Sex, Bombs and Burgers (9 page)

The spray-drying process, largely unchanged since its inception, takes several steps. First, the bacteria in the milk are removed through pasteurization, a heating process similar to the method in which Spam is baked. The fat is then removed by spinning or “skimming” the milk in a centrifuge. The pasteurized skim milk is then put into an evaporator silo, where more moisture is removed through further heating. From there, the milk—now about 50 percent solid—finally hits the spray dryer, a large metal cylinder, where it is again heated and blasted with highly pressurized air. The air evaporates whatever water remains and mixes with the milk to form a powder, which then drops to the bottom of the dryer to await cooling and packaging.

The process was relatively new during the Second World War, so the resultant powder still had a chalky taste when rehydrated with water, but it was cheaper, longer-lasting and more efficient than other methods, and it was deemed good enough for bread making. American production of spray-dried milk took off and reached about 700 million pounds by 1945, more than double pre-war levels.
²⁶
Food processors, led by Carnation, found a veritable bonanza in the technology after the war with a slew of new milk-related beverages. Swiss giant Nestlé, which ended up buying Carnation in 1985, released the ever-popular Quik chocolate milk powder complete with spokesrabbit—because everyone knows that rabbits like milk—in 1948, followed by a strawberry version in 1959. By 1954 sales of non-fat dry milk solids had grown from around two million shortly after the war to 120 million pounds, leading some industry observers to wonder if the long-lasting and unspoilable powdered milk might entirely replace its liquid counterpart.
²⁷
(Obviously, it didn’t.) Spray-drying wasn’t just limited to milk. In 1942 General Foods used the process to create instant coffee, which it supplied to American forces. When the war ended, the company sold the product to the general public as Maxwell House Instant Coffee, which also proved to be a hit.

By the time war broke out, Detroit-based C.E. Rogers was a mid-sized player in the spray-drying industry. Eager to give his company a leg-up over competing milk processors, CEO Elmer Donald Rogers perfected the process of spray-drying eggs. The method was similar but the spray dryer was horizontal and box-shaped rather than vertical and cylindrical, like its milk counterpart, and the eggs weren’t heated, because doing so resulted in prematurely scrambled eggs.
²⁸

Howard Rogers, the company’s current president and grandson of Elmer Donald, boasts about how lucrative selling the machines that made powdered eggs was. His company, run at the time by his grandfather, was assigned a priority “second only to the Manhattan Project” for obtaining the materials needed to build spray-dryers, including stainless and carbon steels. “They made a hell of a lot of money around World War Two,” he told me. “I know this because my grandfather built a home in Northfield, Michigan that was monstrous.” The move may have paid off handsomely, but the company reverted back to milk production after the war, likely because of the universal revulsion soldiers had for powdered eggs. “Ugh,” one naval officer said, “our engineering officer ... could eat a half dozen of those powdered items and squirt half a bottle of ketchup on them. No one else at the wardroom table could stand to watch him.”
²⁹
Larger food processors, including Carnation and Nestlé, furthered research after the war and improved the taste by adding artificial flavours, thereby establishing a commercial market. Today, one in ten eggs is consumed in powdered, frozen or liquid form.
³⁰

Mass Processing

The advances in dehydration, freezing and drying, however, paled in significance to the advent of the mass spectrometer, a scientific instrument that virtually no one outside of a laboratory has heard of. The spectrometer, which measures the mass and relative concentrations of atoms and molecules, was arguably the most significant technological invention of the twentieth century, next to the atomic bomb. In fact, the bomb itself might not have been possible without the spectrometer.

The field of mass spectrometry was created by Manchester-born physicist Joseph John Thomson in the early part of the century. In 1913 Thomson, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his experiments on the conductivity of gases, was investigating the effects of magnetism and electricity on atoms. He believed that if he shot a stream of electron-charged neon gas through a magnetic field, the particles would deviate from their straight path and curve. He used a photographic plate to measure the angle of deflection and his hypothesis proved to be more accurate than he anticipated: the plate showed two different patches of light, indicating that his stream hadn’t just curved, it had split off into two different rays. Thomson took this to mean that neon gas was actually composed of atoms of two different weights. He had discovered the isotope: a chemical twin of a natural element that had a different atomic weight than its brethren.

