The Doctor is In!

Sometimes when I read about the processing of food in America I find myself overwhelmed. Michael Pollan’s exposure of the cornification of our country in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Eric Schlosser’s descriptions of the perverse manipulation of food flavors in Fast Food Nation make me look at food with an anxious, uncertain eye. What am I eating? And does it bear any resemblance to what I really think it is?

As a farmer’s daughter, I grew up knowing where my food came from. We had our own cattle slaughtered and stored the packaged meat in our freezer. My mother laboriously prepared green beans straight from the field, which we packaged and froze for the coming months. I never had a jar of jam that didn’t come from our own produce. But now? I live in the city, and my father, though he still produces multiple crops, doesn’t grow the diversity necessary for a well-balanced diet. Both of us are patrons of supermarkets and all the brightly packaged products there.

Like many others, I yearn for a clearer, more transparent vision of one of the most basic aspects of life–eating. I guess I’ve reached the point where I don’t care if there’s a pound of butter in the recipe. I just want to know what the ingredients are. And if I don’t know what half the ingredients in a processed food are– then why am I eating it? It might as well be Soylent Green. 

Which brings me to the topic of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I’ve never been a big juice drinker, but I love fresh-squeezed orange juice. The taste is unmatched. And I’m lucky, as the daughter of a citrus-producer, to have access to as many organic mandarin oranges as I want. My father hooked me. He drinks fresh-squeezed mandarin juice every day in season, squeezing it with a simple old electric juicer ($20.99 at Target!).

The beauty of fresh-squeezed juice is that not only does it taste so outrageously good, but you also know exactly what it is. The processing is simple and done by you. Not only that, the nutrition is outstanding. An 8-oz glass provides 100% of the RDA for Vitamin C,  as well quality amounts of thiamine, folate, and potassium. It’s good for you, it tastes great, and it’s pure. What’s not to like about that?

If you contrast that with some of the reconstituted orange juices in the store… well, I won’t go into that beyond to say there’s nothing local about that juice (think Brazil) and some of the ingredients aren’t listed on the container. So again, as mantra for 2010, I keep coming back to Keep It Simple. There’s something really lovely about going slow, knowing where you’re going, and savoring the steps along the way.

Now that Thanksgiving 2009 is safely tucked behind us, I can get back to the case of the Cuties– which is not, though it may sound like it, an infectious disease but rather the case of  how even relatively simple sounding “whole foods” like oranges are processed to look so pretty and appealing. How you feel about the following will probably differ, but the processing of a non-organic mandarin orange is worth thinking about, if only to illustrate how powerful our manipulations have become to get fresh produce to people all year round.

The investigation began for me when I was looking for packaging for my father’s certified organic mandarins. I’d casually flip over 5-lb boxes of Cuties mandarin oranges to find the box manufacturer, and the labeling I saw instead shocked me: Cuties are treated with Imazalil or Thiabendazole. As a physician, I recognized thiabendazole as an anti-fungal that is also sometimes used to treat roundworm and hookworm. What was an anti-fungal doing in my mandarin orange, and how in heaven’s name did they apply it?

It turns out that the antifungals are applied within the wax that coats Cuties. I didn’t know Cuties were waxed; I thought only cucumbers and apples were waxed. But apparently waxing is widespread throughout the non-organic produce section. In non-organic mandarin oranges, wax is applied after the fruit is washed because washing removes the fruit’s naturally-occurring protective wax.  Without this wax coat, mandarins becomes vulnerable to ”loss of aroma and weight” and fungal rot. In other words, they start getting old, fast. With a wax coat and antifungals, mandarin oranges can be stored in a climate controlled storage unit for nearly a month.

 It doesn’t stop there, either. Some mandarin oranges are gassed. That’s right, gassed. Ethylene gas is a naturally occurring gas given off by fruit, which acts as a ripening hormone. When gas levels are high enough, the fruit ripens. In the non-organic mandarin orange business, however, external ethylene gas is sometimes added to perfect the mandarins’ orange color. People in the business call this “degreening.” which is considered desirable because consumers associate a mandarin’s orange color with ripeness and sweetness. Green just doesn’t sell well.

So there you have it, the non-organic mandarin’s path to the produce aisle: it may be gassed to look orange and pretty. It will probably be waxed and treated with antifungals to stay looking pretty. The orange you eat may be a month old. Is this so bad? You decide. Some may call all this processing a great leap forward– you can get your mandarins for a longer season and they look awfully good. Others might say that it’s just one more step away from nature, that we are increasingly divorced from how our foods are produced and processed. I merely bring it up to encourage people to develop a food philosophy. How much processing is too much?