they wanted. In In Defense of Food, journalist Michael
Pollan writes:
The regulatory door was thrown open to all manner of
faked low-fat products: Fats in things like sour cream
and yogurt could now be replaced with hydrogenated
oils or guar gum or carrageenan, bacon bits could be
replaced with soy protein, the cream in “whipped
cream” and “coffee creamer” could be replaced with
corn starch, and the yolks of liquefied eggs could be
replaced with, well, whatever the food scientists could
dream up, because the sky was now the limit. As long
as the new fake foods were engineered to be
nutritionally equivalent to the real article, they could no
longer be considered fake.Suddenly, the Frankenfood floodgates were open and
the food supply was awash in fake products. It was like the
breaking of the portal to hell in the 1987 movie The Gate,
but instead of an onslaught of ghoulish creatures, they were
the processed doppelgängers of real foods, now
accompanied by a low-fat or fat-free halo.
One of the more absurd products of the flock came out
in the late nineties: potato chips that had been formulated
with the molecule olestra. It was a dream come true—a lab-
created fat substitute that miraculously slid through your
digestive tract unabsorbed. The only downside? The
cramps, bloating, and “anal leakage” that created the
equivalent of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in unsuspecting
underpants everywhere.