Instant soup: Ummm ... Ummm ... not so good

If there is one group of professionals I like more than university academics, it’s investigative journalists. These people generally have incredible energy, critical thinking skills, and a strong sense of social justice (an essential mix to do this kind of work). Not all are good eggs but most do their muckraking with the fairest and bravest intentions (when they’re not threatened by political regimes).

One of my favorites is food science writer, Michael Pollan. Some of you may be familiar with his well-known bestseller The Omnivore’s Dilemma.

Pollan is a longtime writer for the New York Times and author of several other fascinating books about the culture of food: manufacturing practices, animals, grains, and plants we eat, or don’t.

I would pay graciously to be one of his disciples (he teaches journalism at Berkeley).

Pollan’s sequel, In Defense of Food, resonates deeply -- his themes have familiar roots. Essentially, I grew up hearing similar bells of food and health wisdom from my parents and their parents.

For example, we never had soda pop in our household. The stuff was considered poisonous -- especially for children. This was simply a liquid toxicant that offered no nutritional value whatsoever and in fact, led to all risk and no health benefit.

Convincing my mother to buy Pop-Tarts back in the early ’80s required painstaking manipulation. Forget frosted Pop-Tarts. No amount of childhood begging would result in ever seeing those breakfast cakes in our kitchen cabinets.

There were foods I wanted because I saw other kids eating them. But my parents remained steadfast in their ‘real food’ religiosity and I am grateful for that as an adult.

I could go on about the stories but in sum, pleasurable but quality food was my father’s virtue; healthy and whole foods were my mother’s. I didn’t learn these virtues myself by modeling their behavior alone. Both parents actually spent the time explaining them so I could grow up being more than a passive eater. (Unfortunately, none of us knew I had celiac disease.)

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Now, some of you may argue that all food is real food -- or else it wouldn’t be sold in grocery stores. It wouldn’t be edible.

I can assure you this isn’t so.

Real food contains ‘life food enzymes.’ It hasn’t been chemically manipulated or laced with fertilizers and pesticides, or genetically modified. Real food usually doesn’t come in a package and if it does, as Pollan states, it typically has fewer than five ingredients. And finding anything with fewer than five ingredients is just about as rare as such a thing as a nutritious Pop-Tart.

I’ll use tomato soup to illustrate the point.

Several years ago I had a young ostentatious work colleague, a nutritionist who routinely drank (yes, drank) what had been Campbell’s new “soup at hand” -- pre-cooked tomato soup sold in a hard plastic container, shaped to grip and drink after heating in a microwave.

It’s funny that the most vivid memory I have of her was of the plastic sippy-cups of soup, always sitting on her desk. One time I asked, “Is that all you’re having for lunch?”

It was all she ever had for lunch. I was amazed because she was an athlete -- a runner and an avid cyclist. I couldn’t understand how she had the energy to perform subsisting on this red goop.

Now back to the present. The other day I found myself in the grocery section of a Target store where stacks of Campbell’s soup piled pyramid style near the cashier lines. It brought back memories of my former colleague and peaked my ‘Pollanesque’ curiosity of its contents.

Was this real food?

Stomach this while I go through the list of ingredients:

Tomato puree, water, high fructose corn syrup, wheat flour, vegetable oil (corn, cottonseed, canola, soybean and/or partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed), sweet cream buttermilk powder, modified food starch, salt, whey protein concentrate, dairy base (partially hydrogenated canola oil, corn syrup solids, sodium caseinate [milk], mono and diglycerides, dipotassium phosphate), flavoring, ascorbic acid (added to help retain color), citric acid, spice, butter (milk), cream powder, lipolyzed butter oil, enzyme modified butter, nonfat dry milk, oleic acid, butter flavor (enzyme modified butter, acetic acid), lactid acid, butter oil.

I don’t know when this container actually arrived from Camden, NJ to the Target store in St. Paul, MN, but the chemical mixture doesn’t expire until September 30, 2010. My former coworker would have a little less than a year to eat these 23 plus ingredients.

Now, stomach the list of ingredients of this tomato soup recipe:

Tomatoes, vegetable broth, celery, onion, garlic, spices.

I don’t know about you, but I have a much better understanding of what’s in the second recipe than the first, and probably, I’ll metabolize the second batch of soup more naturally than the first.

On another note, I could probably bring the Campbell’s plastic container to the university and ask the toxicology department to tell me what kinds of chemicals are emitted into the soup goop during the microwave process. And from here, I could add to the list of ingredients that my colleague had been eating.

So even the most educated nutritionists may fail to fully recognize the difference between real and processed foods. Incidentally, my coworker left our department after several short months -- a full scholarship to get her PhD in food science.

I wonder if she’s still drinking tomato “soup.”