Putting the bite on food manufacturers

The food industry tries to convince us that it has our best interests at heart - despite selling us processed products that aren't particularly good for us, writes Kate Holmquist.

EVERYTHING WE know today about nutrition, including the advice from our own Food Safety Authority, shows that porridge, brown bread and fruit make up the ideal breakfast. Meusli and natural yoghurt sweetened with honey are good too and if you're in the mood for an egg, make sure it's boiled or poached.

Some bread with cheese melted under the grill isn't bad either. Sugary processed cereals should be a special treat, which a lot of health-conscious parents cope with by buying one box and one box only of sugary vitamin-enriched joy-crunch and when it's gone, it's gone.

But no matter how much we care, it's hard to combat what our children hear and see on TV. The other day, my son made it clear he'd had enough of porridge, brown bread and bananas for breakfast when I purchased two boxes of half-price processed sugary flakes as a treat (two weeks' worth, I hoped) and put them on the top shelf of the cupboard.

Gazing up at these boxes in all their TV-endorsed splendour, he said, "Now I feel loved". I had to laugh to hide my horror.

When I tell Felicity Lawrence this anecdote, she groans. Her new book, Eat Your Heart Out: Why the Food Business is Bad for the Planet and Your Health, is about exactly this. How the food industry has created processed foods that aren't particularly good for us, and has made billions marketing this "food" so convincingly that we think they mean health and - yes - even love.

My child isn't the only one to have been influenced by TV ads where wholesome-looking mothers in utopian kitchens pour cold processed cereals into bowls then gaze adoringly as the child - so often a boy - scoffs the product in gratitude.

Manufacturers have been selling processed food through media messages of the loving mother for generations now - not just cereals, but also margarines high in transfats that throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s were a wife's way of telling her husband she cared about his heart. The latest fad is probiotics - even though the jury is out on their value. They're not necessarily bad, but are they that good? We don't know in the absence of objective government regulation of such health claims.

Manufacturers do respond to public concern, as they have by producing cereals lower in salt and sugar, "but it's been a huge fight", says Lawrence.

THIS IS THE Guardian journalist's second investigative food book and the sequel to her bestseller, Not On the Label. She says that the appetite in the publishing world for serious analysis of food is so scant that if she weren't on the Guardian's payroll, she would never have had the resources to write her books at all.

"Food is politics, politics is food," Lawrence tells The Irish Times. Staple foods, such as cereal made from corn and all manner of products infused with soya, are actually no more than food surpluses created by government farming subsidies. These unappetising foods - in their natural state - are then made tasty by food scientists, who may add vitamins, sugar, salt and probiotics as well as changing texture through processes such as hydrogenation, which is so bad for us that New York city has actually banned trans-fats in restaurant foods. Once the engineering is complete, the marketers transform the product into what appears to be something that's good for us.

Says Lawrence: "Corn is cheap. Soya is heavily subsidised. We've seen a livestock revolution from fresh meat to factory meat. It's unsustainable - environmentally, politically, ethically (in the way the rich countires get all they want and the poor get nothing) and economically. There is great turbulence coming in the international food market. Will we go hungry? There have been food riots in 37 countries in the last few months. There will be increasing competition for resources. Rich countries will buy their way out of the turbulence for a while, but we will experience food inflation."

Lawrence's epiphany about how she was being manipulated into feeding her family food surpluses redesigned as innately healthy foods came when she first became a mother. Her health visitor told her to wean her baby from the breast onto packaged rice cereal, which prompted immediate constipation in the infant. Lawrence read the packet and discovered that the ingredients had similarities to the food she was feeding her cat: rice flour, skimmed milk, whey protein concentrates, sucrose or oligofructose, palm or corn oils, flavouring - and vitamins and minerals added later to make the cereal acceptable.

WITH CHILDHOOD obesity and diabetes on the rise, something has gone terribly wrong. Lawrence gets to the nub of it by quoting Professor Bill Crawford, author of Cerealizing America: the Unsweetened Story of American Breakfast Cereal: "You abandon evolutionary principals at your peril." Extruded corn and wheat baked at high temperature in ovens have been "little more than sugary junk with milk and vitamin pills added" since the 1970s, when rats fed on the cardboard boxes of cereal packets fared better than those eating the unfortified cereal.

If you do nothing else, Lawrence advises - a point that has been made by nutrition experts in this country, too - just stay away from processed food, buy your meat from local suppliers (avoiding anything processed with potassium nitrates) and don't be afraid of natural fats - even the fat on meat. Unprocessed fats like butter and olive oil are good, she argues. It's the huge variety of processed vegetable oils that we need to steer clear of, in her view.

In other words, a grilled chop with some steamed or baked potatoes, a nob of butter and the freshest local veg you can find makes an ideal dinner - which is exactly what the Food Safety Authority has been telling us. "We need to put right what went wrong with our food in the first place. We cannot do that with hi-tech ingredients. We can only do that by looking at the power structures that control food supply and rejecting the great volumes of commodity sugars and fats they offer," says Lawrence.

DARINA ALLEN with her slow food movement has been an inspiration to Lawrence, who reckons we're fortunate in Ireland to live in a place where natural foods - meats, cheeses, vegetables - are so readily available. Lawrence also argues that people on low incomes may believe that special offers on processed food are saving them money, when in fact we all need to take into account that one-quarter of the cost of processed food is in packaging. "Darina has been saying this for ages. She's an example of how advocates for good food are bubbling up to change the system eventually."

Don't underestimate the political power at work to make the consumer want processed foods with added ingredients like soya (a cheap, unpalatable food that the Chinese feed to their pigs, she points out) and pro- and pre-biotics, Lawrence warns.

"Surpluses are being created by government policy in the US and Europe - and they are very powerful. But the time is coming when governments will see the real cost in terms of food security and cost to the health services."

"Big Food", as some people call it, is combating this by treating processed food as pharmacology, Lawrence believes. "We are being manipulated and it's hard to work it out and stand up to it, especially when our children are being bombarded with advertising. Don't be naïve. For example, understand that the jury is out on probiotics. I'm not saying that there's a conspiracy. Food companies are just doing their job."

We parents are doing our job too. Good place to start: reading Felicity Lawrence, even if she does sometimes make sugar, fat and salt seem like the devil incarnate, she's still open-minded and will help you decide for yourself.

Eat Your Heart Outby Felicity Lawrence, Penguin Books, £8.99