The UAE's Fat Problem - The Super Sized Soda Ban

(Photo credit: marsmet491)

The UAE's Federal National Council has announced steps to ban super-sized sodas in the country. The decision comes as part of a two-day session in which representatives discussed and brainstormed ideas in the educational and healthcare sectors, a discussion that took place alongside a much-publicised public consultation over social media.

The move is a fantastic idea and to be lauded - others have tried but failed to implement the measure. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has spearheaded a long legal battle to implement a super-sized soda ban, a fight that continues even as I write this.

It's a step in the right direction, but when you look at the journey ahead, even so big a step seems like a very small thing indeed. The UAE has a problem - and at its core is one small word. It's actually what I do as a day job and so I get a tad frustrated by it all.

It's awareness. Nothing more, nothing less.

The UAE is a young country, sometimes still painfully young. Its people have grown up in one of the most dynamic, fast-changing and evolving environments in the world. It's one of the most diverse collections of humans on earth - I'm shocked we aren't surrounded by thousands of anthropologists studying the place - with probably the world's wackiest demographics and societal challenges so great even trying to think about them deeply provokes brain skitter. One of the many, many products of that youth is an almost complete lack of food education and a culture of enjoying the plenty we have today - because within living memory there wasn't plenty, but scarcity here.

It's not helped by food producers and importers. Crisps fried in palm oil are the norm here, usually sprinkled liberally with MSG and 'Sunset yellow' - and other egregious dyes. The market leading brand of potato chip is fried in palm oil, a saturated fat. You can't throw a stone without hitting a fast food joint - each worse than the last. These have evolved very nicely to suit local culture and provide fun evening environments for the whole family - which of course gorges itself on processed meats fried in cheap fats (more palm oil!) and then slapped in highly processed buns to be served with processed french fries, flavouring coated onion rings or *shudder* curly marinated potato chips. Let alone the super-sweet sodas, shakes, doughnuts and ice cream sundaes on offer.

And, as anyone who read yesterday's post (or any of my posts passim on the topic of what's in our food) will know, being aware of what you're eating isn't always easy because food producers can be obfuscatory and even mendacious in the way they present foods to us.

The Khaleeji palate is fond of creamy cheeses, fried foods, dry biscuits and sweets. Cake shops sell highly processed confections slathered in artificial colourings and pumped with polyfilla-like artificial creams. And most of the locally sold brands of those dry biscuits are baked using, wait for it, palm oil.

Alongside this, we have a love of cookery and entertainment. The consumption of cooking oil by the average Emirati family is something to be seen to be believed - you can see the trolleys being lugged around Carrefours and the Co-Op. Demijohns of oil, pot noodles and worse things than that lurk in there.

I'm not being holier-than-thou here - I'm not saying anyone else is better. The UK in the 1970s and 80s was a paradise of processed foods, sweeteners and fats. It's not even particularly healthy there in these at least marginally more enlightened days. And the States. Oh, wow, the States. In any case, I'd probably know more about eating habits here than there these days.

But I am being realistic. There's a problem here - and at its heart is the fact the average consumer is totally unaware of what they are eating and there's nobody interested in making them aware because they are making a great deal of money by feeding the appetites of the nation. There are relatively few healthy alternatives - and when people don't know they're paying an insidious price for those burger meals, fried treats and creamy sauces zinging with 'E's, they're hardly going to opt for those 'no fun' healthy choices in any case.

So yes, great step FNC. But someone needs to get serious about letting consumers make more informed choices for themselves and, crucially, for their children.

I, for one, would be only too happy to help...

(PS Yes, I know there are expats who eat unhealthily too.)

(PPS The UAE can take some solace in the fact it isn't the world's fattest nation. Strangely enough that gong doesn't belong to America, but our next door neighbours, Qatar.)

Fancy A Quick Tumble, Chicken?

(Photo credit: @Doug88888)

Tumbling is the process whereby water is added to chicken breasts, typically with the addition of phosphates and hydrolised protein to 'bind' the water into the chicken so it doesn't deflate and become a puddle when you cook it. They also add salt - and then dextrose to re-sweeten the salty mix. I'd recommend a read of this excellent piece in The Guardian, which points out that consumers are paying something like 65p a kilo for water.

In the UK this meat is typically sold frozen in discount or bargain lines. Here in the UAE you can find a similar product as 'frozen' or 'marinated' chicken breast. It's not a marinade I'd choose to consume, I can tell you. These pumped breasts can contain anything up to 50% water. Bargain!

Hydrolised meat protein is extracted from bones, skins and other scraps of cows and, where permissible, pigs. This is accomplished using acid to break the meat down into its component amino acids. When it comes into contact with food, hydrolised protein naturally forms MSG or monosodium glutamate - so that watery chicken breast also packs an (unlabelled!) MSG punch.

