What hapenned to real food?

This is my first food-related article on LTTMMA. Yeah, I wrote about chewing gum some weeks ago, but I really do not consider the topic "Gum in the urinal" a real culinary post... I am a kind of a food-label-addict. I have always been and I always read them all, most of the time looking for ingredients and nutrition facts. It got a bit worse when we had our first daughter that had (and still has) some food allergies and that makes us always look for the "bad" ingredients.

Then I was thinking about why engineers were introduced to the food industry. They should not. Engineers are all about reducing cost, improving processes, reducing production cycles. Sometimes, those are things we wouldn't like to imagine applied to that food-making corporation we always loved and trusted.

I'll start with mayonnaise. I can't find real mayonnaise anywhere in Brazil. It is impossible. Not a single manufacturer makes real mayonnaise here anymore. Hellmann's, a world-wide trusted brand (owned by Unilever), doesn't taste the way it used to. Because they decided to add the so-called "modified corn starch" to the recipe, to grow it at a low cost. The only modified-corn-starch-free mayonnaise I can get is Wal*Mart's Great Value mayonnaise, because it is made in Argentina. It is very good, indeed. In the US you can still find the traditional Hellmann's that they now label as "real mayonnaise". What?! You change all the recipes and now sell "real mayonnaise" at a premium price? They will even stamp "reduced fat" on the "new mayonnaise"! Great! Damn you, food engineer.

Another good example is ice cream. It also doesn't taste like it used to. I do not live in a major brazilian city and it is hard for me to find good ice cream around here. The best I can get is imported Häagen-Dazs, which is still really good (and pricey), at the local Wal*Mart. We can't get good ice cream such as Blue Bell, Ciao Bella or UDF Homemade. All we get everywhere is Kibon (Unilever), Nestlé and some other local, bad brands. They've always put hydrogenated fat on ice cream, but they are adding more and more of it each year. As you may already know, ice cream is normally sold by volume, not by weight. Surprisingly enough, year after year, the 2 liter ice cream box seems to weight a little less. And why? Because it has more fat and because it has more air bubbles. Brilliant! It now tastes like margarine, but this is not a problem, right? Damn you, food engineer.

Finally, we also used to have a decent peanut butter, called Amendocrem. It think it was made by Visconti, a fairly trusted maker. They sold it to someone else (I think it was Claybom, a margarine brand formerly owned by Unilever) that sold it to Fugini, that currently holds the brand. It is now anything but peanut butter. It has peanuts, but has tons of fat and sugar and additives. It is definitely not peanut butter when you compare it to Smucker's, for example. I could continue writing about other items, all ruined by those damn food engineers...

I think we should take all engineers out of the food industry. And, of course, keep cooks away from designing bridges, buildings and computers. Doesn't it make sense?