His system was improved upon and by the war had evolved into the mass spectrometer, a device that allowed scientists to accurately identify different molecules and isotopes by their atomic weight. During the war, the spectrometer was used to find uranium isotope 235, the key element in the atomic bomb. The uranium isotope was particularly dense, which gave it maximum explosive power when split. Mass spectrometry, one of two methods of producing elements that could be split, was used at the giant government facility built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to create the uranium-based atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. (The second method, used at the DuPont plant in Washington, produced plutonium—a derivative of uranium—through a chemical-splitting process. The plutonium-based bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima.)

After the war, the mass spectrometer was widely adopted by scientists across a broad range of fields and industries, including pharmaceuticals, energy and electronics. Food processors were particularly enthusiastic about the new technology because it took a lot of the guesswork out of their jobs by allowing them to study their products at the molecular level. Scientists could now see how adding one molecule or altering the chemical composition of another affected a given food. In wartime experiments with orange juice, potatoes, milk and eggs, scientists found that processing often deprived food of its taste. The mass spectrometer now allowed them to correct those problems on a chemical level.

This introduced a number of new phenomena to the food industry. First, it led to the birth of the flavour industry. With the capability to mix and match molecules, chemical makers were now able to synthesize any aroma or taste. This was a godsend for food processors, because it meant that they could do whatever they wanted to food and not worry about how the end product tasted—artificial flavouring would take care of that. Not surprisingly, the flavour companies that sprung up saw no shortage of demand from food companies. Today, the global flavour market is worth more than $20 billion and is led by companies such as Swiss duo Givaudan and Firmenich, New York–based International Flavors & Fragrances and Germany’s Symrise.
³¹

Mass spectrometers also allowed food processors to dissect their competitors’ products. If company A came out with a particular food that was a big hit, company B could easily replicate it. Some long-held and zealously guarded formulas, like Coca-Cola’s, were no longer secret. Scott Smith, the chair
of the food science program at Kansas State University and an expert in mass spectrometers, explains that the device took much of the guesswork out of food production. “If you’re looking at coffee and you want to know something about coffee—like are you seeing some differences in the coffee beans from different parts of the world or different types of roasting—you can use taste panels, but you can also use a mass spectrometer to give you more of a subjective analytical approach.”
³²

The devices have also become indispensable in ensuring food quality, particularly when something goes wrong. Smith recently used a spectrometer to analyze a chocolate-covered nut product that had been brought to his lab because it “tasted like cardboard.” He found heavy oxidization in one of the product’s compounds, a problem that was solved by simply eliminating that compound. With food problems, the spectrometer “will usually give you an idea of where to start looking,” Smith says. “At my lab, we live and die by it.”

The fifties and sixties thus saw an explosion of new food products, many of which were full of new preservatives, additives, flavours and colourings. Pop Tarts, processed cheese slices, Frosted Flakes, TV dinners, Cheez Whiz, Rice-A-Roni, Fruit Loops, Cool Whip, Spaghetti-O’s, prepared cake mixes and many other products hit grocery stores and became popular with consumers. Chemical intake shot up dramatically—between 1949 and 1959, food processors came up with more than 400 new additives.
³³
The FDA couldn’t keep pace; in 1958 the regulator published a list of 200 “Substances Generally Recognized as Safe,” but by then more than 700 were being used in foods.
³⁴
In the rush to provide the world with products that wouldn’t spoil but tasted just as good through additives, little attention was being paid to
the nutritional value or the potential long-term effects of these technologically engineered foods.

Vitamin B52

Luckily, it wasn’t a total downward spiral into nutritional ignorance. Although the science wasn’t conclusive yet, people did suspect that processed foods weren’t as healthy as the fresh variety, and studies were under way.

