Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (44 page)

As company officials explained to me, the salt that they sell to food manufacturers is no ordinary salt. In the processing plants that Cargill owns, this rock is transformed into a vast array of shapes and designs. Cargill’s salt is smashed, ground, pulverized, flaked, and reshaped in hundreds of ways, all with one goal in mind: to maximize its power in food. Cargill currently sells forty different types of processed salt, from a fine powder to large granules, and every one of them is engineered to provide the biggest bang for the buck—or, perhaps more accurately, the biggest bang for the penny. Even the high-tech salts engineered by Cargill cost a mere
ten cents per pound, which is so cheap in the grand scheme of things that some food manufacturers have to pay more money just to get clean water into their factories.

There is nothing cheap about Cargill’s salt beyond the price, however. Its salts are finely tuned bliss machines. When the popcorn-makers come to Cargill for help, they get a flake that is specially designed to cling to every nook and cranny of this odd-shaped snack—the better to lash the taste buds, instantaneously, with a direct hit of salt. When processed meat and cheese companies come calling, Cargill has a salt that has been pulverized into a texture-less, fine powder, which makes for easier assimilation by our bodies and brains. Dry soup, cereal, flour, and snack manufacturers, when they knock on Cargill’s door, are more keen on certain sea salt
varieties, which contain additives that keep the salt from caking. “Our extensive portfolio of salts can help you delight your consumers,” as Cargill says in its sales literature.

My own personal favorite is the kosher salt I often use at home to perk up everything from steamed broccoli to a roast leg of lamb.
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Cargill makes this salt in St. Clair, Michigan, and sells it to food manufacturers and home cooks alike under the Diamond Crystal brand. When poured out of the 3-pound box, it looks like innocent flakes of snow, but in fact this salt is of cunning and intricate design. Its magnetism begins with the feel: Cooks like to pour it into their hand and then pinch the crystals between their fingers as they add it to food. In 2009, Cargill hired celebrity chef Alton Brown as its spokesman for Diamond Crystal, and in the videos he made for the company, he enthuses profusely about sprinkling this salt on all manner of foods, even chocolate cookies, fruit, and ice cream.
“Salt!” he says. “It’s the finest compound to ever grace our palate.”

It’s what happens after the sprinkling, however, that gives this kosher salt its greatest power in food. Produced through an evaporation technique called the Alberger process, the crystals are quadrilateral pyramids, with flat sides that adhere better to food. On top of that, the pyramids are hollowed out, as a cup is, enabling the salt to have the maximum possible contact with the mouth’s saliva. Lastly, the salt’s unique shape enables it to dissolve three times faster than normal salt. Which, in turn, means that it races to the brain with faster, bigger jolts of salty flavor.

Cargill calls this the “flavor burst” in promoting the kosher salt to food manufacturers, who, of course, are not using these crystals sparingly. The kosher variety is sold by the truckload to food companies, in 80-pound bags stacked thirty to a pallet, and comes in the usual range of grades to meet the industry’s needs: “Flake” for cheese and cured meats, “Special Flake” for crackers and breadsticks, “Fine Flake Improved” for icings and soups, and “Shur-Flo Fine Flour Salt” with three additives—sodium ferrocyanide,
sodium silicoaluminate, and glycerin—to ensure constant flow and prevent factory dust.

The flavor that salt imparts to food is just one of the attributes that manufacturers rely on. For them, salt is nothing less than a miracle worker in processed foods. It makes sugar taste sweeter. It adds crunch to crackers and frozen waffles. It delays spoilage so that the products can sit longer on the shelf. And, just as importantly, it masks the otherwise bitter or dull taste that hounds so many processed foods before salt is added.

Given the many ways that salt facilitates the making of processed food, it is fitting that Cargill became the industry’s leading supplier. In all of its operations, the company prides itself not only on the goods that it sells but also on the service it provides. Being the industry’s friend in need helped make Cargill one the richest companies in the world, with salt a small part of its scope.
Its revenue climbed 12 percent in 2012, to $133.9 billion, with profits of nearly $1.2 billion.

