I bloody love processed food. Here’s my favourite summer processed pork belly dish. In an oven pan I sauté chorizo, onions and carrots, then deglaze with red wine. I reduce by half, top up with chicken stock and chuck in some brown sugar. I bring it to a simmer and then put in a big square of pork belly. I cover it with foil and put it into a low oven for four hours. Once cooked I let it cool a little, wrap it in cling film, and put it in the fridge overnight, under a weighted baking tray so it presses. The next day I slice it up into inch-thick pieces, and put those on to a smoking barbecue for a couple of minutes each side, until the meat is bronzed and the fat is crisped, and the air smells of good piggy things.
I know what you’re thinking (apart from: I wants me some of that pork belly). You’re thinking: that’s not processing. That’s home cooking. But what’s the difference? Count the stages: the sautéing, the deglazing, the braising, the cooling, the wrapping, the pressing, the cutting, the grilling. If that’s not a process I don’t know what is.
This is not mere semantics. Clumsy food campaigners and journalists, the ones who declare themselves committed to the detail of what we eat, seem far less committed to detail when it comes to the language they deploy. Because if they had to accept it’s not all black and white, that there are good processes and bad processes, they would start to topple off their self-built soap boxes. As the brilliant food historian Rachel Laudan has put it, “The proportion of our calories that come from ‘natural’ foods is very small. Meat, milk, grains, sugar, vegetables are normally consumed only after chopping, grinding, pounding, evaporating, heating and so on. That is true as far back in human history as we can go.”
It is the processing of raw ingredients that enabled us to extract from them the nutrition we needed as swiftly as possible so we could get on with doing the more interesting things that make us human. Whenever I hear a pursed-lipped food campaigner announce that we should eat only things our grandmothers would recognise, two thoughts occur: first, that my grandmother was a lousy cook and I’d fight to keep her away from the kitchen; and second, that she had to spend an awful lot of time in that kitchen to get anything done.
What’s more, many processes have virtues. As Dariush Mozaffarian, of Tufts University’s Friedman school of nutrition science and policy, pointed out recently at the Aspen Ideas festival, “You get far more lycopene from tomato paste than raw tomatoes.” As lycopene, which gives tomatoes their colour, is an antioxidant with various health benefits, that’s a good thing. Then there’s freezing, which preserves the nutritional value of vegetables far better than leaving them first on the supermarket shelf and then in your kitchen for days on end. And of course there are the gastronomic considerations. What would Asian food be without soya sauce, XO sauce, miso paste and the rest, all of them the result of a glorious process?
There are, of course, crappy processed foods: the ones with too much sugar or the wrong kinds of fats or which get finished in the deep fat fryer. But even then, they’re only bad if eaten too regularly. Tricky thing, discourse. But surely we’re smart enough to use language properly? Surely we can debate without oversimplifying? Now then, who wants some of my processed pork belly?
