Salt Sugar Fat

by Michael Moss

  And that’s because, for them, the salty taste that drives people to keep eating popcorn until the bag is empty is just the start of salt’s powers.

  Manufacturers view salt as perhaps the most magical of the three pillars of processed foods, for all the things it can do beyond exciting the taste buds. In the world of processed foods, salt is the great fixer. It corrects myriad problems that arise as a matter of course in the factory. Cornflakes, for example, taste metallic without it. Crackers are bitter and soggy and stick to the roof of your mouth. Ham turns so rubbery it can bounce. Some of salt’s power has nothing to do with the food at all. In commercial bread making, salt keeps the huge, fast-spinning machinery from gumming up and the factory line from backing up: Salt slows down the rising process so that the ovens can keep up with the pace.

  Among all the miracles that salt performs for the processed food industry, perhaps the most essential involves a plague that the industry calls “warmed-over-flavor,” whose acronym, WOF, is pronounced something like the dog’s bark. WOF is caused by the oxidation of the fats in meat, which gives meat the taste of cardboard or, as some in the industry describe it, damp dog hair, when the meat is reheated after being precooked and added to soups or boxed meals. “Once warmed-over-flavor gets going, you are pretty well dead in the water,” said Susan Brewer, a professor of food science in the University of Illinois’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Science. “People can smell or taste it at very low levels. At my cafeteria, they will make a rib roast, and serve the leftovers the next day as roast beef sandwiches, and they taste nasty. That’s the warmed-over-flavor. People get very sensitive to its taste.”

  This is where salt comes in. Once WOF sets in, salt becomes a convenient antidote for the processed food industry, which is heavily reliant on reheated meats. One of the most effective cures for WOF is an infusion of fresh spices, especially rosemary, which has antioxidants to counteract the meat’s deterioration. But fresh herbs are costly. So manufacturers more typically make sure they have lots of salt in their formulas. The cardboard or dog-hair taste is still there, but it is overpowered by the salt.

  To make matters worse for consumers, salt is not the only way that food manufacturers pump sodium into America’s bloodstream. Companies are adding sodium in the form of other food additives, completely aside from the salt they pour into their foods. They do this through the dozens of sodium-based compounds that are added to processed food to delay the onset of bacterial decay, to bind ingredients, and to blend mixtures that otherwise come unglued, like the protein and fat molecules in processed cheese. With names like sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, and sodium acid pyrophosphate, these compounds have become essential components in processed foods, making them look and taste attractive and last longer on the shelf. Together, these compounds contribute less sodium than salt, but the grocery store nonetheless has become filled with products dependent on them. The same Hungry Man turkey dinner that listed salt nine times among its various components also had nine other references to various sodium compounds.

  The industry’s addiction to salt and sodium is evident on its product labels. But it is also evident behind the scenes, in how the industry reacts to the slightest nudging from Washington. In 2010, when the federal nutrition panel lowered its recommended daily maximum for sodium to 1,500 milligrams for the most vulnerable Americans, food manufacturers put on a full-court press urging the panel to back off. Kellogg, for one, sent the Department of Agriculture, which was overseeing the panel’s work, a 20-page letter detailing all the reasons it needed salt and sodium—and in amounts that would not make the 1,500 level feasible. “Serious technical constraints limit the ability to dramatically reduce sodium concentrations while maintaining consumer acceptability that is essential to sustain such products in the marketplace,” Kellogg implored. “We urgently request that the Committee consider these constraints.”

  Kellogg did not mention WOF by name but more generally pointed to salt’s powers to override the dark sides of processed foods, in which all the additives being used can generate unpleasant tastes. Foods do not even have to taste salty for salt to be critical to their success, the company noted. “The ability of salt to enhance other flavors and/or mask objectionable ones (e.g., bitterness) in foods that do not necessarily taste salty is more important. Examples of foods in this broad category include baked goods, cereals, cheese, entrees and numerous other foods.”

