## Step 2 - Reading

Fast food commercials

You are going to read two texts, one about how food is prepared for commercials and the other one is about food crime.

- Read the texts and do assignment 1.
- Read the first text Fast food commercials again and do assignment 2.
- Read the second text Food crime again and do assignment 3.

Assignment 1
The texts are mixed up.

- (On your own) read the paragraphs and put them in the right column.
- (In your group) discuss your answers.
- Check your answers on the Answers page.

Fast food commercials | Food crime

A | Food crime There is a new and growing danger with the food we eat. Criminal gangs are selling billions of dollars of fake food to supermarkets around the world. The food could be very dangerous. In the past few years, there have been some high-profile scandals.
B | Fast food commercials It is easy to make a delicious-looking hamburger at home. But would this hamburger still look delicious after it sat on your kitchen table under very bright lights for six or seven hours? If someone took a picture or made a video of this hamburger after the seventh hour, would anyone want to eat it? More importantly, do you think you could get millions of people to pay money for this hamburger?
C | These are the questions that fast food companies worry about when they produce commercials or print ads for their products. Video and photo shoots often last many hours. The lights that the photographers use can be extremely hot. These conditions can cause the food to look quite unappealing to potential consumers. Because of this, the menu items that you see in fast food commercials are probably not actually edible.
D | In Britain, tons of horse meat ended up in products that were labeled as beef. British police recently found a product that used cheaper peanut powder instead of almond flour. This could seriously harm or kill people with peanut allergies. In 2008, six babies died in China after gangs made and sold fake milk powder.
E | Let's use the hamburger as an example. The first step towards building the perfect commercial hamburger is the bun. The food stylist - a person employed by the company to make sure the products look perfect - sorts through hundreds of buns until he or she finds one with no wrinkles. Next, the stylist carefully rearranges the sesame seeds on the bun using glue and tweezers for maximum visual appeal. The bun is then sprayed with a waterproofing solution so that it will not get soggy from contact with other ingredients, the lights, or the humidity in the room.
F | Next, the food stylist shapes a meat patty into a perfect circle. Only the outside of the meat gets cooked - the inside is left raw so that the meat remains moist. The food stylist then paints the outside of the meat patty with a mixture of oil, molasses, and brown food coloring. Grill marks are either painted on or seared into the meat using hot metal skewers.
G | Gangs can make a lot of money from fake food. It is also safer than selling drugs for the gangs because the penalties are lower.The assistant director of Interpol, Michael Ellis, told the BBC that food crime is very similar to the drugs trade. He said: "In my experience, the patterns used by criminals involved in counterfeiting are very similar to those used in the dealing of drugs." He said police in 33 countries showed that food crime is a serious international problem.
H | The police found children's candies that were dyed with a poisonous chemical, 430,000 litres of fake drinks and 22 tons of long-grain rice that was labeled as high-quality basmati rice. The British government said it was a difficult problem to tackle. It said that using technology might be the only way to beat the criminal gangs. Source: http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/1409/140906-food-crime.html
I | Finally, the food stylist searches through dozens of tomatoes and heads of lettuce to find the best-looking produce. One leaf of the crispest lettuce and one center slice of the reddest tomato are selected and then sprayed with glycerin to keep them looking fresh. So the next time you see a delectable hamburger in a fast food commercial, remember: you’re actually looking at glue, paint, raw meat, and glycerin! Are you still hungry? Source: http://www.englishforeveryone.org/PDFs/Level_7_Passage_5.pdf

| #### Answers

#### Assignment 2