If you’re tempted to rush out and buy some of the company’s stock, don’t bother. There isn’t any to be had. Cargill is privately held, controlled for the most part by the one hundred descendants of the man who founded the company in 1865, William Wallace Cargill. The son of a Scottish sea captain, he started with a single warehouse for grain in Conover, Iowa, strategically placed at the end of the McGregor & Western Railroad line. To this day, Cargill doesn’t farm. It doesn’t even own any land. Cargill makes its money by being of exquisite utility to the agricultural industry. It supplies farmers with everything they need to make a profit, from chemical fertilizers to Wall Street swap options that hedge their financial risk. It moves the grain and the sugar beets that farmers grow around the world faster and more efficiently than anyone else. Indeed, Cargill isn’t just a cog in the global food chain. With grain silos in far-flung locales like Romania, shipping terminals in big sugar producers like Brazil, 140,000 employees in sixty-five countries, and
350 chartered cargo vessels calling on 6,000 ports, Cargill
is
the global food chain.

Above all, the company has a $50 billion trade in food ingredients that
makes it extremely likely that whatever you eat or drink today, it will contain something from Cargill. Cargill mills flour for baking, makes malt for brewing, dries corn for cereals and snacks, extracts chocolate from cocoa beans. But most importantly for its customers, Cargill supplies all three pillars of processed food: salt, sugar, and fat. Each day, it produces roughly
4.8 million pounds of food-grade salt alone. As with salt, it fashions its sugar and fat into dozens of formulations that are crafted and honed to meet the industry’s precise needs. It has oils and shortenings for frying, icing and whipping; corn syrups for sodas; and five configurations of beet and cane sugars for powdered drinks, candy, condiments, cereal, meats, dairy, and baked goods.

Because of its massive status in the business, Cargill also has the smarts to move urgently—and offer solutions—when concerns about health causes trouble for their customers. In recent years, it introduced Truvia, a zero-calorie sweetener made from leaves of the stevia shrub grown in Latin America; Clear Valley Omega-3 Oil, an unsaturated fat that has been touted for its healthy heart benefits; and Barlív, a fiber made from barley to reduce cholesterol—or as the name would imply, to extend your life.

In 2005, when salt came under fire from regulators and consumer activists, causing food manufacturers to cringe, Cargill was there with one of its most clever solutions yet.

S
alt has been a significant part of Cargill’s profit stream since 1955, when one of its managers had
a clever idea. For many years, the company’s barges had been carrying grain down the Mississippi River from the Midwest to New Orleans for shipping overseas and returning empty, to pick up another load. Instead of sending the barges back up the river empty, he suggested, what if they were filled with salt from a vast salt mine in southern Louisiana and then sold at a profit back in the Midwest. Today, with
several salt-making facilities, Cargill turns out 1.7
billion
pounds of the stuff each year for use in food.
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When Cargill first started peddling salt, its sales crews would regale their customers with stories about those first barge trips and the mineral’s rich history. They stressed its rarity and value. The raw rock, they would explain, is mined at depths of between 650 and 2,500 feet below the surface of the earth in one of two ways: It is either dug out with machines, or water is pumped into the mine to turn the salt into a brine that is then extracted and left to dry. The other way salt is produced is from seawater, which is pooled into shallow ponds and allowed to lie around until evaporation leaves only the salt behind. Lest anyone grumble about the company’s prices, it was helpful for the Cargill sales crews to point out that salt was once so precious that it precipitated wars and in turn became a target in wars, as it did in our own country’s civil war.
The Union deployed 471 ships and 2,455 guns to stop the 350 tons of salt that had been arriving at New Orleans every day on British ships, and whenever they could, the Union soldiers seized or destroyed salt mines throughout the South. At the time, salt was critical not only for preserving meat; it was also used to disinfect the wounds of the injured. In fact, American history is steeped in salt: The Jamestown colonists made their own salt in 1614 when they got tired of buying it from Britain, setting up wooden evaporation ponds on Smith Island. There was even a time when people, for instance Roman soldiers, were paid their wages in salt. Hence the word
salary
, a derivative of salt.

