Even
if its neon orange shines a little less bright, it's still junk.
Kraft made news the other day with this announcement: Beginning next year, its macaroni and cheese
will no longer contain artificial preservatives or colors.
That’s nice.
One of the favorite foods of American kids will more closely
resemble something that actually comes from the earth, instead of something
scientists concocted in a lab.
Maybe Kraft is making this move because it’s losing market share to organic products — although the
company still sells half-a-billion dollars worth of the stuff annually.
As it turns out, the famous nuclear-orange color of Kraft’s mac
and cheese can be obtained from natural ingredients like turmeric, annatto, and
paprika — instead of artificial food dye.
Its nutritional problem comes from the other ingredients: the
macaroni, and the cheese.
With or without preservatives, Kraft’s mac and cheese is just refined carbs coated in a dairy-based sauce, which may or may not qualify as cheese.
Singling out Kraft isn’t fair. A large number of foods in any
grocery store are made from refined wheat flour.
What does that mean? To understand it, consider the three main
parts of a grain of wheat: the bran, the germ, and the endosperm. The bran and
the germ are where the nutrition is: fiber, vitamins, minerals, and
antioxidants.
The endosperm is mostly just carbs. It’s also what we make
most flour out of. It’s where white bread comes from. And macaroni.
In effect, we take the two most nutritious parts out of the
wheat and then eat the rest. By contrast, whole wheat products include — you
guessed it — the whole wheat grain, withall the nutrients.
Then there’s the cheese, if you can call it that.
Cheese is typically made from a combination of milk and/or cream
with cultures and a curdling agent. Milk contains two types of proteins — whey
and casein. When you make cheese, you want the casein to trap the fat in the
solid cheese. The whey drains off as a watery liquid.
So what’s in Kraft Mac & Cheese? Whey, milkfat, and milk protein
concentrate.
Well, at least the milkfat’s supposed to be there.
Where’s the casein? It’s hidden in the milk protein concentrate.
That mysterious substance is essentially a cheap imported product made by filtering out the liquid
and most of the nutritious minerals from milk, leaving behind a powder that’s
mostly protein.
Thus, Kraft’s recipe for “cheese” makes for a cheap product
that’s high in protein (nine grams per serving), low in fat (three grams per
serving), and less healthy than actual cheese.
So even if its neon orange shines a little less bright, it’s
still junk.
OtherWords
columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our
Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. OtherWords.org.