Den hemlige kocken (The Secret Cook) is about “the unknown cheating with the food on your plate”, i.e. how the food you get is not what you think you get – because of additives, or cheap ingredients replacing the real thing, or shortcuts in the production process.

I care (more than the average consumer, I believe) about what I eat: how it tastes, how it feels, how I feel after eating it, and what’s inside. As a result I do a lot of cooking from scratch so we don’t buy many food products, but we still buy dairy goods, bread and biscuits, and some cooking sauces.

It was interesting and enlightening to read about all the shortcuts and tricks and engineering feats that the food industry has come up with. The concept of producing artificial flavourings to approximate the taste of natural ones (vanillin for vanilla) was no surprise to me, and I was aware of the existence of “smoke aroma”. (Mostly because I avoid products with smoke aroma, because they have a for me unpleasant taste of meat.) But half a dozen different kinds of smoke aroma powders? Spinach to make pistachio ice cream look green? The Chorleywood Bread Process which replaces a few hours of fermentation with a few minutes of intense mechanical mixing? News to me.

But the information content of the book wasn’t as good as it could have been. Of the 263 pages of actual content (before a list of sources and an index) only 161 is actually about the main topic. The remaining 100 pages are filled with a purchasing guide, and a list of all EU approved additives, the so-called E numbers.

(The purchasing guide, by the way, is a weird mixture of instructions on how to choose broccoli, what a Jerusalem artichoke is, etc. Not extensive enough to be of real use, it’s a patchwork list of foods the author cares about.)

The body of the book has two main faults. One: it’s shallowly researched and only skims all the topics it tries to cover. 160 pages isn’t much, but these 160 contain far less actual information than they could. It’s another book written by a journalist who finds a topic he cares about, and decides to write a book without actually knowing anything about the topic, or putting much time into research. He reads some books and articles, surfs the net, interviews a handful of people, and then summarises all the juiciest bits he finds. The E-number guide is very symptomatic of his lack of real knowledge.

And two: I don’t like the author’s tone, which makes everything sound bad. His opinion seems to be that if it’s an additive, it’s got to be bad. And if it’s a modern additive that didn’t exist a hundred years ago, or if it has a long and complex name, it’s got to be even worse.

Not all additives are evil. I’m quite happy that we have additives to ensure that our food doesn’t kill us. And “thickening agents” may sound bad, but any cook would agree that adding cornstarch to thicken a sauce is perfectly OK. The real question is why the additives are used: to create a new kind of food, or to hide problems (such as adding thickening agents to make low-fat cream look creamy). It can be hard to know which is which, and the line between the two is vague.

And not all modern chemical processes make food worse. Packing food in inert gases or a protective atmosphere sounds like a perfect idea to me! I can’t think of a milder way to preserve food.

We want consistent, predictable, pretty-looking, safe food that keeps for weeks. On top of that we want food to be cheap, and most of us wouldn’t be willing to pay the extra price for real (expensive) ingredients, or the cost of food that goes bad before it’s sold. There is no way to get all of that with all-natural ingredients and without technological shortcuts.

What does annoy me is misleading labelling and marketing. The book has made me look more closely at labels. Here’s what I read on the side of a yoghurt package I have in the fridge right now:

Valio Vanilj är en utsökt och lyxig smakupplevelse som för tankarna till mormors hembakta pajer. Mjuk och krämig vaniljyoghurt med bär och frukter, precis som det smakade när vi var små.

Valio Vanilla is an exquisite and luxurious taste experience that brings to mind grandmother’s home-baked pies. Soft and creamy vanilla yoghurt with berries and fruit, just as it tasted when we were small.

And here’s the ingredient list: pasteurised milk, vanilla-berry preparation (sugar, rhubarb, water, thickening agents (modified corn starch, guar gum), aromas (vanilla, vanillin etc), acidity regulator (sodium citrate), colouring (beet red), lactase enzyme, yoghurt culture, Lactobacillus acidophilus, Bifidobacterium sp. and vitamin D.

I know for a fact that my grandmother’s pies did not contain beet juice to make them look redder, and she wouldn’t cover up a added water with guar gum.

I wish I had more room for choice when buying food. I can’t choose a more local or natural product (but with a shorter best-before period, or a higher price) because for most stuff there is no such choice in a normal supermarket. (Bread is a great example.) I can only choose between different brands of what’s really the same thing, with marginal differences. And I don’t have the time to run to 3 different shops daily to buy food.

AdLibris.