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Not So LQD: Let Them Eat Fake

by DeAnander Mon Apr 28th, 2008 at 07:07:17 AM EST

The title of J's recent diary "Let Them Eat Cake," plus AA's diary on food flavourings, finally spur me to action;  I've been meaning to transcribe this delightful (in a manner of speaking) excerpt from Bodanis' amusing little book The Secret House, for a couple of months now.  Bon appetit!  And don't even ask me about the icing :-)

Promoted for your lunchtime delight - Colman


If the serving of [corporate bakery] cake you present to your guests for dessert were divided into its components, the result would be a bowl of water with globs of fat floating in it.  There would also be a coating of sugar, and, underneath the wreckage, a certain residue of flour.  All cakes are like this, or at least all cakes you get from commercial bakeries are, for such cakes are not really food but just a way of taking ordinary water, mixing it with low-cost fats, and then disguising the result so it can be sold at a profit of several hundred percent over raw material cost.

The process begins with cake manufacturers collecting the lowest-cost fats they can.  Olive oil is never used, because that substance has a pleasing texture and satisfying smell, and so can be sold at a high price on its own.  The stuff shipped in tanker loads to commercial cake factories is less pristine in origin.  There's usually a good deal of lard, a good deal of oil from compressed and over-aged fish corpses, and perhaps a little palm oil too.  The fats and oils are mixed together, cooled until they're fairly stiff, and then the air is blasted in.

Blades the size of large airplane propellers force air into the fat chamber.   Because lard and fish fat are so sticky, the air doesn't carry on through but gets caught up inside the mix, separating into little bubbles as it gets absorbed. When the fans are turned off what's left is a giant block of aerated pig and fish fat.  This is not a substance that could be chopped into segments and successfully marketed as cake.

The first thing that has to be done to this cake precursor is to find some way of making it thinner.  It's too heavy as it is, and anyway there's another advantage to making it thinner.  The lard and fish oil were not very expensive to start with, but if they could be made to go twice as far, then whatever profit there might be in store could also be spread by two.  For this diluting a substance known as GMS -- glycerol monostearate -- is mixed into the fat.  It is chemically very similar to soap.  With the GMS in there any water hosed into the room where the fat is will not bead up on the surface, as water tends to do on normal fats, but will instead be pulled in by the soapy GMS.  GMS is so good at pulling water into fat that hundreds of gallons of water can be sprayed in for each ton of mixed fat waiting in the storage rooms to become a cake.  The compact fat wedge swells as the water comes in, it grows and stretches and because the GMS does so good a job it ends up as a super-wedge, twice the volume of the original.

Once the water is there, something else has to be added to the mix:  sugar.  Crates and crates of refined white sugar are dumped on, stirred in, and left to spread.  Since sugar dissolves in water it is taken up throughout the volume of the fat, wherever the GMS-assisted water has itself managed to spread.  Sugar helps the fat and water concoction smell sweet, but mostly it's there to add weight -- important as the aerated water and fat mix is now too light!  Sugar turns out to be one of the most inexpensive substances of substantial weight that is safe enough to be added to food.  Gravel, logs, or cement might weigh more, but happen to be fatal if ingested in quantity;  flour, protein and other nutrients are certainly safe to add to food but they're not as dense, and don't weigh as much.  Sugar is the only substance that falls between the two, neatly replacing the weight the water took away.  It sounds roundabout, but has its logic.

By this stage the proto-cake has 90 percent of the ingredients the finished product you eat will have.  There's pig fat, oil from crushed fish, lots of water, and lots of sugar.  It's not a very palatable object, being a pasty grey in colour, and oily as you might imagine a great hunk of old fats would feel, but with a bit more transformation all of these irritating lacks can be taken care of.  First some flour is added.  As it's masked by all the fat, sugar, and water, there's no need for an especially high grade of flour to be used.  Often it's the reject from bread-making factories.  Even so it's expensive stuff, or at least when compared to plain water and aerated fat it's expensive, which is why only a small amount is used.  All it has to do is provide a thin filler to go into some of the fat sheets that have wrapped around the air spaces, and an addition equal to four or five percent of the total cake weight is usually enough for that.  Sometimes the flour is dispensed with altogether and simple cellulose derivatives -- ground up wood chips -- are used in its place.  These have zero nutritional value, but fill the fat membranes almost as well.  Meringues especially are likely to get this substitute.

The GMS that was originally added to hold the water inside the fat now has another role to play.  Left to itself the flour added in might crumble into small clots, and so give the cake lumps  The soapy GMS oozes around those flour pieces though, before they can clot up.  That keeps the cake-to-be even and free from lumps.

