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In this article, we’ll provide a handy guide to six uniquely unnatural processed foods that will hopefully serve as a blueprint for humanity’s eventual triumph over the tyrannical fist of Mother Nature.
1. Spray-Can 'Easy Cheese'
Dipping a butter knife into a tub of cheese spread and putting it on a cracker takes a lot of time and effort. Thankfully for all of us, the wizards at Kraft have developed a product that ensures we’ll never again run the risk of hurting our wrists trying to spread processed cheese. Kraft’s Easy Cheese cans combine the soulless tastelessness of its cheese products with the convenience and simplicity of whipped cream cans. The most interesting aspect of Easy Cheese is its remarkable consistency. Normally, cheese comes in a solid state when kept at room temperature and only becomes liquid when melted at high temperatures. Easy Cheese, on the other hand, has a Goldilocks-like "not too solid, not too viscous" quality that makes it easy to spread on food without having it drip on your clothing. According to an exposé in Wired magazine, Easy Cheese achieves this amazing texture by containing lots of unhealthy crap, such as the stain-removing chemical trisodium phosphate and a healthy dose of canola oil that keeps the cheese from solidifying. Oh, and they also load Easy Cheese with about twice the amount of salt you'd normally find in natural cheddar cheese. But the best ingredient in Easy Cheese is calcium phosphate, which is used as a calcium supplement. "But wait," you say. "Why does a cheese product need calcium added artificially?" Well, as Wired speculates, the sodium phosphate could actually negate the calcium in the natural cheese. Thus, Kraft had to put in an additive that would make up for the calcium that's taken away through food processing. Genius!
2. Oreo Cookie Death Filling
It’s rare to encounter a food that makes you say, "If only this were as healthy as frosting!" And yet, the filling in Oreo cookies manages to accomplish just that. You see, typical frosting is made mostly from butter, milk, sugar and vanilla extract. No one will ever accuse it of being good for you, but at least you're eating fairly natural fats. Oreo stuffing, on the other hand, is basically sugar-flavored Crisco. Seriously, that’s what you’re consuming when you eat an Oreo. Oreos' death filling is so bad it even inspired an ill-fated lawsuit in California a few years back that tried to stop the sale of Oreos to children. While the suit was eventually dropped, it did introduce trans fats to the public consciousness and helped spearhead the campaign to make food companies indicate on their labels whether their products contained any trans fats, so it wasn’t a total waste. That said, I think the best way to stop people from eating Oreos wouldn’t be to ban them outright but to force Kraft to rebrand them to reflect their actual ingredients. So let’s say you mandate that Kraft label its cookies "Criscoroes" and have the package depict a kid gorging himself in a tub of vegetable shortening. Yum!
3. Condensed Soups
Ah, soup. It’s the food mom used to feed us when we were sick. Every child has fond memories of being nursed back to health by sipping at the warm, nutritious broth of chicken noodle soup. Of course, mom probably didn’t realize at the time that she was setting you up for a future of high blood pressure and kidney failure. Because if she fed you condensed soup from a can, she was loading your young body up with insanely high amounts of sodium. How insanely high, you ask? Well, consider that a mere half-cup of Campbell’s Vegetable Soup contains a heart-stopping 890 mg of sodium, or roughly 37 percent of your daily recommended sodium intake. But wait, there’s more! The typical Campbell’s soup can contains one-and-a-half cups of soup, meaning that one can of soup contains more than 90 percent of your daily recommended sodium intake. To be fair to Campbell’s, it does have a "Healthy Request" brand of soup that contains roughly half the salt of Campbell's other soups. Still, one of soup’s supposed key virtues is that it isn’t a cheeseburger. In other words, when you buy a bowl of soup you shouldn’t have to "request" a healthy version of it.
