Food Unwrapped (2012) s06e07 Episode Script

Let's go.
'Us Brits love our grub.
'And our shops and supermarkets are stacked high 'with food from all over the world.
' Oh! 'But how do we really know about where our food comes from?' I've come to ask you how dangerous my nuts are.
'We'll be travelling far and wide' Look how high up we are! '.
.
to reveal the truth about the food we eat.
' Oh, my word.
Whoa! 'Coming up, I head to Ghana 'to find out why pineapple goes fizzy 'and discover this fruit's amazing healing properties.
' You're never going to look at a piece of pineapple the same way again.
'I try '.
.
to find out how they get the bubbles inside our chocolate bars.
' Frozen in the middle, runny on the outside.
Not a bubble in sight.
'And I ask how safe is my shellfish?' - It can paralyse you, numbness - Really? - Yeah.
- But they can kill you.
- That's pretty bloody serious, then.
'First up, pineapples.
' I chopped up a pineapple yesterday.
Put it in the fridge, whatever.
Today, it tastes kind of fizzy.
- 'Fizzy?' - Yeah.
Is that normal? When you get the stuff out of the packet, it doesn't taste fizzy.
- Why is that? - 'I don't know why that is, really.
' - They must put like a chemical on to keep it sort of fresh.
- 'Yeah.
' How do they grow? 'On a tree.
' 'Pineapple trees?! 'I'm off to Ghana, a top pineapple producer, 'to find out what they are putting in their packets.
' We are most definitely in Ghana.
'I'm headed to Zulu Pineapple Farm in Doboro, 'who contribute to the whopping 140,000 tonnes of pineapple 'imported into the UK every year.
' - Hello! Kate.
- You're welcome.
Ernest.
Look at this.
'Ernest Abloh has been farming for nearly 25 years.
' I don't quite know what I was expecting.
But I was not expecting a field full of what look like house plants.
- So this is all pineapple? - All pineapples.
'Ernest's team are planting next year's crop 'by simply stuffing discarded pineapple tops back into the earth.
' Gosh, can we take a closer look? Look at that! This looks nothing like a pineapple.
But I'm guessing that that might be the beginning of it.
Yeah, this is the beginning.
This is the flowering stage.
'Over the course of three months, each individual flower blooms 'and then forms a tiny berry.
'Those berries then fuse into one big pineapple fruit.
'Then it's ready to pick.
' Oh! So, Ernest, why sometimes at home if I have a little pineapple, leave it for a couple of days, it kind of goes a bit funny? That is due to fermentation by the activities of microorganisms, especially yeast.
There's yeast present? There's yeast on the outside of the food.
'When fruits grow, yeast develops all over the exterior.
'When the fruit is cut open, 'this yeast combines with the sugar inside and begins to ferment, 'creating tiny amounts of alcohol.
'During this process, carbon dioxide is produced, and that is the fizz.
' So what do you do to stop yeast affecting your pineapple products? Our first control point is to make sure that we bring down the activities of yeast by sanitising the fruit.
'The fruit is sanitised 30 miles away at the processing plant 'and is managed by Alistair Djimatey.
' Alistair.
This is basically the intake area.
Here we are just off-loading the fruit.
'Before the pineapples enter the factory, they are sanitised 'in a natural disinfectant to reduce the amount of yeast on the skin.
'And they're not the only ones.
' So I've got to have a head-to-toe body wash? I'm sure you'll enjoy the Ghanaian water.
- In here? OK.
- Yes.
- Right.
All of the factories I visited in my life, never have I had to take a shower for them.
'I'm starting to see the extremes they go to 'to ensure their packaged pineapples stay so fresh.
' Holy pineapples, Alistair! 'These workers have no time to lose.
'Each pineapple is peeled and chopped in under ten seconds.
' What we do is to ensure speed of production, to ensure that even if there is yeast on these fruits, they cannot manifest, or they cannot multiply in any way throughout the production.
'Hundreds of pristine pineapples go from field to packet within a day.
'It's the combination of speed, hygiene 'and chilled storage that minimises the chances of fermenting fizz 'and maximises the shelf life, all totally chemical free.
' And this is it.
Fresh off the production line.
And this pineapple will certainly not taste funny.
Definitely will not taste funny.
'Now, in the name of science, 'I've tasted rather a lot of pineapple while here in Ghana.
'And, to be honest with you, it's taking its toll.
' Look at my tongue, OK? There are these little red spots that have appeared.
And it stings.
What is that? 'I bet Alistair knows.