Ony a few faults are left now.  The cake still looks pretty bad, and so is coated with coal tar colorants;  it also tastes intensely objectionable -- soapy, oily and greasy despite all the sugar -- and is injected with some flavour to make it palatable, usually one of several hundred strong synthetic flavourings on hand.

With all these additions since the first air treatment was given to the fat mass, the cake is likely to be getting pretty compact again.  Baking sodas have to be added to get it to rise, to get the fat-covered air bubbles to grow.  The cheapest baking sodas leave washing soda in the mix as a byproduct, and as this in itself is pretty nasty tasting it is used only for cakes that will end up as chocolate -- a flavour that can be made strong enough to cover almost anything left inside.  This is a general rule.  In almost every commercial food-making process, a batch that gets spoilt will be flavoured with chocolate to get it through.  For other flavours a slightly more expensive baking powder is used, which contains an acid capable of dissolving undesirable byproducts as it goes along.  In both cases carbon dioxide is chemically generated inside the cake, and being caught in those flour-toughened fat membranes, swells them up.  What started as a simple lard, fish oil and palm oil gloop is now an epicure's delight, airy, light, and tender to the touch.

There's a footnote on consumer psychology here.  When the first home cake mixes using the GMS magic were marketed in the US, they did not sell well.  Consumers felt that an amorphous substance that you just added water to and baked could not a true cake be.  They were right, but that wasn't the issue.  The manufacturers might have said that at least the powder was better than what you get in a factory cake, but that did not seem an attractive point, and anyway it was probably best to keep quiet about what went on in the factories.  It looked like the product would have to be withdrawn, until an ingenious advertising man got the idea of saying that a fresh egg had to be added to make the mixture work.  It didn't have to be added, the GMS chemistry worked fine without it, but it gave the housewife users a feeling of being in control, of creating a natural product, of doing good for their family:  sales of cake mix went up.

My my, wasn't that appetising.  I have not felt the same about the bakery section of any supermarket since reading it.  Not that I felt a lot of warm fuzzy stuff for any section of a corporate supermarket at any time, but I now experience a particular frisson d'horreur as I pass the seductively lit, vanilla-scented bakery counters.

[BTW, the rest of Bodanis' book is equally amusing and a worthwhile light read.  His comments on toothpastes and deodorants are delightful, as are his vivid descriptions of the lifeways of household and personal bacteria.]

So, not only do the capitalist bosses cry Let Them Eat Cake -- they cry Let Them Eat Fake Cake.

Which raises all kinds of disturbing questions.  How much else of what ordinary people are eating is really industrial waste disguised as food?  (Bodanis on corporate ice cream is another treat I'll leave for readers to discover for themselves.)  How can we in "the West" (Gringolandia) pride ourselves on the ready availability of affordable food for all -- often bragged about as a selling point of the AWOL -- if much of it is not actually food, but pseudofood or food-like substances actually cobbled together from chemicals, "seconds," and offal?  How did we become inured to fake food?  Why is so much of the content of the average supermarket "food" rather than food, if you get my drift?

These questions are taken up more seriously by Mike Pollan in his latest book, In Defence of Food, which I highly recommend.  Pollan gives us a lightning tour of the history of artificial food and what he calls "nutritionism" (as opposed to nutrition):  the cult of quantification and reductionism that insists food is nothing more than a measured dose of protein and vitamins (the same Liebig-era mania that resulted in the great NPK bubble now in its death spiral of diminishing returns and unintended consequences).  

Food labelling practises, industry shenanigans, diet fads, the "diseases of civilisation," it's all there in lucid, if sometimes a bit brief and hurried, prose (I got the impression somehow, as a reader, that his publisher was pushing hard for an early release date and the book ended up being a bit shorter than it might have been with more researching/writing time -- I'd have preferred the longer version).

I note that all the processes referred to in the riveting description of commercial cake-making above, are dependent on cheap energy and petroleum-based chemistry;  from the factory trawling and processing that generates the tanker loads of rancid fish oil as a waste product, to the strong synthetic dyes and flavourings that conceal the ghastly quality of the base ingredients.  Not to mention the factory-farmed flour and plantation sugar cheap enough to offer a 700 percent profit margin even after all the long haul transport.

Recently, on a visit to friends in the Outback of inland BC, I worked a hand powered grain mill to make fresh flour from hard red wheat.  With local butter, eggs from the chicken house 40 feet from the farmhouse door, local honey and local fruit, we made an apple spice bread whose only long-haul ingredient was -- as in olden times -- the high-value, low-weight, low-volume spices like cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.  It was possibly the most delicious cake I have ever eaten, though the good appetite generated by grinding flour may have added to its appeal :-)  And it was very, very cheap to make -- cheaper than a box of factory cake mix from the nearest supermarket, I suspect (though perhaps not cheaper than some cake mixes marked down for occasional sale or found at Costco).  I had just discovered this section of Bodanis' book at the time and was reading it aloud to my friends, to their mixed amusement and disgust, while the smell of our own apple spice cake filled the house.  It was hard to understand at that moment, how the food-industrial-complex has pulled off this enormous, cruel, and highly profitable scam -- convincing people to eat industrial waste and petroleum distillation byproducts, under the guise of "cake".

