained only six familiar ingredients: a 100% beef patty, a bun, two slices of American cheese, ketchup, mustard, pickles, onions, and an unspecified "grill sauce." The burger tasted decent, but upon reflection, most of the flavor came from the condiments. The beef patty itself, when eaten alone, was nearly flavorless—a dull, grayish slab.
Still, the combination did create a convincing burger experience, especially with the first bite. Though I suspect this olfactory achievement was largely due to the "grill sauce" rather than the 100% beef patty.
In truth, the connection between the cheeseburger in my hand and actual beef was just as tenuous as that between nuggets and chicken. Eating this burger, I had to remind myself that it was indeed linked to a cow—perhaps a spent dairy cow (the source of much fast-food beef) or scraps from a beef steer.
One of the charms of burgers and nuggets is that they are boneless abstractions, allowing us to forget we’re eating animals. In them, I tasted no trace of feed corn, petroleum, antibiotics, hormones—and certainly no cow manure.This situation may be what the industrialized food chain does best: processing obscures the origins of food, making it appear purely as a cultural product rather than something made from natural organisms like plants and animals.
McDonald’s flyers contain a wealth of information, yet the food remains a mystery. Where does it come from? Of course, from McDonald’s—but it’s not that simple. It comes from refrigerated trucks, warehouses, and slaughterhouses, from feedlots in Garden City, Kansas, from ranches in Sturgis, South Dakota, from food science labs in Oak Creek, from spice factories along New Jersey highways, from oil refineries, from processing plants of ADM and Cargill, from massive grain silos in towns like Fanning. And at the far end of this long and winding road lies Naylor’s corn and soybean fields in Churdan, Iowa.
In fact, nearly everything we eat contains a high proportion of corn. Lab calculations rank the corn content of our meals from highest to lowest: soda (100% corn), milkshake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and fries (23%). To an omnivore, this meal appears diverse, but through a mass spectrometer, it looks more like the diet of a single-food eater. Yet, this is what we industrialized eaters have become: corn koalas.
But so what? What does it matter if humans have become an unprecedented corn-based species? Is it necessarily bad? The answer depends on your perspective.
From the standpoint of agribusiness, turning cheap corn into 45 different McDonald’s products is a remarkable achievement. It represents a resolution to the contradiction between agriculture and capitalism and has allowed the food industry’s profits to grow faster than the U.S. population. Increasing the portion sizes of cheap corn-based carbohydrates also solves the problem of limited stomach capacity. We may not be able to increase the number of American consumers, but we’ve figured out how to make each one eat more—which is just as good.
Our family of three consumed a total of 4,510 calories at lunch, more than half of what we need in a day.
From the perspective of America’s lower and middle classes, the "cornified" food chain does have benefits—cheap calories in appealing forms. But in the long run, those who eat this food pay a high price for those cheap calories: obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. From the global lower and middle classes’ perspective, America’s corn-based food chain looks undeniably like a disaster.
All life on Earth competes for the sun’s energy stored in plants as carbohydrates. The planet’s arable land can only produce a finite amount of energy each year, and industrialized meat and processed foods absurdly consume (and waste) vast amounts of it. If we ate corn directly, like people in Mexico and many African countries, we’d get all the energy the corn contains. But when you eat a cow or chicken raised on corn, 90% of that energy is lost to bones, feathers, fur, growth, and metabolism. For every step up the food chain, 90% of the energy is lost, and processing consumes even more. This means that producing foods like chicken nuggets wastes energy that could feed far more children than just my son.
These were the agitated thoughts swirling in my mind as we devoured our fast-food lunch on the highway. What is fast food?
Fast food isn’t just food served in an instant—it’s also food consumed in an instant.We finished this meal in less than ten minutes. Since we could sit in the convertible basking in the sunlight, I couldn’t fault McDonald’s for this particular feature. Fast food lacks flavor, so we eat it quickly, and the more you focus on it, the less it tastes like actual food. I once said McDonald’s offers comfort food, but after a few bites, I began to think they sell something more conceptual: the symbol of comfort food. So you eat more, eat faster, hoping to grasp the primal idea of cheeseburgers and fries before it vanishes beyond the horizon.