' It kind of feels like I've been licking sandpaper.
'The enzyme is eating away at the cells of my mouth.
'It works particularly fast on moist or damaged tissue.
'But fear not, my chops will regenerate quickly.
' 'Bromelain is produced mainly in the pineapple's stem, 'core and under the skin.
'These parts don't make great eating, 'so usually the factories just chuck them away.
'Later, I discover the resourceful way this bromelain 'has been harnessed as a radical new medical treatment.
' There you are.
Took some photos.
Next up, bubbly chocolate.
Ever wondered how they get all those perfect bubbles evenly dispersed inside every bar? 'I'm going to give it a bash with a little help from this fellow.
' I'm trying to work out how you get bubbles in chocolate.
Bicycle pump? What about straws? 'Yeah.
Loads of straws, all in your mouth at once.
' That didn't work.
What other suggestions have you got? You need compressed gas.
What, like, a fire extinguisher? Wicked.
Try those! 'Kids, don't try this at home.
' HE SPLUTTERS AND COUGHS Frozen in the middle, runny in the outside, not a bubble in sight.
'OK, so perhaps my efforts were a bit haphazard.
'But the more I think about it, the more intrigued I am.
' How do they get millions of bubbles into thick, gooey chocolate? I've come to ask the experts.
- Hello, you must be Sean.
- Morning.
Pleased to meet you, Jimmy.
Now, I'm here to find out about the bubbles in your chocolate.
Right, we're going to go in there - and start the manufacturing process for chocolate.
- OK.
'For decades, the chocolatiers here have been closely guarding the secret 'of how they capture hundreds of tiny bubbles inside their chocolate bars.
'I'm hoping that today I can get them to spill the cocoa beans.
' Wow, it smells incredible in here.
This is the start of the chocolate-making process.
Is bubbly chocolate, is the recipe the same as the normal chocolate you make? No, it has to be slightly different to enable you to aerate the chocolate.
The reason why it's different, it has a bit more this ingredient in it than normal chocolate.
That's cocoa butter.
'Cocoa butter is the fat extracted from the cocoa beans.
' If you don't put enough of that in it, the chocolate is too viscous and it wouldn't aerate.
So you make that, put that into the chocolate -- it makes it a bit of fluid, enables the bubbles to grow.
So the recipe is different from standard chocolate.
The added fat loosens the mixture to allow the bubbles to spread inside the bar.
Right, so this is the storage tank.
We're going to get a sample of finished chocolate - for you to taste.
- Ooh, look at that! Oh! You've got a good job.
So the one thing I've noticed, though, there's no bubbles yet.
No bubbles yet.
We need to go to another department - that puts the bubbles inside this chocolate.
- Right, let's see.
- OK.
- Oh, you must be Phil.
I'm Jim.
- Hi, Jim.
Nice to meet you.
- Right, I want to see your bubbles.
- OK.
'Phil Ashley knows every last detail of their bubble-infusing process.
' - Can I open it up? - Give it a snap.
- Here we go.
Reveal the bubbles.
Look at them, frozen in time.
'A firm chocolate outer shell is created to ensure 'there's no unsightly leakage.
' Are you going to put the bubbly chocolate inside? - That's right.
That's the next step.
- Can we see that? - Of course you can.
- Here it is.
- This is the magical bit now.
This is where we've got gas which is mixed with liquid chocolate, and we've deposited it onto the shells here.
So you are actually mixing chocolate and gas together - That's right.
- .
.
to create these bubbles? So what's the secret? How do you get it in there? - I'm not allowed to tell you.
It's a trade secret.
- Really? - Yes.
What if I gave you a bar of chocolate? It'd be more than my job's worth.
It's our secret to keep.
- What if I gave you a Chinese burn if you didn't tell me? - Um no.
'Coming up 'These guys are tough.
'But at last, the secret of dispersing millions of bubbles 'evenly through chocolate.
' Hee-hee! Look at that! 'And I ask, do those bubbles actually make a difference to the taste?' Not too much! 'Back to mussels and I'm off to the West Coast of Scotland.
' This is Mull.
Although it's not a great view of it right now.
That's the ferry we've just arrived on and we are off to look at some mussels.
The majority of the mussels found in our supermarkets come from bonnie Scotland.
- Douglas.
- Matt.
- Nice to meet you.
- You found us.
- I did.
It's beautiful here, isn't it? 'Douglas Wilson farms his in Loch Spelve.
' So, Douglas, I want to find out if there is any truth in that old saying that you shouldn't eat shellfish during the summer months.