An early breakthrough came in 1928 at the University of Wisconsin, where scientists irradiated canned and pasteurized milk with vitamin D, a nutrient it did not naturally have. The effect was soon duplicated with cheese. Many companies, sensing that their ever-growing list of processed foods would eventually come under regulatory scrutiny, began funding vitamin research. At the same time, scientists at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota were performing vitamin experiments on teenagers. After putting them on a diet low in thiamine, or vitamin B1, researchers found their four subjects became sluggish, moody and “mentally fatigued.”
³⁵
They repeated the experiment with six female housekeepers, who found their ability to do chest presses greatly diminished. When two of the six were put on a diet high in thiamine, their abilities recovered.

Russell Wilder, one of the doctors, argued that Hitler was using vitamin deficiency as a weapon in his domination of Europe. The Nazis were “making deliberate use of thiamine starvation to reduce the populations ... to a state of depression and mental weakness and despair which will make them easier to hold in subjection.”
³⁶
Thiamine, Wilder declared, was therefore the “morale vitamin,” a vital part of any military effort, not to mention a balanced breakfast.

Thiamine is naturally found in beans, legumes and whole-wheat flour, but in 1940, Americans hated whole-wheat bread—it accounted for only 2 percent of the bread sold.
³⁷
Milling removed between 70 and 80 percent of wheat’s thiamine to produce the white bread Americans loved, so Wilder believed some sort of government intervention was needed. Having joined the Council on Foods and Nutrition of the American Medical Association in 1931 and the Committee on Medicine of the National Research Council in 1940, he was already a food authority and in a strong position to proclaim his views on vitamins. In 1941 he organized and became the first chairman of the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Research Council, which put him within earshot of the most powerful American politicians.

In 1942 he finally convinced the government to decree that all flour used by the armed forces and federal institutions should be “enriched,” with nutrients such as thiamine mixed back in. The ruling took immediate effect, and by the middle of 1943 about three-quarters of the bread being produced in the United States was enriched with B1.
³⁸
The British military came to the same conclusions. After finding that 41 percent of the young men drafted for service during the First World War were medically unfit, mainly because of poor nutrition, the government also ruled that its flour had to be enriched.
³⁹
The move to counter the bad effects of food-processing technology with
good
food-processing technology had officially begun. Following the war, processors cashed in on the emerging trend toward health consciousness by expanding enrichment practices to other foods, including rice and cereals. They also took it a step further by “fortifying” products, or adding nutrients to foods that did not naturally have them. (The
trend went overboard in the fifties, when even chewing gum was imbued with vitamins.)

Enrichment was one step forward to good nutrition, but by the end of the fifties the world had taken a number of steps back. Mass spectrometers, used today by just about everybody—from sports bodies in detecting the use of performance-enhancing drugs to mining companies in finding gold deposits—allowed food processors to alter the chemical make-up of foods. Tastes, textures, shapes and colours could be changed and moulded as desired. Canning, dehydration, freezing and drying techniques, as well as packaging made possible by new plastics, all improved the longevity of food, preventing spoilage and allowing for transportation across vast distances. The road was paved for truly international foods and, with them, international food-processing companies.

The wartime boom in refrigerator and freezer sales also continued into the fifties and sixties and, combined with the advent of the microwave oven and plastics, gave households new and easier ways of storing and preparing foods. In the span of three decades, the creation, sale and consumption of food had changed more dramatically than it had over the previous three centuries.

All of this was the product of the emerging prosperity-driven consumer culture. Again, after total war came total living, and food was an integral part of that maxim. Food was no longer the precious commodity it had been during the Great Depression and the wars; time was now at a premium. Food producers, armed with an arsenal of new technologies, were more than happy to cater to these desires. As with plastics and their eventual environmental harm, when it came to the
potential negative health effects of these new processed foods, the collective thinking was, “To hell with them, let’s eat.”