You Know, Artifically Flavored, Cellulose Gummed "Food" Really Isn't "Just Like Homemade"
In a new social media campaign, Aunt Jemima has become the latest food brand to insist that its products are "just like homemade" when they're nowhere close. Here's how Charlie Schmaker, an Aunt Jemima frozen pancake plant employee, puts it a video posted on the brand's Facebook site:
They're just like what I make at home. We use the same ingredients here that I use in my own kitchen.Now let's look at the ingredient list for Aunt Jemima frozen blueberry pancakes, which are sold by Pinnacle Foods -- a brand owned by Pepsi's (PEP) Quaker division:
ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR (FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMIN MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), WATER, BLUEBERRY BITS (SUGAR, DEXTROSE, SOY PROTEIN, SOYBEAN OIL WITH TBHQ, DRIED BLUEBERRIES, NATURAL FLAVOR, CELLULOSE GUM, CITRIC ACID, SALT, RED 40 LAKE, BLUE 2 LAKE), WHOLE EGGS, SUGAR, SOYBEAN OIL, WHEY. CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, LEAVENING (SODIUM ALUMINUM PHOSPHATE, SODIUM BICARBONATE [SOY LECITHIN]), SALT, BLUEBERRY PUREE, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SOY FLOUR (SOY FLOUR, SOYBEAN OIL, SOY LECITHIN).Hmm. My kitchen must be horribly out-of-date, as I seem to have misplaced all my artificial flavor, modified corn starch, high fructose corn syrup and sodium aluminum phosphate. Not to mention the cellulose gum and soy lecithin. While some people probably have artificial food dyes on hand for the occasional baking or arts and craft project, it's unlikely they're putting Red 40 into their blueberry pancakes.
If you were making blueberry pancakes from scratch you'd probably use flour, eggs, milk, salt, butter, sugar, blueberries and baking power (also known as sodium bicarbonate).
All natural? Not so much.
Aunt Jemima's campaign follows similarly hollow image-boosting attempts by Domino's (DPZ) and Taco Bell (YUM). In its "Behind the Pizza" campaign, Domino's references to its ingredients as "100% real" and "Nature's tasty little building blocks" are so discordant with the list of things it actually uses in its pizza that you have to assume its marketers have never read the ingredient statements.
And last month, Taco Bell defended itself against a widely-publicized lawsuit over its allegedly fake taco beef by claiming that its meat is "just like the quality beef you buy in the supermarket and prepare at home," even though its beef contains isolated oat product, silicon dioxide, modified corn starch and anti-dusting agents.
It's understandable that food companies would want to capitalize on the growing interest in food that's more authentic and less like junked up, industrialized versions of something that used to be food -- what Michael Pollan calls "edible food-like substances." What's not clear is why food companies think they can get away with writing checks they can't cash.
Aunt Jemima's stab at transparency is particularly unfortunate because the effort could have been worthwhile. The video, the first of three, offers an interesting look at the way the pancakes are poured onto an actual griddle and then flipped by a machine, just like you'd do at home -- minus the precision-timed flipping machine, of course.
But that's where the company should have stopped. Let the employees talk about how delicious the pancakes are and how they love their jobs, but there's no point in boasting of wholesome ingredients unless you're actually doing the hard work of using them.
The reality is that most processed foods simply can't be factory-made facsimiles of homemade, for reasons having to do with the rigorous nature of food manufacturing, the fact that these foods are not consumed right away and because consumers demand that fast food and packaged foods be super cheap. The lesson for food companies is that it doesn't pay to try and convince us otherwise.
Image by Jossifresco, Wikimedia Commons
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