Starting in 2005, Cargill saw the need to edit its sales pitch. That was the year the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines advisory committee first set a maximum limit for sodium of 2,300 milligrams a day in their nutrition recommendations. The limit was particularly onerous for young men, who were averaging twice that sum, approximately two teaspoons a day. But the stakes were high for everybody, the panel said. If people could
go only part of the way in reaching the 2,300 goal, by reducing their intake of salt by even half a teaspoon a day,
this alone would prevent 92,000 heart attacks, 59,000 strokes, and 81,000 deaths, saving the country $20 billion in health care and other costs.

While some scientists quibbled with these numbers, Cargill began telling its customers that it accepted the basic premise that too much salt was bad for you. One Cargill official who regularly makes presentations to the company’s customers, Kristen Dammann, took me through her current deck of PowerPoint slides, saying,
“Excessive intake has been linked to high blood pressure, and high blood pressure is a risk factor for heart disease. So the idea is that reducing sodium can reduce the risk for hypertension and the risk for heart disease.”

As if this wasn’t enough—having salt linked to heart attacks by the biggest
seller
of salt—Cargill had more bad news for its food industry customers. In England, government authorities were not just setting vague overall limits on sodium or dithering around with the saltshaker, like the American authorities did back in the 1980s.
The British knew well that most of the salt in everyone’s diet came from the food industry, so starting in 2003, the Food Standards Agency in London developed a scheme to hold the manufacturers accountable. It set targets for how much sodium they could add to their products—crafting limits for dozens of foods, from bread to cookies to frozen meals. The system was voluntary, but the authorities pressed the industry to meet these targets, and, for companies who were used to heaping as much salt into their products as they wanted, the details were alarming. Soups had to lose 30 percent of their salt, breads 16 percent, meats 10 percent, and so on.

Many of these foods were being made by companies based in the United States, where consumer advocates were turning up the pressure on salt. In 2005, the Center for Science in the Public Interest came out with a damning report entitled “Salt: The Forgotten Killer … and FDA’s Failure to Protect the Public’s Health.” The consumer group had been skeptical when the FDA in 1983 asked manufacturers—in gentle tones—to go easy on the salt. So starting that year, the group began tracking 100 brand-name
products, such as Campbell’s soups and Kraft’s Lunchables, and it found little change in their salt loads. From 1983 to 2003, the salt levels dipped by 5 percent, but since 1993—in the absence of any attention from Washington—these products had actually become
saltier
, gaining 6 percent by 2003. “Despite pleas from government and other health experts over the last quarter century to reduce salt consumption, Americans are consuming more—not less—salt,” the report said. “Thousands of packaged foods provide one-fourth or more of a day’s maximum recommended intake.”

All in all, the food industry was facing trouble with salt that made the public’s addiction look mild. Consumers might find themselves acting like some hapless junkie when they first try to cut back on their consumption of salt, but at least we know that they, in time, can get their taste buds back to normal and that these cravings will, in turn, subside. What companies face, on the other hand, is a much harsher mistress. The mere suggestion that they might cut back on salt causes them to panic, and it is not the saltshaker they reach for. They lunge for the salt that arrives at their factories in fifty- and eighty-pound sacks, piled to the ceiling on wooden pallets.

Without salt, processed food companies cease to exist.

Which is where Cargill comes in, with the full force of its service-oriented mission. It hired some smart research scientists, bought them a $750,000 scanning electron microscope and other sophisticated equipment, and put them to work finding ways to reduce the industry’s dependence on sodium. To see the fruits of their efforts firsthand, I left the company’s office complex where cubicle workers sell salt and visited a nearby facility where the focal point was a large, industrial kitchen, its windows heavily shuttered to keep industrial spies at bay. In the ovens here, one of Cargill’s technicians, Jody Mattsen, had baked me some loaves of white bread. She had them sliced and placed on trays for us to taste.

“A lot of people would say, ‘Hey, let’s just take the salt out,’ ” she said. “You know, that’s contributing the sodium, so let’s just take it out. So here is an example on that end of the spectrum.” She offered me a slice. “Basically, this is a bread with no salt added.”

We ate. We gagged. The bread tasted like tin. Without salt, it didn’t even look like the puffy, light bread you buy in the grocery store. It was riddled with big air pockets and had a rough texture, and the loaf’s normally burnished brown crust had faded to a wan, sickly tan.