Mystery Ingredients in Food

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/07/21/346103/index.htm

Say what you will about American food, at least we Yanks haven’t afflicted the world with calamities like haggis, the Scottish staple made of boiled sheep’s stomach, or hakarl, an Icelandic offering of putrid shark. In fact, it’s hard to think of a down-home American recipe that would warrant inclusion in The Joy of Cooking a Dog’s Ex-Breakfast–the obvious title for a collection of demented dishes like haggis. Unless, that is, you happen to know about the human-hair extract in U.S. baked goods, the crushed-insect residue in many of our foods, and the flavorings made with … something unimaginable.

Those aren’t contaminants. They are official ingredients that the food industry rarely tells us about. Some yuck factors are fairly obvious, such as the blue mold spores in Stilton cheese. But most are hidden, since it’s perfectly legal for manufacturers to lump additives such as insect extracts under the comforting term “natural” on food labels–or simply omit them (unlike artificial ingredients). How many times have you seen “essence of squashed bug” listed on a food package?

Yet if you scan the label on, say, a container of strawberry yogurt, you may spot “carmine”–a popular coloring concocted from insects. Used to give red, pink, and purple color to everything from ice cream to lipstick, carmine is made from a pigment called cochineal. Cochineal, in turn, is extracted from dried female insects that feed on a cactus found in Peru, the Canary Islands, and other places. The pigment builds up in the insects’ bodies; after the six-legged moms deposit their eggs on the cactus and die, their rotting carcasses, along with the eggs and hatched larvae, are brushed off the plants, crushed, and then baked, boiled, or steamed to produce cochineal.

Carmine may not be yummy, but it is GRAS. That’s food-industry speak for Generally Recognized as Safe, a classification almost as all-embracing as “natural.” But skeptics say carmine can cause severe allergic reactions, and hence should be classified as CRUD–Considered Really Unsafe to Devour. (I just made up that category.) Several years ago the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer watchdog in Washington, D.C., petitioned the FDA either to ban carmine or to require that manufacturers disclose its creepy-crawly source on labels. So far the agency hasn’t responded.

If you want to rid your diet of bug extracts, you’ll need to avoid not only reddish foods but also many shiny ones. Shellac, made from the excretions of insects, is used to glaze everything from apples to coffee beans. If you get really obsessed, you may starve; blended-in insect remnants are everywhere. The FDA permits a typical jar of peanut butter to contain over 100 bug parts. A can of tomatoes can include one maggot or up to nine fly eggs.

But you’ll find stranger things than insect parts if you hack into the American cuisine’s heart of darkness. Perhaps the creepiest ingredient is l-cysteine. Sometimes derived from a human body part–to wit, hair–it seems to have come right out of The Mistah Kurtz Cookbook. (It also can be extracted from feathers or produced synthetically.) An amino acid, l-cysteine is used to enhance the stretchiness of dough, which facilitates its rapid processing by machines into cookies, pizza crusts, bread, doughnuts, bagels, and other baked goods.

Discovering whether a product contains stuff extruded from human bodies isn’t easy. When I put the question to a spokesman at Interstate Brands, which makes Wonderbread, Hostess, and other baked lines, he said, “I’ve no idea of the source. We don’t use enough l-cysteine to be interested.” A Sara Lee spokesman snapped that there was no hair extract in his company’s products but declined to say how he knew. A spokesman at Puratos Group, a Belgium-based supplier of bakery ingredients, was friendlier: “Very commonly l-cysteine is from human hair,” he conceded, “but I’m 99% sure that ours comes from duck feathers.”

Oh, well. Next question: Whose hair do we eat, anyway? Industry experts say most human-derived l-cysteine comes from Chinese women, who, in a case of life imitating O. Henry, help support their families by peddling their tresses to small chemical-processing plants scattered across the People’s Republic.

The baking industry’s hairy little secret takes the cake for weird, but among all consumables, cigarettes stand out as richest for bizarre ingredients. According to tobacco industry documents divulged in court cases, various brands of cigarettes include cocoa, pine oil, bee’s wax, prune juice, cognac, vinegar, beet juice, apple skins, butter, flour, yeast, maple syrup, urea, skatole, and several hundred other additives.

To those with a smattering of chemistry, skatole is the most startling–it is one of dung’s key components. (Don’t freak: The skatole added to consumables is synthetic.) To flavorists, the fact that cigarettes are spiked with simulated essence of excrement doesn’t seem odd at all. At low levels, skatole actually smells nice. Indeed, it is often added to jasmine fragrances and flavorings, says Frank Fischetti, a senior flavor chemist at Wynn Starr Specialty Foods & Flavors in Allendale, N.J.