4. Spam
Spam was really a major miracle of food science, as it solved a mystery that humanity had been trying for centuries to figure out: namely, how to make meat-flavored Jell-O. Developed in the 1930s, Spam is derived primarily from pork shoulder meat (seriously) and combined with water, sugar, sodium nitrate (of course) and copious amounts of salt. The result is a meat-like goo that derives 80 percent of its calories from fat and that delivers a whopping 790 mg of sodium per two-ounce serving. Spam first hit the big-time during World War II when its highly preserved state made it the ideal food to feed to our protein-needy soldiers fighting over in Europe. Now there's a fine tribute to our fighting boys! Thanks for risking your butts against the Nazis, fellas, now here’s a mound of pork slime! When you think about it, it’s remarkable that more of our troops didn’t defect to the German army, which assuredly would have offered them generous helpings of bratwurst, knockwurst and schweineschnitzel in exchange for changing sides. The fact that Americans bravely suffered through Spam prior to fighting the Battle of the Bulge adds yet another heroic chapter to the Greatest Generation’s legacy.
5. Artificially Flavored Blueberry Bits
Frozen waffles are fairly non-nutritious. Indeed, the only real way to get any sort of vitamins in your waffles each morning is to buy blueberry waffles that contain…. But, hang on! It turns out those aren’t blueberries at all! They’re more like…well, just what are they? An apt description would be "purple globs of sugary goo," but they’re actually called "artificially flavored blueberry bits." Their ingredients include sugar, dextrose, soybean oil, soy protein, salt, citric acid, cellulose gum, artificial flavor, malic acid, Red 40 Lake, Blue 2 Lake and…that’s it. Notice anything missing? Oh yeah: blueberries! For a long time, companies such as Aunt Jemima parent Pinnacle Foods were able to get away with implying that these little unfruity lumps were actual blueberries, as the box for Aunt Jemima’s blueberry waffles had pictures of actual blueberries strewn across it. But the threat of a lawsuit from Center for Science in the Public Interest made Pinnacle decide to tell people that their waffles didn’t contain any actual blueberries. What makes the development of fake blueberries so exciting is the number of possibilities it opens up for other fake fruits. Picture artificial strawberry strips, made mostly of bacon and high-fructose corn syrup. Or perhaps artificial melon mounds made of solidified vegetable oil and dextrose monohydrate. Or the coup de grace, artificial artificial blueberry bits, made with NutraSweet and artificial soy protein. Not one natural ingredient, baby!
Kraft’s Avocado-Free Guacamole
This right here may be the pinnacle of processed food magic. Kraft has managed to make a food product without an actual main ingredient, akin to tomato-free tomato sauce or potato-free baked potato. Yes, there are no avocados in Kraft’s guacamole. Then what is it made of, you ask? How about some modified food starch, coconut and soybean oils, corn syrup, food coloring…in other words, you’re eating green-colored oil. As with a lot of phony processed foods, the avocado-free guacamole compelled somebody to sue the product’s manufacturer for false advertising. In this case, California resident Brenda Lifsey got upset because she thought Kraft’s guacamole "didn’t taste avocadoey." She then looked at the ingredients, and lo and behold, "there was almost no avocado in it." Kraft’s response to Lifsey’s lawsuit was a masterwork of poor corporate spin, as a company spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times, "We think customers understand that it isn't made from avocado." Well actually, no. Customers tend to buy guacamole with the understanding that it will be made from, oh, I don’t know, avocados. This is akin to a Viagra spokesperson saying, "We think customers understand that our pills won’t really give them erections." For the record, Kraft is no longer selling congealed green oil as "guacamole" but rather as "guacamole-flavored dip." It’s an improvement, I suppose, though I think somebody should file a suit against Kraft that prevents the company from ever again describing its products as "foods."
Labels: cheese, diet, fat, food science, health, kraft, obesity, processed cheese, processed food
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BY PHIL NUGENT [NERVE.COM]
When Swiss police apprehended director Roman Polanski (Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby) after he'd spent more than thirty years as a fugitive from justice, they couldn't have known that the arrest would set off a fiery international debate between those who see Polanski as an important cultural figure who is being persecuted, and those who can't believe that anyone would rush to the defense of a convicted child molester. Since the arrest, some of the attention Polanski had been involuntarily hogging has shifted to David Letterman, whose confession of infidelity -- delivered in front of his live studio audience as part of a damage-control strategy against an extortion plot -- was actually reviewed as "brilliant television" by jaded TV critics. Both cases serve as a handy reminder that sex scandals, from Fatty Arbuckle to Charlie Sheen, have always been part of the show-business circus, and that one can tell a lot about shifting mores by charting the careers of those caught in the spotlight with their zippers down.
