News

If modern life is complicated, then deconstructing dinner is even more so. A mere Twinkie contains 39 ingredients. There are 18,000 products (many of them artificial) sitting on our grocery shelves. And the food industry has armies of lab coats to analyze ingredients and create mysterious new foodstuffs, all in the interest of feeding our insatiable hunger for novelty.

To make sense of the food we eat, we must turn to academics in the burgeoning field of food science to analyze the origins of ingredients and try to keep food producers accountable.

Enter Massimo Marcone, an academic food scientist at the University of Guelph who is helping bring the discipline to the mainstream.

Dr. Marcone's memoir, In Bad Taste?: The Science and Adventures Behind Food Delicacies, published this spring, chronicles his travels from Malaysia to Africa to uncover the origins of seven bizarre delicacies.

"I want people to see the science in ordinary things," he explains.

For Dr. Marcone, his work is all about stories.

"So many foods from the supermarket have lost their story from gate to plate," he says. As we lose sight of an ingredient's origin, the need for scrutiny becomes even greater.

"Marcone helps people understand that science is very much a human adventure," says Nobel laureate Dr. Dudley Herschbach, a professor of chemistry at Harvard.

As an adjunct professor in the university's food science department, Dr. Marcone holds an unusual position; he has never had to seek tenure or to cultivate a narrow specialty like most of his colleagues. Instead, he is able to work independently on whatever projects happen to pique his interest.

His lab resembles a CSI set. In it, he fingerprints proteins and searches for missing chemical components with gas and liquid chromatographers.

He has made a number of surprising discoveries: almost half of the coffee beans being passed off as the rare Kopi Luwak variety were either fake or mixed with regular beans; bags of mushrooms that contain half-morels (which can make you sick); and hundreds of ingredients either missing or not properly labelled.

"The average Canadian eats over a pound of insects a year," he exclaims. Few people realize that less than 1 per cent of grocery products are actually tested for safety, he says, or that lax government regulations allow for 20 per cent deviation in nutritional labelling. Even so, Dr. Marcone's lab has uncovered hundreds of violations of nutritional labelling standards.

About five years ago, a producer from the Discovery Channel asked Dr. Marcone to analyze a batch of Kopi Luwak coffee, which sells for $600 a pound. She explained the putative origins of its unique, chocolatey flavour - passage through the intestinal tract of the palm civet, a small, cat-like creature that lives in Indonesia's rain forests.

Dr. Marcone couldn't believe his ears, thinking it "an abomination of the first order" that such a product would be fit for consumption.

Nevertheless, he agreed to analyze the beans for bacteria. To his surprise, despite the fact they'd passed through a cat's intestines, they turned out to host fewer bacteria than his control samples did.

The revelation turned his world upside down. So he hopped on a plane to Indonesia, donned a pith helmet and decided to collect his own civet scat. Further study, he decided, could enable scientists to mimic the chemical breakdown of the beans as they passed through the civet's gastrointestinal tract and allow producers to manufacture the rare coffee bean on a wider scale.

"Since then, he's become the world's foremost authority on Kopi Luwak," says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World. "He's very much a scientist. He can fingerprint the coffee and tell you if it's fake."

That adventure led to many others, which Dr. Marcone chronicles in his book, an oddball memoir published by Key Porter in May. Never having camped, he found himself sleeping in dung huts in Africa. He visited remote caves in Malaysia to gather edible birds nests, a delicacy made from the saliva of the swiftlet swallow. Within a few years, he had earned the nickname "Indiana Jones of the food world."

For Dr. Marcone, analyzing a rare Asian delicacy or the nutritional content of a doughnut is all the same. He sees himself as a consumer advocate.

In the world of food science, progress is a double-edged sword: White-coated experts are creating more and more complicated recipes in the lab, while scientists such as Dr. Marcone work harder to crack the codes and keep the food chain honest.

These days, it seems, it takes a PhD to tell you what's on the table.

*****

Try it. I dare you

Massimo Marcone's travels have taken him to strange places where he's eaten even stranger foods. Here's a sampling:

Kopi Luwak coffee

Provenance Indonesian rainforest

How it's made Palm civets digest the coffee beans, which are then collected from their scat

What it tastes like "The top note (as it is called) was that of dark chocolate, and two secondary notes described as earthy and musty soon followed."

Argan oil

Provenance Morocco

How it's made Wild goats climb argan trees and eat the nuts, which are later collected from their scat and pressed into oil

What it tastes like "Very delicate and light in flavour, with a unique aroma."

Bird's nest soup

Provenance Malaysia and Indonesia

How it's made Swiftlet swallows spin the nests out of saliva

What it tastes like "The strands in the soup tasted much like the 'beads' in tapioca pudding."

Casu Frazigu

(maggot-infested cheese)

Provenance Sardinia and Abruzzo

How it's made Fly larvae excrete their digestive enzymes throughout an illegal sheep's-milk cheese

What it tastes like "This [the enzymes] gave the cheese a creamy texture, similar to the common Camembert."

Escamoles (the pupae

of a dark red ant)

Provenance Mexico

How it's made The pupae are harvested from ant nests

What it tastes like "The texture was very interesting indeed - a little like a multitude of hard-boiled eggs."

Sasha Chapman