Thanks for this. Nice transcription job. :)

If I could recommend another book, you would really enjoy (if reading about the corporate and chemical takeover of our tastebuds can be enjoyed) Eat Your Heart Out, by Jim Hightower, written in 1975.

Poll answer: no, but I already knew it was crap. This just means it's even worse crap than I could imagine.

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes

 it is better not to see them being made." - Otto von Bismarck, Prussian politician

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

This is legal?  If so, Americans need better food laws.  Didn't they learn anything from The Jungle...?

(In New Zealand, food is supposed to be made out of food...)

What are the labelling requirements for this?

Here in the UK, animal fats disappeared from the ingredients labels of most commercially-produced cakes and biscuits a good fifteen years or so ago.

There was no great upheaval. I thought at the time that the number of vegetarians/Muslims/Hindus who avoided such products must have reached a critical level where the manufacturers cared about the loss of business.  More realistically, it's possible that the abolition of the practice of rendering (boiling up the carcasses to get the last scraps of meat and fat) post-BSE reduced the amount of cheap animal fat.

(I realise the hydrogenated crap with which it was replaced is no better in health terms...)

However, last year Mars announced that it would be using slaughter-derived whey in its chocolate, and was forced to back down after a week.  So...is there some quirk of labelling that allows decaying fish to be labelled as vegetable oil, or does the British situation, though equally nutritionally icky, not involve the more emotionally repulsive ingredients?

Would you like to know more about bananas?

Salon.com reviews Dan Koeppel's "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World" and Peter Chapman's "Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World":

The mass-produced banana first came to the United States in the 19th century. As the next century rolled on, buccaneering banana men pioneered such innovative business practices as propping up puppet heads of states throughout Latin America, keeping them in power through corporate largesse, and exploiting local workers, when not actually encouraging local governments to enslave or kill them. By building railroads, in exchange for land for plantations, United Fruit [now Chiquita] tightly entwined itself with the economies of many countries, and came to own huge swaths of Central America. Its reach was so extensive that it became known as "the Octopus."

When local leaders threatened taxes or complained about the company's abysmal labor practices, such as paying workers exclusively in company scrip to be spent only at the company store, United Fruit threatened to leave the country, taking its business next door. Mere bribes to local officials were strictly junior varsity in this jungle.

In some countries, United Fruit blatantly paid no taxes at all for decades. In others, when troubled by local officials, it simply installed a more sympathetic government. In Honduras in 1911, the banana men not only staged an invasion to depose the current regime and put in a new one, they had the audacity to demand the new government reimburse the costs incurred in the invasion!

United Fruit was not to be crossed. In Colombia in 1928, 32,000 banana workers went on strike, demanding such niceties as toilet facilities at plantations. In a massacre later immortalized in literature by Gabriel García Márquez in "One Hundred Years of Solitude," the military killed 1,000 unarmed striking workers and their families in the town square in Cienaga after Sunday church services.

The banana men, however, saw themselves not as ruthless corporate overlords but as a force for all that's good in civilization. [...] Today, when the business buzzword "corporate social responsibility" is so commonplace that it has its own acronym, CSR, it's sobering to remember that the banana czars themselves invented the term. [...]

I remember reading this exact description of industrial cake production in maybe Harpers', sometime in probably the mid 1990s.

As I look around my kitchen and fridge, the only processed foods I find are dried pasta, high end tomato sauce which, by the ingredients, is close to what I make from scratch when I have time, and Thai curry paste. I tried making Thai curry paste from scratch. Once. It's amazingly difficult to grind up lemon grass with a mortal and pestle (I think nowadays they use food processors, but I don't have one).

Now I am not being all moral here...these selections are left over from my days as a rad veg. It's just that I've read too many articles like the cake story, and I gross out very easily for a biologist. I won't cook with things that I don't know the chain of custody from living thing to my tummy.

Speaking of my tummy, do you have a recipe for the Apple Spice Cake? I'd like to try it, since I can't live in BC anymore.

Thanks for posting this.

My wife is very keen on reading the ingredients of any processed food we buy. An interesting thing to note is that although the brands stay the same, the ingredients regularly change - suddenly, hydrogenated fats or palm tree oil appear when they'd been absent beforehand...

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères

The story in the final paragraph appears in Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, which is possibly its source. However, he attributes the housewives reaction against cake mixes because they take away not only their individual creativity ('just add tap water'), but also the feeling that they are the food maker/provider for their family. He doesn't really mention that they had concerns over the the contents of nature of the cake, which, if correct, makes it irrelevant to his story.

Member of the Anti-Fabulousness League since 1987.

Sure, this description sounds very industrial, but a lot of its 'disgustingness' is because the industrial process makes things explicit that happen in all cakes.

How do you make normal cake? Butter, flour, eggs, sugar, vanilla or something for taste.

The whole first part of this story describes how fat is aereated with an emulsifier and water. Or, in household terms, Butter and eggs are mixed together until creamy.

There is a lot of story how GMS "pulls in water" and "oozes around flour chips". Well, that's pretty much the function of eggs in normal cake.

Next there is part how the evil corporations put sugar in cake because it has the right weight and price. Seriously, is he criticizing factories because they put sugar in their cakes?

And on we go: in both cases carbon dioxide is chemically generated inside the cake, and being caught in those flour-toughened fat membranes, swells them up.

Yes, that's what happens in all cakes. It's how baking powder works.

So, the real differences between this industrial cake and normal home-made cake are basically two things: cheap fat and a chemical emulsifier instead of eggs. The rest of the story is pretty much the same as normal cake baking.

Thank you for this and all your reading, DeAnander, because it links a lot of previous pieces of information and my gut feelings about processed stuff.  Many times, I get bad vibes from foods, textiles, furniture... and I cannot ignore them.

Bodani´s description is even better than Cruella de Ville´s factory scene.  (:

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.