1) THE STAR: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, silent comedy star and director
THE SCANDAL: On Labor Day weekend, 1921, the overworked Arbuckle treated himself to a holiday by checking into a hotel with a couple of male cronies and as many women as would respond to their wolf whistles. One of them was Virginia Rappe, a twenty-six-year-old aspiring starlet whom Arbuckle was said to have been lusting after. Two days later, Rappe checked into a hospital and died there of complications from a ruptured bladder. Subsequently, a friend who had accompanied her to the party told police that Arbuckle had raped the girl, and Rappe's manager fanned the flames in the press. Various sources claimed Arbuckle had fatally injured Rappe by violating her with a Coke bottle, a chunk of ice, and/or his bigass self.
Although police concluded there was no evidence that Rappe had been raped, the Hearst papers flogged the public into a fury. There were calls for Arbuckle's execution, and when he was finally charged with manslaughter, somebody took a shot at his estranged wife as she was entering the courtroom to show her support. After two mistrials, the third jury acquitted Arbuckle and presented him with a letter of apology.
THE FALLOUT: Arbuckle deserved his vindication, but he was considered toxic by the studios and his onscreen career was over. A few loyal friends got him jobs as a director (under the name "William Goodrich"), but he had begun to slip into alcoholism and declined rapidly, both on the set and off. Louise Brooks later described Arbuckle after the scandal as "very nice and sweetly dead."
2) THE STARS: Thomas Ince, pioneering filmmaker and independent studio chieftain; Charles Chaplin; Marion Davies, cuddly star of silent comedies and early talkies; and her paramour, newspaper tycoon and close personal friend of the devil, William Randolph Hearst
THE SCANDAL: In November of 1924, Ince was taken ashore from Hearst's yacht, where he had been one of the celebrity guests brought together for one of Hearst's floating parties. Soon he was dead, officially of a heart attack, and the body was quickly cremated and interred. Rumors quickly sprung up that Hearst had shot his guest, but that it was all a simple misunderstanding: he had actually been gunning for Chaplin, because he suspected the beloved screen comedian and notorious womanizer of scratching on Marion Davies. One story had it that Ince had interrupted Hearst just as he was about to murder Chaplin and that the gun went off as they struggled for it; another version had Hearst mistaking Ince for Chaplin as Ince sat chatting with Davies in the moonlight. Another of Hearst's guests, Louella Parsons, was supposedly rewarded for her silence with a lifetime contract as a writer for his papers, a position that she used to promote Davies' movie career even as it was dying on the vine.
THE FALLOUT: Because of Ince's hasty burial and the confusion surrounding the whole mess, we'll probably never know for sure just what happened. Hearst inadvertently stoked the rumors through his own papers, which issued false reports about where and when Ince was supposedly taken ill and about everything else to do with the case. Others onboard the yacht, including Chaplin and Davies, also lied about whether they'd even been there -- maybe because many of the guests, Ince included, were spending the weekend with romantic partners other than their spouses -- but Hearst's enemies were eager to assume the worst. Whatever happened, "the strange death of Thomas Ince" is now officially part of the Hearst mythology; an early draft of Citizen Kane referenced it, and in 2002, Peter Bogdanovich made a movie about it called The Cat's Meow. As for Ince, he was one of the men who built Hollywood, but he remains best remembered for his death.
3) THE STAR: Errol Flynn, high-living action star of the 1930s and 1940s
THE SCANDAL: In 1942, a pair of underage girls charged Flynn with statutory rape. The star was picked up and tried for the crime early the next year.
THE FALLOUT: Reflecting the attitude of the times, Flynn's defense team basically argued, yeah, he did it -- wouldn't you? The high point of the trial came when Flynn's lawyer asked one of the girls if she hadn't wanted Flynn to undress her, and she replied, "I didn't have no objections." Because of the girls' ages, it shouldn't have mattered in the eyes of the law whether the sex was consensual or not, but given Flynn's rascally charisma, it apparently seemed that having any woman he liked was the movie star's honest due. Pearl Harbor had just been bombed; people had more important things to worry about. The jury quickly voted to acquit. Not only did the scandal have no negative effect on the star's career, it inspired U.S. serviceman to invent a new slang term designed to honor his sure-thing success with women: "In like Flynn."