And so it goes—bite after bite, yet never satisfied, leaving you with nothing but simple, pitiful fullness.
(Excerpt from *The Omnivore’s Dilemma*, Chapter 7: A Meal—Fast Food)
Source: http:/ / www1. businessweekly. c……eb/ webarticle2_16669_p1. html
US Court Rules: McNuggets Aren't Chicken, They're Monsters
The industrialized food chain, which begins in the cornfields of Iowa, ends at McDonald's with a meal designed to be eaten while driving. This is the industrialized meal I chose. Countless tributaries of raw corn, processed and transformed into meat, converge into the meals of fast-food chains like KFC and Pizza Hut, as well as the ingredients found in supermarkets. We are surrounded by industrialized food; this industrialized food chain supplies most of what we eat and drink.
My 11-year-old son, Isaac, was thrilled to join me on this McDonald's trip—he rarely gets to go, so it was a treat for him (though for most American children, this is hardly special, as one in three eats fast food daily). My wife, Judith, was less enthusiastic. She is very particular about her diet, and a fast-food lunch meant abandoning a "real meal," which she found regrettable. Isaac suggested she try McDonald's new "Premium Salad," topped with "Paul Newman dressing." The business section of the newspaper reported that these salads were wildly popular—and even if they weren't, as long as they sounded good, they might stay on the menu.
For items like salads or veggie burgers in the fast-food chain, marketers have a term: "denying the denier." These healthier options allow children who crave fast food to effectively counter their parents' objections: "But Mom, you could just order a salad."
And that’s exactly what my wife did. She spent $3.99 on a Cobb Salad with Caesar dressing, the most expensive item on the menu. I ordered a classic cheeseburger, a large fries, and a large Coke. The large Coke now holds nearly a liter, but thanks to the economic miracle of upselling, it costs only 30 cents more than the small 500ml version. Isaac went for the new Chicken McNuggets made with white meat, a double vanilla milkshake, a supersized fries, and finally, a dessert with a frozen scoop of ice cream. Our orders were all different—a hallmark of the industrialized food chain, which breaks a family into individual consumers, markets different products to each, and often leads to us collectively eating more than we would at a shared meal. The three of us spent $14 in total, and our order was packed and ready to go in just four minutes. Before leaving the counter, I grabbed a densely printed flyer that read, "Providing complete nutrition to help you make the best meal choices."
We could have eaten in McDonald’s booth seating, but the weather was nice, so we decided to put the car’s top down and have lunch inside. Both the meal and the car’s design were remarkably well-considered. Today, 19% of American meals are eaten in cars, which come equipped with cup holders in both front and back seats. The entire process—ordering, paying, and picking up the food—can be done without ever opening the car door. And except for the salad, everything can be eaten with one hand.
In fact, that’s the brilliance of the McNugget—it liberates chicken from knives, forks, and plates, making it easy to eat without dealing with skin or bones. Like the pre-seasoned, no-condiments-needed burger, it’s perfectly suited for car consumption.
Though Judith’s Cobb Salad proved tricky to eat in the front seat, we managed at 90 kilometers per hour. Corn was the true star of this meal: the car was also consuming corn, as the fuel contained ethanol. While this additive worsens air quality in California, the corn-processing industry has successfully lobbied the federal government to mandate that gasoline in the state include 10% ethanol—a policy designed to use up surplus corn.When I was a kid, I ate a lot of McDonald’s—back in the pre-Wallerstein era, when ordering more meant getting a second small burger or small fries, and chicken nuggets hadn’t even been invented yet. I loved fast food then because each item came wrapped like a gift, and I didn’t have to share it with my three sisters. The best part was that everyone got their own portion. The familiar, rich aroma of fries filled the car, and with each bite of the burger came the soft, sweet bun, the crisp pickles, and the juicy, flavorful patty—pure delight.
Well-designed fast food has its own unique aroma and taste, one that can only be associated with burgers, fries, or other fast food. A homemade burger just doesn’t have that same flavor. Whatever this aroma and taste may be, for countless people in modern times, the scent of such fast food is an indelible part of childhood, giving it a comforting quality. Like other foods that soothe the soul, fast food offers nostalgia along with generous amounts of carbs and fat.