  To be sure, Kellogg—like other food manufacturers—didn’t miss their opportunity to shift some of the blame for the country’s dependence on salt onto the people who buy processed foods. In its letter, Kellogg talked about salt as if it was a drug. It cited the “psychobiology of the innate craving for salt” and “the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for salt” and shifted the onus on consumers. “Taste is by far the most powerful factor that motivates consumers to purchase and consume foods,” Kellogg said, citing some recent polling. In these surveys, people conceded that they were not doing enough to achieve a healthy diet, but three in four cited the same excuse for their failure: “I don’t want to give up the foods I like.”

  Yet, for people at least, there’s hope when it comes to salt. Addiction to salt, it turns out, can be readily reversed. All that is needed is to stop eating processed foods for a while.

  This bit of wisdom—known instinctually to anyone who is forced to undergo a low-salt diet—was put to the scientific test by Monell. In 1982, when salt first landed on the radar of federal regulators, the institute’s director, Gary Beauchamp, performed an experiment on salt. He studied six women and three men as they slashed their consumption of salt by half by avoiding certain processed foods. For the first few weeks, nothing much happened, apart from the subjects missing the foods they used to eat. But then, slowly, bit by bit, a radical change occurred. The test subjects didn’t stop liking salt, nor did they lose their taste for it. Rather, the salt-sensitive taste buds in their mouths—the same ones that had grown used to bombardment by salty foods—became more sensitive to salt, so they needed less salt to experience its pleasures. A lot less. Enough to get them within the limits now being urged upon Americans by the federal government. “At the end of twelve weeks, after being on the low-sodium diets, we allowed them to use as much salt from their saltshakers as they wanted to, and all they added back to their diet was about 20 percent of the salt we had taken out,” Beauchamp told me.

  The subjects had, in effect, unhooked themselves from salt, or at least from the levels of salt that are considered potential killers.

  That is the good fortune that awaits anyone trying to wean themselves off salt. As I would soon see, the food manufacturers are facing a much deeper and far more complex struggle in confronting their own addiction.

  chapter thirteen

  “The Same Great Salty Taste Your Customers Crave”

  I arrived at a modern office complex in Hopkins, Minnesota, ten miles west of Minneapolis on a cool morning in April 2012. This is where Cargill, the $134 billion food industry giant, houses its central operations. I walked into the lobby, picked up my security badge, passed through the security gates, and took the elevator to the sixth floor. When the doors opened, I was greeted by seemingly endless rows of cubicles with low partitions, filled with men and women staring at their computer screens. The mood was decidedly dreary.

  They had a good excuse to feel down, my guide explained. They had just spent months drumming their fingers on their desks, waiting for their phones to ring. This was the unit that sold road salt, and the past winter had been a relief for everyone in the country—except for these workers at Cargill. Meteorologists declared it the fourth-warmest winter on record, which meant it had rained, not snowed, throughout the entire Northern Plains, the Midwest, and the Northeast, which meant there was no ice on the roads. Icy roads are Cargill’s best friend; the more ice the winter brings, the more money the company makes. “We have a saying at Cargill,” the company’s spokesman, Mark Klein, told
me. “When winters are brown, we are blue. And when they are white, we are green.”

  As we moved deeper into Cargill’s sixth floor, however, the mood changed dramatically. In this part of the salt division, the workers were all happily green. There was no global warming to worry about here. These sales people were downing cups of coffee not to keep themselves awake but to keep up with the frantic pace of orders. These workers had been busy for as long as anyone could remember. This was because the salt being sold here was not for the country’s roads. This salt was for a much more reliable—and dependent—customer: the processed food industry.

  As company officials explained to me, the salt that they sell to food manufacturers is no ordinary salt. In the processing plants that Cargill owns, this rock is transformed into a vast array of shapes and designs. Cargill’s salt is smashed, ground, pulverized, flaked, and reshaped in hundreds of ways, all with one goal in mind: to maximize its power in food. Cargill currently sells forty different types of processed salt, from a fine powder to large granules, and every one of them is engineered to provide the biggest bang for the buck—or, perhaps more accurately, the biggest bang for the penny. Even the high-tech salts engineered by Cargill cost a mere ten cents per pound, which is so cheap in the grand scheme of things that some food manufacturers have to pay more money just to get clean water into their factories.