4) THE STAR: Robert Mitchum, heavy-lidded writer, sometime calypso musician, and definitive practitioner of the "I'm just doing this movie-star shit until I win the lottery" style of acting
THE SCANDAL: One night in 1948, Mitchum was arrested at a late-night house party in Laurel Canyon, after cops who'd staked out the place observed him smoking a joint. The circumstances of the arrest left many convinced that the whole thing was set up as a plan to blackmail Mitchum, which had been a not-uncommon occurrence in the early decades of the studio system. If that was the idea, they seriously misjudged their target. Mitchum, as cooly sardonic in real life as the characters he played, shrugged, loped into the police station, and gave his occupation as "former actor," indicating that he saw the implosion of his career as one more bad joke that the universe had pulled on him.
THE FALLOUT: Mitchum was sentenced to two months for possession and ambled off to do his time, amid industry speculation that he was finished in the movies. But the public loved seeing that their hero really was a bad boy with a bone-deep who-gives-a-shit attitude. The famous courtroom photo of Mitchum's "ain't that a bitch?" expression on receiving his sentence would become as much a part of his iconography as anything he ever did in a movie. He went through his two months in the jug as a regular prisoner and was greeted, upon his release, as if he'd just flown across the Atlantic Ocean by waving his arms. Technically not a sex scandal, but thanks to Mitchum's grace under pressure, a very sexy one.
5) THE STAR: Ingrid Bergman
THE SCANDAL: In the 1940s, Bergman was one of the most-loved stars in America, partly because she struck so many people as a nice family girl who, in such movies as Notorious and Casablanca, was able to suggest a raving slut under the surface: what range! All that changed overnight when Bergman, who had a husband and a daughter, got pregnant by the Italian director Roberto Rossellini, for whom she'd gone off to Europe to make some weird flick that wasn't hardly in English, even. People felt so personally betrayed that Colorado Senator Edwin C. Johnson took to the floor of the U.S. Senate to denounce Bergman as "a powerful influence for evil." It's hard when your favorite movie actress busts up her family for someone other than you.
THE FALLOUT: Bergman and Rossellini married in 1950; the marriage, which produced two daughters (including the actress Isabella Rossellini) ended in 1957. In 1956, Bergman won a Best Actress Oscar for Anastasia but tactfully sent Cary Grant to pick it up for her. When she appeared at the Academy Awards as a presenter the next year, the crowd gave her a standing ovation. Still, as late as her 1974 appearance in Murder on the Orient Express, many in the press felt the need to mention the way that the country had turned its back on her, if only to note that the time had come to make amends. In her later years, all was forgiven, and the sense that she had been gravely wronged added a touch of nobility to her glamour.
6) THE STAR: Elizabeth Taylor, the Angelina of her day crossed with the Princess Diana of her day, with a little Paris Hilton thrown in for flavor
THE SCANDAL: In 1957, Taylor, already twice-divorced, exchanged vows with the producer Michael Todd, whose death in a plane crash a year later guaranteed he'd forever be cited as the one man with whom she could have been happy. The public was deeply moved by the sight of the beautiful, grieving young widow being comforted by Todd's friend, the popular singer Eddie Fisher. They were less moved by the news that Taylor had permitted Fisher to comfort her all the way to the aisle, a development that required him to divorce his own wife, Debbie Reynolds. The newlyweds would co-star in Butterfield 8, the movie for which Liz won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
THE FALLOUT: General consensus has always held that Taylor was given the Oscar because she'd fallen ill and nearly died, so that everybody felt guilty for shunning her as a homewrecker and a black widow. Taylor permitted her rebound husband to hang around pulling her chair out for her at dinner for five years, until Richard Burton sent a man down to the lobby with a card informing him that his services would no longer be required. In the end, the scandal was folded into the ongoing extravaganza that is Elizabeth Taylor, but Fisher never escaped his position as national shmuck.