Isaac said his McChicken nuggets tasted great, definitely an improvement over the original flavor. The McNuggets have faced criticism lately, which might explain why the recipe was tweaked.
In 2003, a group of obese teenagers sued McDonald’s. Federal Judge Sweet in New York dismissed the case, but his ruling shamed the McNuggets: “It’s not just fried chicken in a pan. It’s a McDonald’s monster made from ingredients no home cook would ever use.”
After listing the 38 ingredients in McNuggets, he argued that McDonald’s marketing bordered on fraud because the product wasn’t what it appeared to be—just a piece of fried chicken. Contrary to consumers’ reasonable expectations, a serving of McNuggets actually contained more fat and calories than a cheeseburger. Because of this lawsuit, McDonald’s changed the nugget recipe, using chicken breast and distributing a “Full Nutritional Disclosure” flyer. According to it, a six-piece McNugget now has 10 fewer calories than a cheeseburger.
I asked Isaac if the new nuggets tasted more like real chicken than the old ones. He looked confused: “No, they taste the same—like nuggets.” Then he gave his dad an eye-roll, as if to say it was a dumb question.
At least in this consumer’s mind, the connection between nuggets and chicken is abstract at best—or maybe nonexistent. Isaac handed one to Judith and me to try. It looked and smelled good, with a nice crust and a white interior reminiscent of chicken breast. Its appearance and texture did evoke fried chicken. But when I took a bite, all I tasted was saltiness—the flavor common to all fast food. Well, maybe a hint of chicken broth too.
In short, the nugget feels more like an abstract substance than real food, and the “chicken” aspect could use some work.
The ingredients listed on the flyer made me think a lot about nuggets and corn. McNuggets contain 38 ingredients, and I counted 13 that could be derived or cultivated from corn: corn-fed chickens, modified cornstarch (to bind the ground chicken), mono-, di-, and triglycerides (emulsifiers to keep fat and water from separating), dextrose, lecithin (another emulsifier), chicken broth (to restore some flavor lost in processing), yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (to turn the mix into a paste), cornstarch (filler), vegetable shortening, partially hydrogenated corn oil, and citric acid (a preservative).Additionally, McNuggets contain other plant-based ingredients, such as flour (to increase viscosity). As for hydrogenated oil, it may sometimes come from soybeans, rapeseed, or cottonseed rather than corn, depending on current market prices and supply.
According to the leaflet, McNuggets also contain several entirely synthetic ingredients. These seemingly edible substances do not originate from cornfields or soybean fields but from oil refineries or chemical plants. These compounds ensure that organic ingredients do not lose their flavor or appearance after months of freezing and transportation, making modern processed foods possible. Listed first are leavening agents, including sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These compounds act as antioxidants, preventing the various animal and vegetable fats in the nuggets from developing a rancid taste. Next are defoamers like polydimethylsiloxane, primarily added to cooking oil to prevent starch from bonding with air molecules, thus avoiding foam formation during frying. The biggest issue, however, is that such toxic substances are permitted in food.
According to the *Handbook of Food Additives*, polydimethylsiloxane is a suspected carcinogen and is confirmed to cause mutations, tumors, and reproductive issues. It is also flammable.
Yet the most shocking ingredient in McNuggets is likely tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ). This petroleum-based antioxidant is sprayed directly onto the nuggets or the inside of their packaging to "preserve freshness."
Per the *Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives*, TBHQ is a derivative of butane (the same fuel used in lighters). The FDA allows processors to use it in food in small quantities, not exceeding 0.002%. Consuming one gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse," while five grams can be fatal.
With so many strange molecules organized into such a complex food, you can appreciate that the brilliance of nuggets lies not only in their appeal to children but also in their ability to fill them up without costing much. Tyson Foods invented the nugget in 1983 at McDonald’s request. Thanks to nuggets, chicken surpassed beef as America’s most popular meat.
Compared to Isaac’s nuggets, my cheeseburger was much simpler. According to the "Total Nutrition Facts" leaflet, this cheeseburger contained only six familiar ingredients: a 100% beef patty, a bun, two slices of American cheese, ketchup, mustard, pickles, onions, and an unspecified "grill sauce." The burger tasted decent, but upon reflection, most of the flavor came from the condiments. The beef patty itself, when eaten alone, was nearly flavorless—a dull, grayish slab.