I've long felt that when I walk into the average supermarket, I don't recognise most of its contents as edible.  But I didn't realise how right I was until the latest round of exposés of the food industrial complex came out:  Pollan and a small but vocal band of muckrakers have pulled back the curtain on what can only be called a crisis of adulteration, false advertising, corruption of government bureaux, etc.

Anyway, In Defence of Food is a fine followup to The Omnivore's Dilemma and a welcome addition to the growing library of what we might call the Real Food Movement.  Also recommended (by me anyway):  Nourishing Traditions by Fallon and Enig, Full Moon Feast by Prentice, Slow Food Nation by Petrini, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Katz, and of course the various recent "limited radius" or locavore books.

Poll
Did you know how factory cake is made?
. Nope, but who cares? It tastes OK to me! 0%
. Nope, and I don't think I'll be able to stare a slice in the face again without fear and loathing. 9%
. I had a vague idea, but wasn't aware it was quite that ghastly. 59%
. Oh yeah, I knew that, doesn't everyone? 13%
. If you think that's bad, you should see where I worked back in...! 4%
. Who eats cake anyway? 13%

Votes: 22
Results | Other Polls
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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.

by lychee on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 03:22:26 AM EST
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
by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 04:07:39 AM EST
 it is better not to see them being made." - Otto von Bismarck, Prussian politician

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.
by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 06:12:14 AM EST
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...)

by IdiotSavant on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 07:17:54 AM EST
Oh, and how I make cake: butter, chocolate, sugar, flour, eggs, vanilla, and more chocolate.  Why would anyone waste time eating crap?
by IdiotSavant on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 07:20:42 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Didn't they learn anything from The Jungle...?  

No.

The Fates are kind.

by Gaianne on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 09:54:39 PM EST
[ Parent ]
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?

by Sassafras on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 07:24:14 AM EST
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. [...]

by das monde on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 08:56:33 AM EST
I wouldn't eat from any bunch of bananas that doesn't warn about tropical spiders in them. If the transportation doesn't support spiders, it doesn't support bananas.

When was the last time you saw a rotten banana that was fit to eat ? I remember them from when I was a kid, a black banana was gooey but edible. Now, if it's gone even slightly black it's compost (and smells like it). Once the fruit was still alive and ripening when it arrived here, now it's dead and I'm sure it's more than they're stored under Nitrogen.

keep to the Fen Causeway

by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 09:45:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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.

by PIGL (stevec@boreal.gmail@com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 11:39:24 AM EST
Speaking of my tummy, do you have a recipe for the Apple Spice Cake?

Well, a friend of mine has a good recipe:

Take two eggs, a pinch of cinnamon, 350 g of wheat flour, 200 g of milk, four large apples, 200 g of brown sugar and two bottles of good whiskey.

1 - Mix eggs and milk.

2 - Taste the whiskey to make sure that it is a good one.

3 - Finely mix flour and sugar.

4 - Make sure that the whiskey is still good.

5 - Gadually put zhe flour/sugar mix into the eggs and milk.

6 - 'Ave another tazte of ze fine whiskey.

7 - Addd a pinzh of sinnamon.

8 - Open ze zekond bottle of whizky.

9 - Tozz a few sppoonfuls of kurry into ze mix. Curry is alwayz good.

10 - Swipe a zhot of ze whizky.

11 - GOTO 10

12 - find anuzzer bottle of whizky.

13 - chuck a roasted chicken into ze mix.

14 - 'ave anuzzer drunk.

15 - go to bed. who vould vant to eat kake anywayz ven zey ave wizky.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Caution! Remember to turn off the stove before you turn in.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 03:32:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]
It's amazingly difficult to grind up lemon grass with a mortal and pestle

In the running for Typo of the Year?

by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 04:00:47 PM EST
[ Parent ]
by PIGL (stevec@boreal.gmail@com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 05:09:15 PM EST
[ Parent ]
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
by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 02:25:23 PM EST
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.
by Ephemera on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 03:27:06 PM EST
Your comment reminds me that (it seems to me) every TV ad I see for a quick-make mix (cake, soup, whatever), always features the happy food-providing mother rewarded with general joy around the table and often an appreciative glance from Mr Man of the Family.
by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 04:08:17 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Fake food and a fake social construct?