  There is nothing cheap about Cargill’s salt beyond the price, however. Its salts are finely tuned bliss machines. When the popcorn-makers come to Cargill for help, they get a flake that is specially designed to cling to every nook and cranny of this odd-shaped snack—the better to lash the taste buds, instantaneously, with a direct hit of salt. When processed meat and cheese companies come calling, Cargill has a salt that has been pulverized into a texture-less, fine powder, which makes for easier assimilation by our bodies and brains. Dry soup, cereal, flour, and snack manufacturers, when they knock on Cargill’s door, are more keen on certain sea salt varieties, which contain additives that keep the salt from caking. “Our extensive portfolio of salts can help you delight your consumers,” as Cargill says in its sales literature.

  My own personal favorite is the kosher salt I often use at home to perk up everything from steamed broccoli to a roast leg of lamb.* Cargill makes this salt in St. Clair, Michigan, and sells it to food manufacturers and home cooks alike under the Diamond Crystal brand. When poured out of the 3-pound box, it looks like innocent flakes of snow, but in fact this salt is of cunning and intricate design. Its magnetism begins with the feel: Cooks like to pour it into their hand and then pinch the crystals between their fingers as they add it to food. In 2009, Cargill hired celebrity chef Alton Brown as its spokesman for Diamond Crystal, and in the videos he made for the company, he enthuses profusely about sprinkling this salt on all manner of foods, even chocolate cookies, fruit, and ice cream. “Salt!” he says. “It’s the finest compound to ever grace our palate.”

  It’s what happens after the sprinkling, however, that gives this kosher salt its greatest power in food. Produced through an evaporation technique called the Alberger process, the crystals are quadrilateral pyramids, with flat sides that adhere better to food. On top of that, the pyramids are hollowed out, as a cup is, enabling the salt to have the maximum possible contact with the mouth’s saliva. Lastly, the salt’s unique shape enables it to dissolve three times faster than normal salt. Which, in turn, means that it races to the brain with faster, bigger jolts of salty flavor.

  Cargill calls this the “flavor burst” in promoting the kosher salt to food manufacturers, who, of course, are not using these crystals sparingly. The kosher variety is sold by the truckload to food companies, in 80-pound bags stacked thirty to a pallet, and comes in the usual range of grades to meet the industry’s needs: “Flake” for cheese and cured meats, “Special Flake” for crackers and breadsticks, “Fine Flake Improved” for icings and soups, and “Shur-Flo Fine Flour Salt” with three additives—sodium ferrocyanide, sodium silicoaluminate, and glycerin—to ensure constant flow and prevent factory dust.

  The flavor that salt imparts to food is just one of the attributes that manufacturers rely on. For them, salt is nothing less than a miracle worker in processed foods. It makes sugar taste sweeter. It adds crunch to crackers and frozen waffles. It delays spoilage so that the products can sit longer on the shelf. And, just as importantly, it masks the otherwise bitter or dull taste that hounds so many processed foods before salt is added.

  Given the many ways that salt facilitates the making of processed food, it is fitting that Cargill became the industry’s leading supplier. In all of its operations, the company prides itself not only on the goods that it sells but also on the service it provides. Being the industry’s friend in need helped make Cargill one the richest companies in the world, with salt a small part of its scope. Its revenue climbed 12 percent in 2012, to $133.9 billion, with profits of nearly $1.2 billion.

  If you’re tempted to rush out and buy some of the company’s stock, don’t bother. There isn’t any to be had. Cargill is privately held, controlled for the most part by the one hundred descendants of the man who founded the company in 1865, William Wallace Cargill. The son of a Scottish sea captain, he started with a single warehouse for grain in Conover, Iowa, strategically placed at the end of the McGregor & Western Railroad line. To this day, Cargill doesn’t farm. It doesn’t even own any land. Cargill makes its money by being of exquisite utility to the agricultural industry. It supplies farmers with everything they need to make a profit, from chemical fertilizers to Wall Street swap options that hedge their financial risk. It moves the grain and the sugar beets that farmers grow around the world faster and more efficiently than anyone else. Indeed, Cargill isn’t just a cog in the global food chain. With grain silos in far-flung locales like Romania, shipping terminals in big sugar producers like Brazil, 140,000 employees in sixty-five countries, and 350 chartered cargo vessels calling on 6,000 ports, Cargill is the global food chain.

