Gone are the days of daily morning milk and egg deliveries, specialty food stores on every block, and farmer’s markets being the norm. Whether we like to admit it or not, we live in an age of processed foods, large multi-chain supermarkets with less than fresh produce, and dozens of unpronounceable ingredients making up one flavor in our multi-flavor, multi-colored foods.With a seemingly never-ending list of ingredients, most people pick up their familiar and favorite food item without even reading, let alone understanding, all that is listed. To help us understand exactly what is in our foods, here are excerpts of an article sent to me, titled “Ten Quirky Facts About Mass Produced Food.” Bon appetit!
10. Every 16th of a second, a Twinkie is born. And despite the popular belief that Twinkies remained edible for years, their shelf-life does not extend past 25 days. On a more grim note, almost 65,000km of plastic wrap is used per year to package these Twinkies.
9. Fast food fries are not just fatty and starchy, they are also sugary. Restaurants like McDonald’s dip their fries in sugar to give them that nice golden brown color when they’re fried. It also helps to develop that nice outer crispiness that can be difficult to replicate at home.
8. One flavor, 50 ingredients. To copy nature’s single-ingredient flavor called “strawberry,” one common concoction has more than four dozen ingredients. If you consume any mass-produced strawberry-flavor desserts, chances are you’re eating an artificial flavor made of more than 50 different chemicals.
7. Seaweed and ice cream do mix. Seaweed and ice cream don’t usually seem like compatible flavors. When ice cream melts and refreezes (during transport usually), it can form ice crystals. Seaweed extract keeps the ice
cream crystal-free — i.e. creamy.
cream crystal-free — i.e. creamy.
6. Worcestershire is fishy. Worcestershire sauce is commonly used on steak, burgers and in Bloody Mary drinks. You may not have known that the sauce is primarily anchovies, bones and all. On a brighter note, Worcestershire sauce is relatively nutritious for a condiment since anchovies are high in protein and calcium (and, on the down side, cholesterol).
5. The bugs are on purpose. Dozens of pink foods that draw you in with their pretty, appetizing, fruitlike color, including Dannon strawberry yogurt and Ocean Spray pink-grapefruit juice drink, are made with bugs. The critters are in the form of a common food coloring called cochineal extract (or sometimes carmine or carminic acid). To make cochineal, the insects are dried and then ground up into a powder. You’ll find it in lots of processed pink, red or purple foods.
4. Cheese product not so cheesy. Mysteriously packaged “cheese product” can sometimes be found in the cheese aisle of your grocery store, as well as in the non-refrigerated aisles. Cheez Whiz and some varieties of Velveeta are cheese products. These cheese products are less than half cheese. More than half the product is such ingredients as emulsifiers, carrageenan (that’s the seaweed-extract stabilizer in #7) and flavorings like citric acid for that cheese-characteristic tanginess.
3. A little something extra in your mushrooms. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has rules about what can and cannot inadvertently fall into mass-produced food products. One product, canned mushrooms, is allowed to have up to 19 maggots per 100 grams of mushrooms. That same portion can acceptably contain up to 74 mites. There are similar rules for bug parts in lots of other mass-produced foods, such as peanut butter and hot dogs. The lesson is: Eating maggots may gross you out, but it’s not gonna hurt you. (So says the FDA, at least.)
2. Frozen can be healthier than fresh. Frozen peaches or peas can actually be more nutritious than the fresh versions. It’s one of those rare areas where mass-production may be good for your health. But for the most part, vegetables and fruits are more nutritious than frozen when fresh and ripe.
1. Beef. It’s everywhere. Grilled chicken sandwiches and salads are now pretty standard on fast-food menus, but there’s a small catch: They might contain beef. To most American taste buds, “beefy” often equals “yummy.” As a result, beef, typically in “extract” or “essence” form, can be found in chicken nuggets, grilled chicken sandwiches, and up until recently, in french fries.
At this rate, if we are what we eat, then we are a mixed bag of seaweed extracts (not so bad), beef essence,
countless preservatives, bug extract, maggots and mites.
countless preservatives, bug extract, maggots and mites.
