'Food Tech,'
not much to chew on
History channel series about how foods are produced
By Tom Conroy
Jan 20, 2010
Back before VCRs and DVDs, schools used to show films with titles like “How Cars Are Made” or “Our Friend Corn.”
While telling us how the product came to our homes, the movies never addressed such dodgy subjects as workers’ wages, product safety, government subsidies or environmental damage.
Attentive students may have noticed that the producers of those films were often the very same people that made those products.
“Food Tech,” a new documentary series about how Americans’ favorite foods are made, could have been produced by agribusiness and the major fast-food chains. Questions about health, artificial ingredients, low pay or the treatment of livestock are ignored or brushed aside.
Still, viewers who prefer not to have any upsetting or unappetizing issues raised when discussing food could enjoy watching the show. The host, Bobby Bognar, is good company, and the show sprinkles fun facts throughout the hour.
In the premiere, airing on the History Channel at 9 p.m. this Thursday, Bognar investigates (to use the term loosely) how the ingredients in a cheeseburger with French fries come together.
At a feedlot, Bognar reports that cattle gain three to four pounds a day eating “superchow,” helped along with injections of hormones, which, he says, leave only traces in the beef we eat.
Bognar says that the beef processing facility that he visits is “immaculate,” thanks to stringent government regulations. How E. coli keeps getting into beef he doesn’t say.
While touring a cheese factory, Bognar never addresses whether the processed American cheese that’s served on most burgers is more or less nutritious than an equivalent slice of cheddar or Swiss, but after tasting the finished product, he gives it a grade of “A-plus, man.” In fact, every finished product he tastes in the first two episodes is delicious.
The actual slaughtering of cattle or, in next week’s episode, ducks, happens off-screen.
Though we see workers performing such unenviable tasks as picking lettuce and shucking oysters, Bognar fails to ask about their wages or job conditions.
The show does provide a fair number of interesting, albeit innocuous, facts. In the second episode, on Chinese takeout food, Bognar says that sailors used to grow bean sprouts on long voyages to fight scurvy.
And some of the industrial food-making machinery is cool, whether it’s a conveyor belt carrying a bedsheet-size piece of cheese, a ramp that tests ketchup for viscosity or the device that inserts the paper into fortune cookies.
But in an era where people are increasingly concerned about where their food comes from and what its impact is on the environment and the community, this series’ choice to skirt controversy is jarring.
Viewers will probably finish an episode hungry for some real reporting.
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