  Above all, the company has a $50 billion trade in food ingredients that makes it extremely likely that whatever you eat or drink today, it will contain something from Cargill. Cargill mills flour for baking, makes malt for brewing, dries corn for cereals and snacks, extracts chocolate from cocoa beans. But most importantly for its customers, Cargill supplies all three pillars of processed food: salt, sugar, and fat. Each day, it produces roughly 4.8 million pounds of food-grade salt alone. As with salt, it fashions its sugar and fat into dozens of formulations that are crafted and honed to meet the industry’s precise needs. It has oils and shortenings for frying, icing and whipping; corn syrups for sodas; and five configurations of beet and cane sugars for powdered drinks, candy, condiments, cereal, meats, dairy, and baked goods.

  Because of its massive status in the business, Cargill also has the smarts to move urgently—and offer solutions—when concerns about health causes trouble for their customers. In recent years, it introduced Truvia, a zero-calorie sweetener made from leaves of the stevia shrub grown in Latin America; Clear Valley Omega-3 Oil, an unsaturated fat that has been touted for its healthy heart benefits; and Barlív, a fiber made from barley to reduce cholesterol—or as the name would imply, to extend your life.

  In 2005, when salt came under fire from regulators and consumer activists, causing food manufacturers to cringe, Cargill was there with one of its most clever solutions yet.

  Salt has been a significant part of Cargill’s profit stream since 1955, when one of its managers had a clever idea. For many years, the company’s barges had been carrying grain down the Mississippi River from the Midwest to New Orleans for shipping overseas and returning empty, to pick up another load. Instead of sending the barges back up the river empty, he suggested, what if they were filled with salt from a vast salt mine in southern Louisiana and then sold at a profit back in the Midwest. Today, with several salt-making facilities, Cargill turns out 1.7 billion pounds of the stuff each year for use in food.†

  When Cargill first st
arted peddling salt, its sales crews would regale their customers with stories about those first barge trips and the mineral’s rich history. They stressed its rarity and value. The raw rock, they would explain, is mined at depths of between 650 and 2,500 feet below the surface of the earth in one of two ways: It is either dug out with machines, or water is pumped into the mine to turn the salt into a brine that is then extracted and left to dry. The other way salt is produced is from seawater, which is pooled into shallow ponds and allowed to lie around until evaporation leaves only the salt behind. Lest anyone grumble about the company’s prices, it was helpful for the Cargill sales crews to point out that salt was once so precious that it precipitated wars and in turn became a target in wars, as it did in our own country’s civil war. The Union deployed 471 ships and 2,455 guns to stop the 350 tons of salt that had been arriving at New Orleans every day on British ships, and whenever they could, the Union soldiers seized or destroyed salt mines throughout the South. At the time, salt was critical not only for preserving meat; it was also used to disinfect the wounds of the injured. In fact, American history is steeped in salt: The Jamestown colonists made their own salt in 1614 when they got tired of buying it from Britain, setting up wooden evaporation ponds on Smith Island. There was even a time when people, for instance Roman soldiers, were paid their wages in salt. Hence the word salary, a derivative of salt.

  Starting in 2005, Cargill saw the need to edit its sales pitch. That was the year the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines advisory committee first set a maximum limit for sodium of 2,300 milligrams a day in their nutrition recommendations. The limit was particularly onerous for young men, who were averaging twice that sum, approximately two teaspoons a day. But the stakes were high for everybody, the panel said. If people could go only part of the way in reaching the 2,300 goal, by reducing their intake of salt by even half a teaspoon a day, this alone would prevent 92,000 heart attacks, 59,000 strokes, and 81,000 deaths, saving the country $20 billion in health care and other costs.