If you want, I can take you out and show you what we're doing - and talk you through some of - Perfect.
'Douglas has been farming mussels in these waters for over 25 years.
'He was one of the first Scottish fishermen 'to pioneer a specific mussel farming technique.
' - This is the lines that the mussels are growing on.
- Right.
These are rope-grown mussels? Look at that! It's like a sea monster.
- The rope is in a 10km length.
- Right.
- And it zigzags up and down.
Down 10m, up 10m.
Do you bait the rope at all? No, you just hang the rope in a place that's good for collecting mussels.
They choose a place to settle and hopefully it's on our ropes.
And how do the mussels actually attach themselves to the rope? They have several threads called byssus threads.
They just put a dab of almost like glue and that sets in the water.
So what do they fed on when they're down there? They're feeding on phytoplankton, which is plant, almost like grass.
Do you find that plankton all year round? No, there's almost none in the winter but in the summer it gets really thick and that's good.
It gives us good growth.
So they grow during the summer months but they're the months they're not recommended or historically it's not recommended that you eat them? That's right.
If one particular type of plankton predominates and the mussels feed off that, it's not toxic to the shellfish but it can cause illness in humans.
'Toxic plankton? That could put you right off the moules mariniere.
' Phytoplankton, seen here as turquoise swirls, has the potential to grow exponentially.
This is known as an algal bloom.
It's triggered by warm temperatures, increased light and certain water currents.
The huge swathes can span hundreds of miles, often so big they're visible from space.
Mussel farm manager Cameron Maclean knows all too well how problematic any toxic plankton can be.
It's really important, especially through the summer months, that the water sampling and the meat sampling is stringent.
We employ our own guy who does our water testing for us.
It's better to know that what's in the water is non-toxic rather than knowing the meat in your mussels that you've just dispatched is toxic.
So nowadays, thanks to rigorous testing of farmed mussels, we can eat the all year round.
But that about this annoying algae? I've come to an aquarium in Brighton to meet marine biologist Kerry Perkins.
Kerry, nice to meet you.
I want to ask you all about toxic plankton.
- Excellent, shall we go inside? - Are you excited? - Yeah, very excited.
Kerry has set up an experiment to demonstrate why mussels have the potential to make us poorly.
We're going to put some algae in with them and we're going to see how they uptake this possible toxin.
- This is the algae? - This is the algae.
That is a phytoplankton.
- OK.
And this is exactly what you'd find in the sea? - It is.
- If you just want to squirt that in.
- OK.
- Ready? - That's it.
Oh-ho! Mussels, like oysters and scallops, are filter feeders.
Over the next 30 minutes, they suck in the surrounding water and sift out tiny particles of plankton, whether they're toxic or not.
So it's easy to see why mussels are now deployed to clean up rivers and coastlines.
- Oh, wow! That's really clear.
- Yeah, they've done their job.
- Wow! So, potentially, if that was toxic, they would all now contain a level of toxicity? Exactly.
If you then harvested those mussels straight afterwards And ate a load of them.
Then you could potentially get very ill.
So why is the algae often toxic to us but not to the mussel, then? When the mussel takes it in, it's very small amounts and they then bring it into their tissue.
So for them it's not actually at toxic levels.
It's accumulated in the mussels.
And also the fact that we wouldn't eat just one mussel, we'd end up eating loads cos they're so tasty.
How bad can this toxin be? Is it a bit of vomiting, diarrhoea? There's different forms but the most severe one for humans would be paralytic shellfish poisoning.
- It can paralyse you from numbness.
- Really? - It can kill you.
- That's pretty bloody serious then.
'Although filter feeders are vehicles for the toxins in the water, 'in most cases, they will flush themselves out 'or metabolise the toxins within days.
' By and large, if you go to the supermarket, go to the fishmonger, we can happily eat mussels all year round cos the water has been tested but if people go and help themselves off the beach, that could be potentially very, very dangerous.
It's a bit like mussel roulette.
'Earlier, I travelled to Ghana 'to find out what makes my pineapple fizz.
' That is due to fermentation by the activities of the yeast.
'And I discovered the hidden power within, bromelain.
' These little red spots have appeared and it stings.
'Back in the UK, I've come to meet Dr Baljit Dheansa, 'one of Britain's leading burn specialists 'at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead.
' - Mr Dheansa.
- Hi there.
Pleased to meet you.
- You too.
So I'm here to find out a little more about bromelain.
Well, we do use it here for certain types of burns.
