Foods: the Future Is Now, and It’s Pre-Masticated

Back in the 1950s, futurologists were painting exciting pictures of how the next generation of Americans would live. They predicted cars made of plastic, cities under plastic domes and a food supply made largely from soybean byproducts.

Some of the predictions were pretty accurate: We have covered sports stadiums and shopping centers, if not entire cities, with domes. Others were not: Cars still are made largely from metal, and soy-based milk and soy-based meat have not squeezed Elsie out of the supermarket.

Nevertheless, the food industry quietly but doggedly is transmogrifying our food supply. Restaurants are at the vanguard of change--perhaps because they are cost-conscious, perhaps because they don’t have to list the ingredients of what they serve. While some of the new menu items may be welcomed by those who have difficulty chewing, others--including me--greet them with a Bronx cheer.

The chicken sensation of the past decade is the nuggetized product, made famous by McDonald’s and copied by others. Nugget fanatics should know that Chicken McNuggets actually come in two varieties. The white-meat nuggets are made of bits and pieces of chicken, with ground-up chicken skin added. The pieces are then re-formed in the restaurateur’s version of a trash-masher. (Believe it or not, the dark-meat nuggets are really made of whole pieces of chicken.)

Not one able to resist carrying the ridiculous to the extreme, McDonald’s has developed the McChicken sandwich. These beasts--made from pressed scraps of chicken meat--are as big as hamburgers, fried, and drenched with a mayonnaisey McSauce. But unless you visit Detroit, the test market and the only place where they are available now, don’t start salivating yet. Let’s hope that they don’t proliferate beyond the Motor City.

Throughout the country, however, most restaurants, when you order chicken or turkey sandwiches, will give you pressed chicken roll or turkey roll. Don’t bother asking the waiter if it is the real thing. The employees generally are oblivious to such subtleties in the culinary arts. Rather, try tearing the sandwich stuffing gently. If it has a grain and tears in only one direction, it’s real poultry. If it falls apart every which way under the slightest pressure, it isn’t.

Some of the large roast-beef chains like Arby’s and Carl’s Jr. have built fortunes on a misnomer. Roast beef, at least as my mother serves it, is made by roasting a large piece of beef. Many restaurants that pretend to sell roast beef actually are selling beef that has been “comminuted” (that’s restaurant jargon for chopped into tiny pieces and then all squished together). Greek restaurants sell comminuted roast beef and lamb as gyro sandwiches, but they don’t pretend that it’s “roast beef.”

Seafood, too, is succumbing to mechanical and chemical manipulation. Many years ago the Japanese invented surimi, a stylish-sounding name for what food technologists call fish paste. They grind up cheap fish, add a little crab meat and some artificial colorings and flavorings and--presto!--they have turned $1-a-pound raw materials into $3-a-pound entrees. Whenever you see terms like “seafood salad” or “sea legs” instead of “crabmeat salad” or “crab legs,” you should suspect fish paste--oops, surimi.

You don’t have to be a restaurant critic to be offended by the taste, texture and duplicity of some of these engineered foods. But you do need some help to understand the nutritional consequences of this new kind of cooking.

A six-piece order of McNuggets, with its turbo-charge of chicken skin and shortening, provides 323 calories, almost five teaspoons of fat and 512 milligrams of sodium. Compare that to the same amount of “real” roasted chicken breast, without skin: 190 calories, 1 teaspoon of fat and 80 milligrams of sodium. (Reasonable levels of consumption are about 2,000 milligrams per day of sodium and 15 teaspoons of fat.) Similarly, is it any surprise that Arby’s “roast beef,” while still leaner than most hamburger meat, contains four times as much fat as the real roast beef sold by the Roy Rogers fast-food chain on the East Coast?

The story is the same for surimi. It typically contains about five times as much sodium and one-sixth as much niacin as a piece of flounder.

Of course, many people still don’t care much about nutrition. And, judging from the popularity of McNuggets and Arby’s sandwiches, there are those who really like the taste of processed foods. But, as for me, serve up the real stuff, and let me do the chewing, if you please.