28 August 2008
Five Ingredients: Bacon and Yoghurt
Yesterday, I posted about Michael Pollan’s rules from In Defense of Food. Today, I poked around the Tesco in Baggot Street, picking up things I like to eat and looking at the ingredients.
This one is going to be more difficult than I thought, at least if you apply it strictly.
I looked at six different packs of rashers, for instance. All of them had more than five ingredients. I thought they were slices of bacon, maybe smoked if you’re into that. But no, there’s pork, salt, water, preservatives (up to four chemical names), at least one anti-oxidant, and sometimes more, and here’s the kicker: smoke flavouring. Tesco’s own-brand streaky rashers came in best at six items.
And then I looked at some yoghurt. Man, that’s frightening. A good brand - Glenisk - has eleven ingredients in its organic blueberry yoghurt. To wit: organic low fat milk, organic skimmed milk powder, organic cane sugar, organic blueberries (7.2%), organic tapioca starch, stabliser (organic carob gum), natural flavouring, active cultures (Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobactilus bulgaricus), probiotic cultures (L casei and bifidus).
Now, perhaps it’s unfair to call all that 11 ingredients. After all, the milk, powdered and liquid, plus the four cultures, form what you’re looking for in the first place - yoghurt. So that would leave five other ingredients to consider. The blueberries, well, again, that’s pretty necessary. The cane sugar I’m less convinced about, and I’m particularly miffed that since these things go in descending order of percentage of the total content, there’s more sugar than blueberries. But yoghurt is pretty sour on its own, and blueberries won’t counter that much, so I suppose that can be argued.
It’s the stabiliser and the “natural flavourings” that I’m looking askance at. Wikipedia tells me that “locust bean gum“, also known as carob gum, is “used as a thickening agent and gelling agent in food technology”. Thickening makes cultures and dairy goods more “stable”, but I can’t easily find anything that tells me what that means. Natural yoghurt is a lot thinner than the stuff we’re used to, so I reckon it’s used here mainly to make the yoghurt thicker. I’m not convinced by that, but the gum itself is actually straight from the bean, so it’s probably not ALL that bad.
Which leaves only the question: what’s this “natural flavouring” stuff? Poking around on the net gets me absolutely nowhere in terms of identifying it. Wikipedia, once more, says that UK law defines it as “a flavouring substance (or flavouring substances) which is (or are) obtained, by physical, enzymatic or microbiological processes, from material of vegetable or animal origin which material is either raw or has been subjected to a process normally used in preparing food for human consumption and to no process other than one normally so used.” …which covers a lot of ground. So I’m opting to ask Glenisk directly. I’ve sent in a message on their website, and I’ll let you know what I get back.
Lesson learned, though: neither bacon nor yoghurt in these forms qualify on the five ingredients rule. If I want to stick to it, I’m going to need better definitions of “ingredient”, or to find ways to get less modified food.