By Peter Gellert
MEXICO CITY — On a busy, crowded street here, among thousands of US products offered by ambitious street vendors, one finds dietetic chocolate fudge soda. In case you're wondering how something that contains chocolate fudge can be dietetic, the answer is easy. This soft drink contains no chocolate fudge, nor anything else for that matter. It's 100% artificial, with added imitation chocolate flavour and aroma.
The food industry is highly internationalised. Some food processors, such as Heinz, International Multifoods and Coca-Cola, obtain more than 50% of their sales and profits abroad. Control and economic power in this sector are increasingly concentrated and centralised as well.
The growth of investment in the food processing industry in Latin America, particularly Mexico, began in the 1960s. Conditions in both the United States and Mexico established the basis for this expansion.
In the United States the domestic market was almost saturated. Companies could increase sales with new, high-tech, slick sales campaigns to sell more junk food and precooked food inside the country or could seek to develop new markets abroad. The multinationals chose both options.
Latin America was a very attractive market. Between 1960 and 1975, 80% of multinational food industry investment in developing countries was channelled into Latin America. The bulk of this growth was in reprocessed and junk food, which had shown so much success in the United States.
Thus a complex food industry has grown up and with it an extraordinary and increasing number of preservatives and food additives which seek to improve characteristics such as colour, flavour, aroma and texture.
The list of highly processed foods, low in nutritional value and high in price, is almost limitless: candy, gum, flavourings, cheeses, gelatine deserts, pizza mixes, potato chips, bottled soft drinks, breakfast cereals.
Many of these foods are much more expensive than locally produced products — and even more expensive than in the United States. For example, chips and a Coke at McDonald's in Mexico costs three times the price of a more balanced, nutritious meal in a local restaurant. A small packet of the cheapest brand of potato chips costs more than three litres of milk. For many Mexican workers, two packets of potato chips cost the equivalent of a day's wages.
Medical specialists, such as Dr Mario Rojas of Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos, are concerned about the effect of such foods, which provide calories instead of protein. For tens of millions of poverty-stricken Latin American consumers, especially children, each peso spent on these products contributes to the deterioration of the daily diet.
In the case of potato chips, the use of vegetable oil adds fats and cholesterol to the product. Slicing the potatoes causes considerable nutritional value to be lost.
Corn flakes, according to consumer groups, contain a considerable amount of sugar and have little nutritional value. The corn, which contain protein, is over-processed, steam cooked at high temperatures, subject to 75 tons of pressure and is then toasted.
By the time the process is complete, Vitamin A and B have been eliminated. Although the multinationals claim their products are fortified with synthetic nutrients, doctors such as David Contreras Duran, a specialist for the Mexican health system, say that the main value of the product is the calories it offers or the milk that is poured over it.
Powdered Kool-Aid, a big favourite in Latin America, has so much artificial colour that it can be used in painting. Its colour lasts 10 years.
A bottled apple-flavoured soft drink, very common in Mexico, contains water, artificial flavour and preservatives, stabilisers, sweetening agents and synthetic colour. The only thing absent is apple.
Coca-Cola, which is often given to Latin American infants in baby bottles, produces addiction, and not because of the microscopic amount of coca it supposedly contains. A single glass of Coca-Cola contains five spoonfuls of sugar; a family-size bottle contains 17.5 spoonfuls.
When one drinks Coca-Cola, the pancreas sends insulin into the bloodstream to respond to this sugar assault, which results in a tremendous drop in the glucose level in the blood, which in turn produces a greater desire for sugar. No-one would dream of putting five spoonfuls of sugar in a cup of coffee, but how many soft drinks are consumed daily in Latin America?
In the United States there is a new and generalised consciousness about the negative effects of junk food. More than a decade of work by consumer groups has awakened tens of millions of North Americans to the danger of such products.
Apart from changes in many people's basic eating habits, laws have been adopted to limit the effects of negative practices by
multinational food corporations, impose strict sanitary controls and force detailed labelling.
In addition, institutions have been created and studies undertaken to determine the possible risks of these products. In Latin America, such practices are still few and far between. While health food stores dot the region, a consumer rights movement such as is known in industrialised countries does not really exist.
Take the case of monosodium glutamate, sold in Latin America under the name Ajinmoto. It is used to intensify the flavour of meat, soups and food high in protein, stimulating the activity of the salivary glands. It is an important part of artificial flavourers and powdered and canned soups. It has been proved that monosodium glutamate has carcinogenic effects in laboratory animals. However, the product is readily available and commonly used in Latin America, to the tune of 20,000 tons per year.
While industrialised countries have tried to exercise control over and limit the use of chemical additives, developing countries have been bombarded by the junk food industry, which seeks to maintain and extend the number of consumers.
In Mexico, more than 30 billion bottles of soft drink are consumed each year — more than three times the figure for milk consumption, and much more than in the United States itself, despite differences in population and personal income between the two countries.
According to the Mexican medical journal Medicina y Cultura, Mexico is world leader in soft drink consumption. Thanks to multimillion dollar advertising campaigns, the vast majority of the population has come to accept soft drinks as an integral part of their daily diet.
Foreign brands control 75% of this market. Coca-Cola, together with its subsidiaries, controls 42% of soft drink sales in Mexico.
In the last year, this situation has dramatically worsened. New, large plastic disposable containers tend to increase consumption. Fancy, slick packaging makes people, particularly adolescents, want to buy the product just for its appeal. The growth of foreign fast-food chains is an additional factor which increases sales of soft drinks and junk food.
Although most of these products are aimed at the urban market and the middle class, others such as chewing gum, candy, soft drinks and potato chips are sold in huge quantities to Latin America's poor.
For the urban middle classes, there is a desire to emulate the consumption patterns of the industrialised countries, thanks in part to the glamour of the "American Way of Life" as
conveyed by television and the mass media. Gradually consumer preferences are oriented away from the consumption of local products towards those that are characteristically European or North American.
A good example of this process is to be found in Honduras, where the artificially created desire to consume North American-style white bread has led that country to use its scarce resources to import wheat from the United States, instead of using locally produced corn.
According to Lorenzo Flores, a researcher at Mexico's National Polytechnical Institute, the vast majority of Mexico City's inhabitants have an unnatural and unhealthy diet. He says that a junk food diet leads to the growth of chronic and degenerative diseases such as allergies, arthritis, diabetes, heart disease and some forms of digestive cancer. These diseases are on the increase, particularly among young people.
This process has affected all of Latin America. In the '60s, Mexico attracted an important amount of investment. Today it has more multinational food processors than any other Latin American country.
Attention was then centred on Central America. Although the five countries of that region do not represent a very large market, the emergence of the Central American Common Market — together with special financial incentives offered by both the US and local governments — made the area attractive to foreign investors.
In the 1970s, the food processing industry shifted its expansion plans to Venezuela and Brazil. Both countries had growing middle and upper classes, likely targets for processed and junk food consumption.
This "Coca-Colonisation" of Latin America, which translates into a distortion of consumer habits by multinational corporations, tends to stunt economic development since it represents a poor distribution of limited financial resources.
The developing countries face serious problems which point to a bleak future, malnutrition being high on the list. Most of Latin America is increasingly dependent on food imports and is far from its declared goal of self-sufficiency in that field.
What we are seeing is an increasing nutritional impoverishment of the poorest sectors of Latin America and the enrichment of an industry which has contributed very little to humanity's fortunes.