7) THE STARS: Sarah Miles and Burt Reynolds
THE SCANDAL: In 1972, Miles and Reynolds, both of whose careers were just taking off, co-starred in the Western romance The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. In the movie, the rough outlaw played by Reynolds abducts and eventually wins the heart of the flinty English beauty played by Miles, in the course of a story that requires her to suffer at the hands of crueler, less photogenic men. Midway through filming, Miles herself was physically attacked by her business manager, David Whiting, and sought sanctuary by fleeing to Reynolds' quarters; the next morning, Whiting was found to have committed suicide.
THE FALLOUT: At first, the creepy synchronicity between the movie's plot and what happened on the set inspired a certain amount of interest and rumor-mongering, and Esquire ran a purplish article by Ron Rosenbaum titled "The Corpse as Big as he Ritz." Two things splashed cold water on the whole thing: Miles (who was married at the time to playwright Robert Bolt) and Reynolds (who was embarking on a very public relationship with Dinah Shore) failed to hold up their end by having a steamy affair, and the movie turned out to be so dull that no amount of gossip could prop it up at the box office. Much of the blame belonged to Miles; her offscreen reputation as an irresistable temptress didn't come across onscreen. Her failure to become a star probably had little to do with the unhappy fate of David Whiting. As for Burt Reynolds, Cat Dancing was a blip in his career, sandwiched between his first big hits Deliverance and White Lightning, and was almost instantaneously forgotten.
8 ) THE STARS: James Woods, actor and nut, and Sean Young, nut
THE SCANDAL: In 1988, Woods, then forty-one, and Young, twenty-eight, co-starred in the raging-cokehead drama The Boost. They then had a nasty public spat that played into popular hysteria over "stalkers" and "fatal attractions." Woods claimed that the two of them had enjoyed an on-set affair and that Young, unable to let go, had tried to keep his heart tingly by burning the limbs off a doll and leaving the charred remains on his fiancee's doorstep. Young accused him of being delusional. Woods and his fiancee eventually filed a harassment suit that was settled out of court.
THE FALLOUT: Woods survived the embarrassment while continuing to be frustrated in his attempts to graduate from character actor to mainstream leading man, never mind his bewildering campaign to be seen as a nice guy. (Delusional? Even Sean Young is right twice a day.) But Young, who already had a reputation as a troublesome weirdo to go with her reputation as a godawful actress, was not so lucky. A year later, her attempt to storm Tim Burton's office in a homemade Catwoman costume -- part of her master plan to get cast in Batman Returns— badly scared the creator of Edward Scissorhands and solidified her image as a walking freak show, a once-hot property who would soon be lucky to get hired for the sake of her punch-line value in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.
THE FALLOUT: In the wake of the scandal, CBS canceled its reruns of Pee-wee's Playhouse. (Contrary to fable, the show itself had already ceased production.) Reubens himself had already decided to put Pee-wee on the shelf, feeling that, after more than a decade, the character was running on fumes. Before retiring Pee-wee forever, Reubens slipped back into his skintight suit for the MTV Awards, where he greeted the crowd with the line, "Heard any good jokes lately?" and brought down the house. The media had badly misread the national mood on this one; some still wanted to string Reubens up, but most people just wanted to know if Sarasota cops had nothing better to do than hang out at showings of Nurse Nancy.
10) THE STAR: Charlie Sheen, actor
THE SCANDAL: In 1993, Heidi Fleiss was arrested for running a prostitution ring in Los Angeles. Intense media speculation suggested that the madam's "little black book" might be chock full of the names of movie stars and other celebrities. Ultimately, the one recognizable show business name outed was Charlie Sheen. Fleiss was finally sentenced to thirty-seven months in prison for tax evasion in 1997.
THE FALLOUT: When the story broke, Sheen had already slid a ways from his high-profile roles in Platoon and Wall Street. The years that Fleiss was in the news neatly overlapped with his transition to walking punch line. His self-parodying role in Being John Malkovich was the first sign that this might actually be a good look for him. He recently began his seventh year co-starring alongside fellow '80s relic Jon Cryer on the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, and is currently the highest-paid actor on TV.
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Hi! I am a Malaysian Malay guy who is friendly, thoughtful, humourous and ambitious. An alumni of the Victorian Institution and an ex-scholar, I was a banker throughout the 90s, after graduating. I love singing, karaoke, music and follow sports. I started making money online since April, 2005. I aim to make as much cash as possible from the Internet. Join me!
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