John_Yudkin_-_Pure_White_and_Deadly_revised_1986_OCR

Pure, White and Deadly
we can use as food almost any sort of animal or vegetable material,
our preferences are for the particular palatability qualities of meat
and offruit, which together can supply all the nutrients we require.
We are only just beginning to emulate the taste and texture of meat;
and people will be eating and relishing significant quantities of the
new vegetable or microbial protein foods only when the food manufacturer
imparts to them qualities that make them much more
attractive than he has been able to do up to now. But for some time
industry has been able to isolate an essence of sweetness, which has
the property of imparting a very desirable palatability to a wide
range of foods and drinks. People do not demand a particular flavour
and texture to go with sweetness, although they seem to demand
only a very limited range of flavours and textures to go with savoury
foods.
The human avidity for sweetness could for vast periods of time
be satisfied almost exclusively by the eating of fruit; rarely, and in
very small quantities, our ancestors might be lucky enough to find
some honey produced by wild bees. But some time after the Neolithic
revolution, perhaps only 2,500 years ago, people found that
they could produce a crude sort of sugar by extracting and drying
the sap of the sugar cane. This first began to be cultivated probably
in India, and its cultivation slowly spread to China, Arabia, the
Mediterranean, and later to South and West Africa, the Canary
Islands, Brazil and the Caribbean.
In spite of this increasing area of cultivation, the cost of the sugar,
crude as it was, was extremely high, so that by the middle of the
sixteenth century it was said to be equivalent to the present cost of
caviar. Compared with the price of foods such as butter or eggs, it
has been calculated that the price of sugar has fallen to about a twohundredth
of its price in the fifteenth century. Even as late as the
eighteenth century, sugar was a luxury, and until a hundred years
or so ago domestic sugar boxes were often provided with lock and
key.
It was chiefly the development of the sugar plantations in the
Caribbean, based on the slave trade, that set the pattern of the sugar
industry in the form known today. The demand for sugar was so
great, and its production so lucrative, that tremendous improvements
began to be made from about the middle of the eighteenth
century in the production of high-yielding sugar cane (and later the
sugar beet); in the efficiency of the extraction of the sugar and the
making of raw sugar; and finally in the process of refining the sugar.
12
I eat it because I like it
Thus, the price fell constantly, the demand grew, and consumption
rose to exceedingly high levels.
Legislators in many countries have often taxed sugar to provide
revenue, just as they have often taxed tobacco and alcohol. And
sugar also resembles alcohol and tobacco in that it is a material
for which people rapidly develop a craving, and for which there is
nevertheless no physiological need.
I am saying, then, that human beings have a natural liking for
sweet things; that primitive people could satisfy this desire by eating
fruit or honey; and that in eating fruit because they liked it, they
obtained necessary nutrients such as vitamin C. But now we can
satisfy the desire for sweetness by consuming foods or drinks that
provide little or no nutritional value except calories. It is possible
today to get an orange drink that is more attractive in colour than
true orange juice, is sweeter in taste, has a more aromatic flavour,
is cheaper to buy - and can be guaranteed to contain no vitamin C
whatever.
Since people chiefly seek palatability in foods and drinks, the sale
of these drinks increases all the time. One day it will no doubt
be possible to manufacture from some non-digestible polymer a
hamburger that looks more attractive than a real meat hamburger,
and smells and sizzles better on the barbeque, at only half the price.
It will be entirely 'pure' in that it will contain neither protein nor
vitamins nor minerals. And who will say that we shall not buy this
super, space-age, new food just because it has no nutritional value.
We shall buy it because we like it, and only because we like it.
Most people still believe that foods that are palatable must have
a high nutritional value; many also believe what is equally untrue:
that foods with little flavour have no nutritional value. I am certain
that it is the dissociation of palatability and nutritional value that is
the major cause of the 'malnutrition of affluence'. For this reason,
let me give you one or two more examples of how one can no longer
expect the two qualities to be found together.
First, you may remember beef tea, which even in this century
was commonly given by doctors to their convalescent patients as a
'restorative' . And to this clay many mothers believe that a tasty clear
soup is nourishing for their children. Yet here is high palatability
with virtually no nutritional value. Second, the economics of
chicken farming has produced a broiler chicken which, because it
is slaughtered young, and because of the speed with which it is
eviscerated, has less flavour than a free-range chicken. Yet its