Still, the combination did create a convincing burger experience, especially with the first bite. Though I suspect this olfactory achievement was largely due to the "grill sauce" rather than the 100% beef patty.
In truth, the connection between the cheeseburger in my hand and actual beef was just as tenuous as that between nuggets and chicken. Eating this burger, I had to remind myself that it was indeed linked to a cow—perhaps a spent dairy cow (the source of much fast-food beef) or scraps from a beef steer.
One of the charms of burgers and nuggets is that they are boneless abstractions, allowing us to forget we’re eating animals. In them, I tasted no trace of feed corn, petroleum, antibiotics, hormones—and certainly no cow manure.This situation may be what the industrialized food chain does best: processing obscures the origins of food, making it appear purely as a cultural product rather than something made from natural organisms like plants and animals.
McDonald’s flyers contain a wealth of information, yet the food remains a mystery. Where does it come from? Of course, from McDonald’s—but it’s not that simple. It comes from refrigerated trucks, warehouses, and slaughterhouses, from feedlots in Garden City, Kansas, from ranches in Sturgis, South Dakota, from food science labs in Oak Creek, from spice factories along New Jersey highways, from oil refineries, from processing plants of ADM and Cargill, from massive grain silos in towns like Fanning. And at the far end of this long and winding road lies Naylor’s corn and soybean fields in Churdan, Iowa.
In fact, nearly everything we eat contains a high proportion of corn. Lab calculations rank the corn content of our meals from highest to lowest: soda (100% corn), milkshake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and fries (23%). To an omnivore, this meal appears diverse, but through a mass spectrometer, it looks more like the diet of a single-food eater. Yet, this is what we industrialized eaters have become: corn koalas.
But so what? What does it matter if humans have become an unprecedented corn-based species? Is it necessarily bad? The answer depends on your perspective.
From the standpoint of agribusiness, turning cheap corn into 45 different McDonald’s products is a remarkable achievement. It represents a resolution to the contradiction between agriculture and capitalism and has allowed the food industry’s profits to grow faster than the U.S. population. Increasing the portion sizes of cheap corn-based carbohydrates also solves the problem of limited stomach capacity. We may not be able to increase the number of American consumers, but we’ve figured out how to make each one eat more—which is just as good.
Our family of three consumed a total of 4,510 calories at lunch, more than half of what we need in a day.
From the perspective of America’s lower and middle classes, the "cornified" food chain does have benefits—cheap calories in appealing forms. But in the long run, those who eat this food pay a high price for those cheap calories: obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. From the global lower and middle classes’ perspective, America’s corn-based food chain looks undeniably like a disaster.
All life on Earth competes for the sun’s energy stored in plants as carbohydrates. The planet’s arable land can only produce a finite amount of energy each year, and industrialized meat and processed foods absurdly consume (and waste) vast amounts of it. If we ate corn directly, like people in Mexico and many African countries, we’d get all the energy the corn contains. But when you eat a cow or chicken raised on corn, 90% of that energy is lost to bones, feathers, fur, growth, and metabolism. For every step up the food chain, 90% of the energy is lost, and processing consumes even more. This means that producing foods like chicken nuggets wastes energy that could feed far more children than just my son.
These were the agitated thoughts swirling in my mind as we devoured our fast-food lunch on the highway. What is fast food?
Fast food isn’t just food served in an instant—it’s also food consumed in an instant.We finished this meal in less than ten minutes. Since we could sit in the convertible basking in the sunlight, I couldn’t fault McDonald’s for this particular feature. Fast food lacks flavor, so we eat it quickly, and the more you focus on it, the less it tastes like actual food. I once said McDonald’s offers comfort food, but after a few bites, I began to think they sell something more conceptual: the symbol of comfort food. So you eat more, eat faster, hoping to grasp the primal idea of cheeseburgers and fries before it vanishes beyond the horizon.
And so it goes—bite after bite, yet never satisfied, leaving you with nothing but simple, pitiful fullness.
(Excerpt from *The Omnivore’s Dilemma*, Chapter 7: A Meal—Fast Food)
Source: http:/ / www1. businessweekly. c……eb/ webarticle2_16669_p1. html