NUTRITION
What were the first processed foods? BY WILLIAM PARK (FROM BBC FUTURE - JUNE 2021)
From putrid water to fizzy cola, food processing gave us preservation, consistency and innovation. So how did it become associated with unhealthy food?
F
rom the moment one innovative ancient human decided to cook their meat on a fire at least 400,000 years ago, to the advent of agriculture 10-15,000 years ago, people have processed foods. Our ancestors fermented (essential for alcohols and dairy products), milled and baked (breads and pasta), and worked out how to preserve meat by salting or brining. The early history of food processing was both useful and tasty. Food processing was essential to the expansion of human civilisation. How did it become synonymous with high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt diets? And do the processed foods we eat today bear any resemblance to their original forms?
Each of the early forms of food processing mentioned above has a clear purpose: cooking adds flavour and softens foods – making root vegetables and legumes easier to chew and extract nutrients. Fermentation, milling and baking also makes some foods more nutritionally available and easier to digest. It’s very difficult for our bodies to extract anything useful from a kernel of wheat, but ferment it into beer or mill it into flour and you can make a calorie-rich food. Techniques like salting or pasteurisation make foods safer and last longer. This allowed humans to travel further and survive cold winters or harsh famines.
carbonated water (he called it “medicated water”) might prevent scurvy: “In general the disease in which water impregnated with fixed air will most probably be serviceable are those of a putrid nature,” he wrote. He was wrong. But he had stumbled onto something reasonably useful – carbonated water is slightly acidic, which means it’s a little anti-microbial and therefore goes stale slower than still water. “Bacteria are not big fans of carbonic acid,” says Michael Sulu, a biochemical engineer at University College London in the UK.
To the approval of the Earl of Sandwich, Priestley’s medicated water was a success. Driven by innovation, medicated waters took off. Early successes included tonic water, infused with quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree, which acted as an antimalarial. Tonic water with quinine was widely drunk by Europeans from the mid-19th Century for this reason (although the antimalarial properties of cinchona bark were known for centuries beforehand by indigenous South Americans). What happened next is a similar story for many of the highly processed foods on our supermarket shelves.
We still do this today. Much of food processing is about making foods safer and longer-lasting, which is better for the environment as it means less food waste. But clearly some processed foods are very bad for your health. Where did this happen? The 4th Earl of Sandwich is perhaps best-known for lending his name to two slices of bread with a filling in between. However, he has another claim to a lunchtime staple – soft drinks. Soda, fizzy drinks, pop – whatever you call them, they started life in Britain 250 years ago. The Earl of Sandwich then held the title of First Lord of the Admiralty and oversaw the welfare of Britain’s navy. Early carbonated cola drinks were marketed as health tonics, thanks to the stimulating effect of kola, coca leaves and caffeine. Sea voyages in the 18th Century were slow, miserable affairs. They might last months away from land and supplies of fresh food and water. The crews relied on their provisions. Water could be stored for weeks or months in the hold (desalination was a nascent science and not yet widely used in the 18th Century) where it festered and went stale. No wonder sailors preferred rum.
In search of a way to make stale freshwater more palatable, Sandwich turned to chemist Joseph Priestley. Natural sparkling water from springs was already consumed for its health benefits – Priestley wanted to manufacture his own. In a 1772 pamphlet, Priestley described a 15-minute method of producing a vessel of “water impregnated with fixed air [carbon dioxide]”. It was his belief that 36 THE AUSTRALIAN ORIENTEER MARCH 2022
cacao beans.
The chocolate we enjoy today is a much more processed and refined food than the one enjoyed by the Aztecs centuries ago
Modern high-sugar soft drinks are “heavily vilified”, says Sulu – far from their good-for-you origins. Likewise, breakfast cereals are far removed from the grains our ancestors milled, and modern chocolate, meats, dairy, even ice cream would be unrecognisable to our ancestors. So how did we get to this point? The search for natural extracts with which to fortify sparkling drinks in the 19th Century led to even more exotic medicated waters. Various companies started to produce stimulating, caffeinated “cola” drinks with extracts from the kola nut. Pepsi-Cola, originally concocted in the 1890s and named “Brad’s Drink”, was a digestive
