A pastry cook in dazzling whites finished off his online presentation by offering sample petits fours to the purchasers that had gathered. His pretty heart- and diamond-shaped cakes were dead ringers for those fresh layers of sponge, shiny fruit jelly, cream, and also delicious chocolate you see in the windows of upmarket patisseries, yet were made totally without eggs, butter or lotion, thanks to the alternative of potato protein isolate.
Exhibitors' stands were arranged like art setups. Dazzling glass shelves were back-lit to show off a rainbow of super-sized vials of fluids so bright with coloring, they could be neon. Plates of various powders, shaped right into pyramids, were piled on classy Perspex stands bearing enigmatic tags-- "texturized healthy soy protein.
The full-service profile of the firms displaying at Food Contents was perplexing. Omya, based in Hamburg, explained itself as "a leading global chemical distributor as well as manufacturer of industrial minerals," supplying markets in food, pet dog food, oleo chemicals, cosmetics, cleaning agents, cleansers, papers, adhesives, construction, plastics, and commercial chemicals.
For huge companies such as this, food processing is just one more profit stream. They experience no cognitive dissonance in supplying parts not only for your meal, yet likewise for your fly spray, scratch-resistant car coating, paint, or adhesive.
The meeting was the domain name of people whose native environment is the laboratory and also the manufacturing facility, not the kitchen area, the farm or the field; people that share the presumption that everything nature can do, man can do a lot better, and also a lot more successfully.
Exhausted after hours of walking around the reasonable, and also, uncharacteristically, not feeling hungry, I sought refuge at a stand presenting cut-up vegetables and fruits; it felt good to see something all-natural, something promptly well-known as food. But why did the fruit have days, many weeks past, beside them?