It is ironic that food companies have exploited and subverted the link between food and motherhood. The idea that food is to be trusted implicitly because it is provided by our mothers, who would never put anything on the table which would harm us. By providing food which is quicker and easier, they have allowed women to dispense with another 'duty' which tied them to the home. The price being that you didn't ask whether your family's health was the cost.

Now you are as likely to see a mother examining the ingredients of a food product as you are seeing her make a meal from scratch. Maybe that is an overstatement, but mothers (and fathers) have reasserted their control over their child's diet in a way which remains within the system of mass-produced food.

Member of the Anti-Fabulousness League since 1987.

by Ephemera on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 05:32:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I think "proper mother" pressure comes into that.

Despite the fact that most of us now work, there's (manufactured?) pressure to do all the things our mothers used to as well.

So...the friendly cake mix manufacturer comes to our rescue...Add water, stir, become a domestic goddess.

When my children were smaller, I confess to having bought biscuit kits, keeping the Thomas the Tank Engine/dinosaur cookie cutter, and throwing the biscuit mix away.  It seemed more of a waste to spend time making something horrible.

But...my mother baked everything herself, and I learned from her. Not everybody did. "Proper" cookery lessons have only just been reintroduced to UK schools.

Unfortunately, cookery lessons in UK schools are funded by the parents providing the ingredients.  My daughter is doing cookery at the moment, and estimates that, in any given week, only about half of her class will take part.  Usually the same half.

It's a problem.  It can be really, really expensive to provide the ingredients, because supermarkets don't sell 50g of beansprouts, one stick of celery, half a pepper, four baby corn, six mange-tout or a tablespoon of soy sauce.  I estimated that her vegetable stir fry would have cost £10-£12 from a standing start. Leaving a fridge full of leftover ingredients, but that presupposes the parents know what to do with them.

Coincidentally, tomorrow, she's making cake  :)

by Sassafras on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 05:59:45 PM EST
[ Parent ]
that seems insane, expecting each individual set of parents to buy the ingredients just for their kid.  what about pooling an ingredients fee and buying in bulk for the whole class from farmer's market or greengrocer's?  harumph...

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Sun Apr 27th, 2008 at 07:18:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]
What about the state rather than the parents financing a free education ?

Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
by linca (antonin POINT lucas AROBASE gmail.com) on Mon Apr 28th, 2008 at 04:44:38 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Liability. See stories about "cake sales" requesting that you not bring home baked cakes.
by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Mon Apr 28th, 2008 at 06:13:27 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I've thought that there might be a business opportunity providing and delivering cookery ingredients to local schools.

I know I'd rather send in a cheque once a term and know it was going to be dealt with for me.

The foreseeable problem is that, if the business model were successful, anyone who didn't buy the cheapest possible ingredients would be easy to outcompete.

And at least I know my daughter is using good ingredients when I provide them.

Her cake was, by the way...er...dense.  But don't tell her I said so... :)

by Sassafras on Mon Apr 28th, 2008 at 01:13:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]
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.

by GreatZamfir on Wed Apr 30th, 2008 at 05:03:23 AM EST
There's truth in what you say, but :

  • creaming butter and eggs does not amount to increasing fat volume by addition of water;

  • putting sugar in a cake is not the same as adding an excess amount of sugar both to increase specific weight and give a masking taste appreciated by all.

So the differences are: cheap (lousy) fat, a chemical emulsifier, added water, excess sugar.
by afew (afew(a in a circle)eurotrib_dot_com) on Wed Apr 30th, 2008 at 05:27:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely hate factory cakes.

But adding water+emulsifier is sort of the equivalent of
adding eggs. Form a chemical-industrial point of view,
eggs are egg powder with added water. The article
mentions a doubling of the fat by adding water, which is
pretty much the same ratio between eggs and butter as I
use when making cake.

And I am not sure about the excess sugar either. In my
cakes, there are roughly equal parts sugar, butter,
eggs and flour. That's already a lot of sugar, and it
sure 'masks' the taste of the butter-with-egg mixture.

Sometimes you here people complain that the modern
city-dweller doesn't know how his foods are grown. But
in reality, people have a reasonably good idea how food
is grown. It's industrial processes that we are really
far removed from.

by GreatZamfir on Wed Apr 30th, 2008 at 05:45:00 AM EST
[ Parent ]
And the article seems to claim that flour is more expensive per weight than sugar. that sounds doubtful to me.
by GreatZamfir on Wed Apr 30th, 2008 at 05:46:52 AM EST
[ Parent ]
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.

by metavision on Sun May 4th, 2008 at 12:21:20 PM EST


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