So there's horse in your beef and beef in your chicken! Yum!

Of Goats...

(Photo credit: heliotropia)

Our neighbour is in the habit of slaughtering goats outside his villa. He's got a killing tree they hang from as he slits their throats then beheads and skins them. I make no complaint, but it can be a tad disconcerting to be popping down to Spinneys and find your gaze caught by the sight of glistening viscera and a pavement swimming with blood as a man in a shalwar kameez hacks away at furry folds.

They were preparing for a feast the other day, a pile of three beheaded carcases awaiting skinning as another was hoisted up. Must be a big family do or something.

It all rather got me thinking about the whole process. My mum remembers killing the pig from when she was a child, Wales in the 1930s, a big family and community occasion. Sarah remembers animals being slaughtered at home - Ireland in the 1970s was a very rural place indeed. Today, of course, we're too squeamish for that kind of thing in the West. The very sight of slaughter is something we cannot bear. We're far too sophisticated to stop and contemplate the fact our food contains, you know, dead stuff.

Sarah came back from school a couple of years ago with the marvellous news she'd told her class of five year-olds McDonalds were made out of cows. The class wouldn't believe her, a torrent of yews and general sick fascination following. These kids have only ever seen chicken on foam trays. They make no connection between a hen and the supermarket shelves.

Imagine - they mince up dead cows to make McDonalds. Lucky she didn't tell 'em what they put in the chicken nuggets, isn't it?

And strangely, in our rush to be 'humane' and escape the appalling sights of death, pumping blood and warm, fatty flesh I think we've become less human. We talk of humane killing and buy our food wrapped in plastic so we never have to become involved in the messy death of our next meal. By being 'humane' I think we seek to exonerate ourselves from the fact we kill to eat - and survive. And yet my neighbour understands his food, has taken the blood, the responsibility, on his own hands. He's a lot closer to life, through the cycle of death that feeds it, than I am picking my nicely prepared and sanitised meat product in a packet from the chiller in Spinneys.

Mind you, the spectacle of a bloody-handed bloke in a shalwar kameez hefting a big pointy knife in the street plays a lot better in Sharjah than it would in Surbiton...

What's In My Food? Chicken Rib Meat Special!

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I occasionally do a post where I look at the content of some piece of food or other. Today, still reeling from the various horsemeat and food adulteration scandals, we hear that Ikea has recalled batches of chocolate cake from stores in 23 countries after samples were found to contain faecal bacteria. Yummy!

As I pointed out in this here post, we have accepted a dangerous principle here - that they're putting stuff in our food without us knowing what it is. It's a short step from 'improving' a natural product to 'adulterating' it. The industrialised production of food is all very well, but its when the principle of cutting corners becomes enshrined in business' approach to processing, you get horses or poo in your food. Or ground up bones.

One great example of this is chicken 'rib meat'. Take, for instance, the ingredients of a McDonald's Crispy Chicken Fillet:

Crispy Chicken Fillet: Chicken breast fillet with rib meat, water, seasoning [sugar, salt, sodium phosphates, modified tapioca starch, spice, autolyzed yeast extract, carrageenan, natural (vegetable and botanical source) and artificial flavors, maltodextrin, sunflower lecithin, gum arabic]. Battered and breaded with: bleached wheat flour, water, wheat flour, sugar, salt, food starch-modified, yellow corn flour, leavening (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, ammonium bicarbonate), wheat gluten, spices, corn starch, dextrose, xanthan gum, extractives of paprika. CONTAINS: WHEAT. Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent.

Quite apart from containing an awful lot of scary-looking chemicals, the list begs the question, what IS 'rib meat'? You won't get far by Googling it - in fact, you'll get a highly mendacious article titled "What's really in that chicken nugget?' penned by the US National Chicken Council that avers, "Rib meat is simply a natural extension of the breast meat. It is NOT an additive or a filler."

Ah, no. Rib meat is, in fact, MSM - or mechanically separated meat. Also known as 'white slime'. The meat and bone from an already-stripped carcass are pushed through a sieve under high pressure and the resulting bone-enhanced white gloop can be moulded into star shapes or whatever you fancy - dinosaur shapes, from the example photographed above. McDonalds labels its chicken nuggets as containing 'White boneless chicken', which may or may not be another way of saying 'rib meat' which is, of course, another way of saying 'Mechanically Separated Meat' or even, more deliciously, 'meat slurry'.

Interestingly, there would appear to be a regulatory requirement to label MSM as such in ingredients lists, but the regulations aren't global, aren't easy to understand and, obviously from the above example, aren't being adhered to. A certain amount of ground-up bone is permissible in MSM, typically about 3% - and pieces no larger than 0.5mm. That's the US regulation. The EU and other bodies will have their own versions.

And yes, Dimethylpolysiloxane is what it sounds like. They're putting silicone in your food.