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Over thousands years, our tastebuds have evolved to seek out the tastes, smells and colours of good food. But nowadays our tastebuds are being fooled by fake flavours, smells and colours. Modern scientists have cooked up over 4,500 chemicals to do just that. It may mean that the food we're eating isn't as good as our senses are telling us.
What is a natural flavour?
Natural flavourings don't have to come from the plant or animal you might expect. For example, strawberry flavour products can contain natural flavourings that have never been close to a real, natural strawberry. They have been made in a laboratory and are so chemically similar to real strawberry extract that they are allowed to be called natural. They are sometimes described as 'nature identical'. There's an easy way to tell
if a food or drink contains real ingredients. Take a look at the ingredients
list. If it shows a lot of colourings and flavourings,
there's a good chance that the manufacturer cut back on real ingredients.
If you wanted to make a strawberry milkshake at home, you'd pour some milk into a blender, add some strawberries and a chunk of ice cream and whizz it all up until it was frothy. But if you worked for a food manufacturer, you might be asked to find the cheapest way to make a milkshake. Strawberries are quite expensive, so the simplest way to cut costs would be to cut back on the strawberries and use a cheaper artificial flavouring instead. In 2003, the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser went to an American flavouring factory, when he was researching his book Fast Food Nation. He found out the list of chemicals that go into making a typical artificial strawberry flavouing - the sort you might find in a strawberry flavour milkshake or strawberry flavour dessert. It goes like this:
Phew! Artificial
flavourings are cheap, so can cut the cost of food, but don't have the
nutritional goodness of real ingredients like meat, fruit and vegetables. Spot the difference: Flavour and Flavoured
The big cake on the right doesn't contain any chocolate at all. It looks chocolatey and it tastes sort of chocolatey, but the flavour is fake. Rather than use real chocolate, the food manufacturer has used chemical compounds that have a similar taste to chocolate. The little cake on the left really does contain chocolate. Only products that contain real chocolate can be called 'chocolate flavoured'. Those that pretend to contain chocolate can only be call 'chocolate flavour' (without the 'ed' on the end). It's hard to spot the difference between 'flavour' and 'flavoured' so you have to look carefully. The
only reliable way to find out if a product contains real chocolate is
to look for the word 'chocolate' in the ingredients list. Sweeteners cut the calories (and the cost?)
In Lite, Low-calorie and Diet drinks, the sweetness of the sugar is replaced by a chemical compound that gives a sweet signal to your tongue, but which contains none of the calories of sugar. Sugar is cheap. It costs about 6p to sweeten one litre of soft drink. But some artificial sweeteners are even cheaper, costing only 2p or 3p to sweeten one litre of drink. You might expect to pay less for artificially sweetened drinks, but most manufacturers sell their sugary and artificially sweetened drinks at the same price. There
are only a few artificial sweeteners permitted in foods, and these are
restricted to certain uses. Acesulfame-K (E950) and Aspartame (E951) are
200 times sweeter than sugar. Saccharin (E954) is 350 times sweeter than
sugar. There's also a new sweetener starting to be used in some foods
and drinks, called Sucralose. Chemicals are used to make food attractive
But by the time a modern food manufacturer has put food ingredients through all of the processes that make them into a food or drink, they've often processed the colour right out. The products end up with a yucky grey or brown colour. Some of the nutritional goodness may have been lost in the same way. To make the processed food look more attractive or tasty, manufacturers replace the missing colour by using highly concentrated colours. Some of these come from natural sources. Many manufacturers go a stage further, and skip using real ingredients altogether. For example, instead of orange juice they use orange colouring; instead of strawberries they use red colouring; and instead of making custard with egg yolks they use yellow colouring. Colourings may make food and drinks look good, but they are often a sign that real ingredients are missing. To check if there's real food in your food or drink, check the ingredients list. The secret and invisible ingredient Food manufacturers who want to cut costs (and make more profit) can use a secret ingredient. It can dramatically increase the size of products such as bread, cakes, pies, milkshakes and puddings.
The secret ingredient is air - the stuff we breathe every day. By using special mixing or baking techniques, helped by food additives, air or other gases can be incorporated into food. Added air can improve the texture of foods such as bread or cakes, but manufacturers can also use it to make products look as if they are bigger and better value for money. Here's an example. The two ice-creams in the picture weigh about the same. One looks much bigger and fluffier because it is pumped full of air.
Technological need? What do they mean?! Most additives, whether natural or artificial, are banned from baby foods. That's because babies are so small, eating chemical additives could have a big effect on their health. But what about the rest of us? There could be risks to our health if we ate a lot of additives over a long period of time. So there are national and international laws that set strict limits on the level of additives that can be put into our food. Food inspectors (Trading Standards Officers) sometimes test food to check that food manufacturers are keeping to these limits. One important thing that the additives law says is that colourings and other additives shouldn't be put into food unless there is a clear 'technological need' for them to be there.
Over many years, the food companies argued that there is a 'technological need' to turn processed brown glop into colourful products because they can't sell dull-looking food. And the food inspectors accepted this argument. So now there are hundreds of thousands of food and drink products that contain these additives, tricking our senses into believing that glop is good food. A few of the products don't even have any food in them - they're just artificially sweetened and coloured substances, like these candy sprays. Can you think of any real 'technological need' for the chemicals in this product? It's a pity nobody thought
to stop this problem before it started. Wouldn't it be better if companies
made healthier fresh food that doesn't need to be pumped full of fake
colours and smells?!
Click here to download activity sheets on the subject of factory food
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Many
foods and drinks are 
What
is an artificial flavour?
Both
of these cakes look like they contain chocolate, but only one of them
was made with real chocolate. The other one was made with 
You've
probably seen drinks described as Lite, Low-calorie or Diet. These usually
have a reduced sugar content, and are designed for people who want to
control their weight by not consuming too much energy (too many 
Fresh
foods like fruit and vegetables are full of vibrant, natural colours.
Our ancestors soon learned that such foods are good to eat, and used colours
and smells to help them judge what food was safe and what food was harmful.
In turn, we have inherited an instinctive attraction for the wonderful
colours and smells associated with good food. 
The
ingredient is secret because you won't find it mentioned on any ingredients
list. Food manufacturers love it because it costs them nothing to use.
You
can also get a sense of how much difference added air makes by looking
at these two loaves of bread. You may not believe it, but they weigh exactly
the same. One is much bigger and fluffier because it contains a lot of
gas (carbon dioxide) produced by a factory baking technique called 'Chorleywood'.
The other was baked using traditional methods that don't trap as much
gas.
The
idea is that additives should only be used in special circumstances. That
way, the food inspectors thought, not too many colourings, 