In fact, we've got a patient that needs to have it done.
Former soldier Andy Kendall was transferred to the burns unit here yesterday.
Hi.
Hello, Kate.
I'll just give you the other hand.
Oh, what happened? We were having a bonfire yesterday and because it was very windy I took the petrol off somebody cos I was concerned about them setting theirselves alight and I did exactly the same thing, unfortunately.
You must have been in excruciating pain? It was a bit sore, but there we go.
How does it look under there? There you are.
Took some photos earlier on.
Oh, my word! 'Traditionally, doctors would cut away the dead, burnt tissue 'with a scalpel, which can be very painful.
'And can take off some of the healthy tissue underneath.
'The new bromelain treatment means all of that is set to change.
' What does the bromelain actually do to the tissue? It has the ability to differentiate between live and dead tissue.
And the enzymes in bromelain can get rid of the tissue we want without damaging the tissue that we need.
That's astonishing, isn't it? So, what's the prognosis for Andy now? I'm expecting Andy to be healed within ten days to two weeks.
Gosh, that's incredible, isn't it? A simple bit of fruit extract making a big difference to burns patients every day.
You're never going to look at a piece of pineapple the same again.
I'm never going to look at a gallon of petrol the same way again.
- No more bonfires, Andy.
- No more bonfires.
'Back to bubbly chocolate.
'I've been trying to crack how they get the bubbles in the bar.
' Frozen in the middle, runny on the outside, not a bubble in sight.
'My charms have melted the management 'and Nestle have agreed head confectioner Vicky Gill will give me 'a demo of exactly what's going on inside their mystery machines.
' What are the gasses used to make the bubbles in the bubbly chocolate? - You can either use carbon dioxide or nitrogen.
- Right.
Nitrogen would give you really tiny bubbles in there.
Carbon dioxide gives you slightly bigger bubbles.
- So can we make some chocolate using these two different gasses? - Yep.
'First off, load up the gas canisters 'with a cocoa butter-rich chocolate mix.
' I feel like we're going to have a food fight.
Be great fun.
Let's have a big chocolate fight.
'Then release the pressurised gas.
' Good squeeze.
You need to shake it to disperse the bubbles.
'Shaking mixes the gas and the chocolate, 'ensuring an even infusion of bubbles.
'Just like a milkshake.
' Next we've got some moulds which have been shelled out with chocolate.
I might be here some time.
I feel like some old lady doing it.
And then if you tap slightly See the bubbles.
This just helps the bubbles to grow.
In the factory, all the trays are mechanically jiggled to evenly spread those bubbles.
'As the chocolate is chilled, 'the bubbles set but the gasses evaporate.
' - Woo-hoo! Look at that! - Snap the bar.
Can I compare mine to one of yours? This one here is CO2.
And this one here is nitrogen.
Will the difference size of bubbles affect the taste of the chocolate? They don't effect the taste of the chocolate but the effect you get is from the mouth feel when you eat the chocolate.
Usually with the carbon dioxide bubbles being bigger, you get a much faster melting on your tongue in your mouth.
Right, so when it comes to bubbly chocolate size really does matter.
It can do, yes.
Thank you very much.
See you later.
'Armed with a bounty of samples, I'm going to see 'if the bubbles really do have an effect on this mouth feel.
'First, I have a solid chocolate bar 'made with exactly the same ingredients as the bubbly one.
' The purpose of that is because I want you to gauge about flavour.
- I can taste the milkiness of that one.
- You can? - Yeah, milkiness.
And I have a selection of bubbly bars to compare them with.
Not too much.
LAUGHTER - I prefer that.
- You prefer the second one? - It's thicker.
- Creamy.
- You like that one? - I prefer the taste of that chocolate.
- It's not quite so rich.
OK.
If I was to tell you that both chocolate bars were exactly the same recipe apart from the gas, would you be surprised that the gas can have such an effect? Definitely.
'So it seems bubbles can alter our sensory reaction to chocolate 'and have an effect on how we perceive its taste.
' There we go.
Empty plate, everyone loves chocolate but it really appears that bubbles do make a difference.
The only question is, are you a big bubble person or a small bubble? Next time, I hunt down the humble prune.
That's hot, hot.
And ask, are they really good for our bowels? It's a poo recipe.
- It it but it's not me making it, it's you.
- Pop it in.
I'm on a mission to find out exactly how much sugar is in cherry tomatoes.
That's really sweet.
And I learn how a Dutch farmer is set to help millions in the developing world using sea water.
That's amazing.