Just once it would be nice if it was mangoes. Or kale. But, no. First they came for our booze, then our bacon and sausages. Now the latest cautionary advice, from the Food Standards Agency (FSA), is destined to cast an anxious, cancerous shadow over a whole swath of once-pleasurable foods.
Yes, those joy-killing wonks/responsible governmental health advisers (delete to your own taste) have put toast, biscuits, cakes, chips, crisps and even roast potatoes on a new scare-foods watchlist. Not only will they make you fat, but they contain acrylamide – a compound of sugars and amino acids formed in the high-temperature cooking of starchy foods – that, in tests, causes cancer in animals.
Those looking for positives in all this should note that sweet potatoes are culpable, too, and by extension that ludicrous “dude food” affectation, sweet potato fries. Anything that may potentially hasten the decline of this childish US import cannot be all bad. The same goes for pretentious root vegetable crisps – the definition of middle-class sophistication, circa 2002 – which are, in fact, like playing Russian roulette with a loaded parsnip. Or something. But, for food lovers, those upsides are small beer.
The FSA is urging everyone to “go for gold” when cooking to minimise the Maillard reaction: the browning process that, in fried and roasted foods, creates all those awesome dark and crusty, rich, savoury edges on everything from a joint of roast beef to a fresh loaf, but – once the temperature tops 120C – also produces acrylamide. Essentially, this advice contradicts two decades of cooking evolution, when, in the search for fuller and deeper flavours, food has often gone darker.
Take roast potatoes, for example. For years, cooks have hotly debated and refined this process (goose fat, lard or dripping; how to rough them up and when, etc), all with the aim of producing crisp potatoes riven with browned fissures. Ideally, you want to create a sweet and sticky shattering carapace around the fluffy potato. Now, suddenly, we are being asked to steam, boil or microwave our spuds (surely only an animal would micro-ping a “baked” potato?) and accept the limp and anaemic chip-shop chips that Heston Blumenthal has spent a decade trying to triple-cook out of our system.
Despite this being toast’s second wave of cancer panic (there was a 1980s version where, in between drags on their third fag of the morning, people would solemnly urge you not to burn theirs), it is one of the few foods readily adaptable to this new cooking regime. There are a handful of outliers who like their toast incinerated (Jay Rayner loves the smell of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the morning), but most of us – whether using a glossy, open-textured tangy sourdough or a toastie loaf from Warburtons (the king of bagged supermarket breads) – know that toast should be patiently, watchfully grilled (not abandoned to an untrustworthy toaster), until its colour is somewhere between a golden, two-weeks-on-the-Med tan and russet autumn leaves. That colour spectrum may not be ideal in FSA terms, but it is not exactly cavalier. All toast should then be liberally slathered in salted butter (not bland, creamy unsalted butter and never margarine or an insipid vegetable oil-based spread), and eaten in mountainous quantities.
It is worth stressing that there is no conclusive evidence that acrylamides in food causes human cancers. This is currently cautionary, safety-first advice. Bodies as diverse as Cancer Research UK and the European Food Standards Agency have considered the threat and remain sceptical. As the latter put it in 2015, after reviewing the current evidence: “For most cancers there is no consistent indication for an association between AA [acrylamide] exposure and increased risk.”
Moreover, given how regularly the advice around food and health changes – for instance, the science has almost come full-circle on the once seemingly established evils of saturated fats – you may wish to take this acrylamide news with a pinch of that other killer, salt. We are all dying. Life is short. Donald Trump is in the White House. Pass me those cheese and onion crisps.
