Off The Shelf #36: Krispy Bad Dreme

Are you a doughnut junkie?

TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) version:

• Krispy Kremes and other highly processed treats might appear to taste good, but wait till you see what goes into them.

• Highly processed foods are designed by big manufacturers to keep us coming back, and we’re locked into a junk food cycle.

• The system makes it hard for consumers to change their habits, and companies have no incentive to change. So should governments intervene?

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Back onto my pesky old sugar addiction again.

The food website Delish has a basic home doughnut recipe which contains 9 ingredients. They’re hardly health foods, but at least we can recognise them: milk, caster sugar, icing sugar, yeast, flower, salt, butter, vanilla extract, vegetable oil.

Sounds good. But let’s face it: making doughnuts at home is a faff. You need a deep fryer and a thermometer. It’ll probably go horribly wrong, and won’t taste as good as the ‘real thing’. Much better to get a dozen Krispy Kremes, the universal currency of goodwill, sure to please the office floor on your birthday. Until recently, I thought nothing of happily piling into these glazed rings of indulgence. The sugar rush does feel a bit weird, with a slightly unpleasant comedown a few minutes later, but whatever.

Then, a few weeks ago, I was stunned when I caught a glimpse (on the box of special edition Krispy Kremes) of what goes into these treats. According to the KK website, ‘for over 80 years, customers have been enjoying Krispy Kreme doughnuts made from premium ingredients… we are proud to make our doughnuts fresh daily.’

Well, the basic Krispy Kreme glazed ring doughnut contains 23 unique ingredients.

I had to wade through a 70+ page pdf to learn this. They don’t publish the ingredients at the point of sale, instead pointing you to the ‘nutrition’ pamphlet on their website. Among the ‘premium ingredients’ are calcium phosphates, carboxymethyl cellulose, ascorbic acid, amylase, mono and diglycerides of fatty acids. Palm oil too. There’s a bit of flour thrown in somewhere.

That’s just the original basic glazed offering. Don’t even start me on Strawberries and Kreme or Berry Burst.

How about a rule of thumb: if something sounds more like a chemical than food, don’t eat it. Maybe bicarbonate of soda is ok.

28% of Britons are obese, and the NHS spends £6 billion per year dealing with diet-related illness. Our food system is geared towards ultra highly-processed foods. You only have to stop at a motorway service station to see how difficult it can be in some places to find healthy, fresh food. For more insight on just how crazy our food system is, check out Henry Dimbleby’s recent book Ravenous.

In the book, Dimbleby points out that big food manufacturers spend a staggering amount of money on scientific research designed to make us eat more of their products, looking for ways to bypass our feelings of ‘fullness’ and to artificially engineer the way foods look, feel and taste. Ingredient lists like the one above are the result. And we become addicted to them, in turn maximising these companies’ profits. It’s a cycle: our consumption encourages more production, driving consumption up further as these products become the default option on the shelves.

These products, known as HFSS - high in fat, sugar and salt - are everywhere, and human health, which depends on a balanced diet of whole foods, doesn’t come into the equation. What’s worse is that HFSS foods are particularly abundant in less affluent areas, leading to severe health inequality.

Who needs to fix this mess?

🛒 Is it all down to us as consumers to just exercise our willpower and vote with our wallets? With the system built the way it is, and the economics of processed food the way they are, there are real obstacles here. The difficult fact is that, for people on poorer incomes especially, it’s cheaper to buy this stuff.

🏭 Should producers and retailers overhaul their processes and just start selling healthier products through some moral imperative? Some already do, but again, it comes back to economics.

🏛 Which leads us to the role of policymakers. Should governments intervene and regulate this market through bans and taxation? This would seem the most effective option, but it’s a brave minister who’d be happy to endure the cries of ‘nanny state’. As I wrote last year, a planned ban on junk food advertising was cancelled by the government. Dimbleby, who wrote a comprehensive set of recommendations for tackling the obesity crisis, thinks there should be a tax on sugar and salt in HFSS processed foods - and shows that there is widespread support for these kinds of policies among the public. Yet the media and some politicans still regularly fall back on the nanny state defence, which means regulation is tough to get through.

What would you do to break the junk food cycle?

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A public service announcement

It’s been a year since I hatched the plan to bombard your inboxes with sustainable food-related news and views. The feedback I’ve received from you all has been fantastic and your support has meant a huge amount.

I’ve learnt loads about the global food system over the past year, including some things that I didn’t expect: just how much food waste contributes to carbon emissions, for example. Or the idea that local isn’t always more sustainable. And I can’t quite look at certain chocolate brands the same way again, given what we learned about exploitation in the cocoa industry.

So it’s been quite a ride. Late last year, a couple of acquaintances remarked that they had no idea how I was keeping up a weekly schedule, given that this is a hobby and I have a full-time job. Well, to be honest (and as many of you have noticed) they were onto something. Because as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. Toward the end of last year, with my workload increasing and my family circumstances changing, I ended up taking a couple of breaks because I could feel myself burning out. My consistency has suffered ever since.

So I’m going to slow the pace for a bit, commit to a monthly (or 4-weekly) publishing schedule instead of weekly. I’m sure you won’t mind. My life has changed alot in the last few months, and while I’m on an extended period of paternity leave, my priority is my family, and I also have a few other projects I want to dedicate some time to. Watch this space.

Thanks again for your support; if you’ve managed to read down this far and I’ve tugged at your heartstrings, go on: subscribe for free, and/or recommend me to a friend. Let’s keep the subscriber list growing. Also, if you have any ideas for things you’d like me to cover, I’d love to hear them.

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HOW CAN WE STAY IN TOUCH?

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