Similar olfactory paradoxes are at work in perfumes, says Fischetti. Rose-scented fragrances often contain small amounts of civet absolute, an extract from the anal scent glands of civet cats, weasel-like creatures of Asia. Yet “when you taste concentrated civet, it reminds you of fecal matter,” he adds. Taste it? “In the old days we got civet from Asia,” says Fischetti. “It came packed in water buffalo horns. One of my jobs was to tell if it really was civet. You had to taste it to make sure.” (Instruments now do the job.)

Civet was once widely used in meat flavorings, cheese, and other foods. Like skatole, its role is to help blend a mix of flavors or fragrances together. But today a cheaper synthetic version, civetone, has replaced the real thing in most products except high-end perfumes.

One member of the scatological fragrance family hasn’t yet been synthetically replicated: castoreum. Extracted from beavers’ anal musk glands, it is sparingly used to impart a “smoothing and rounding note” to raspberry flavorings. Which raises an issue that’s been crying out for attention for several paragraphs: How did things like beaver excretions find their way into food in the first place? We’ll let that one cry itself to sleep; we wouldn’t want to spoil your appetite.

Sand (silicon dioxide)

 

Silicon dioxide, also known as silica (also known as sand!), is used to make glass, optical fibers, ceramics and cement. Oh, and chili. Used as an anti-caking agent, it is often added to processed beef and chicken to prevent clumping, and is listed in the ingredient panels for chili from both Wendy’s and Taco Bell. Most experts suggest that it isn’t harmful for consumption, but just know that the ingredient keeping that chili meat nice and non-caking is the also the primary component of diatomaceous earth, commonly used as a natural insecticide.
 

Wood (cellulose)

Processed wood pulp, known as cellulose, is used in everything from cheese to salad dressing, from muffins to strawberry syrup. Food processors use it to thicken and stabilize foods, replace fat and boost fiber content — as well as to minimize reliance on more costly ingredients like oil or flour. Powdered cellulose is produced by cooking virgin wood pulp in chemicals to separate the cellulose, and then purified. Modified versions require extra processing, such as exposure to acid in order to further break down the fiber.
 

Ironically, with the increase in nutritional awareness has come an increase in the use of cellulose — with the addition of wood pulp, products can boast of less fat and more fiber. Just don’t mind the wood.

 

McDonald’s, Taco Bell, KFC, Sonic, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, Arby’s, Jack in the Box, and many others include cellulose in their repertoire.

 

Silly Putty plastic (dimethylpolysiloxane)
Eight-syllable ingredients make sense for Silly Putty, but French fries? Sure enough, dimethylpolysiloxane, a form of silicone used in cosmetics and Silly Putty, is also found in many a fast-food fried thing. It is the secret ingredient that keeps fryer oil from foaming. McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish and French fries have it, as do Wendy’s Natural-Cut Fries With Sea Salt. In fact, most fast-food items that bathe in a deep-fat fryer are imbued with a hint of dimethylpolysiloxane. Should you be concerned? The World Health Organization found no adverse health effects associated with dimethylpolysiloxane, but come on — what’s wrong with using potatoes, oil, and salt for fries?

 

Petroleum-derived preservatives (TBHQ)

Tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ) is made from compounds derived from petroleum and finds a home in cosmetic and skincare products, varnish, lacquers and resins — and processed food. McDonald’s, for example, uses it in 18 products ranging from its Fruit and Walnut Salad to Griddle Cakes to McNuggets.

 

TBHQ was finally approved after many years of pressure from food manufacturers, though with approval, the FDA mandated that the chemical must not exceed 0.02 percent of a food’s oil and fat content. Why would there be a limit? Because five grams would be lethal, while one gram can cause nausea, vomiting, delirium, a sense of suffocation and collapse. (Although you would have to eat more than 11 pounds of McNuggets to reach that level. And if you’re willing to eat 11 pounds of McNuggets in one sitting, well…)

 

Soil fertilizer (ammonium sulfate)

Ammonium sulfate is sold by chemical companies to food manufacturers as “yeast food for bread,” and many fast-food companies list the ingredient in their bakery products.

 

But that’s just its night job; when ammonium sulfate is not moonlighting as a food additive, it performs its main task: as a fertilizer for alkaline soils. Ammonium sulfate also does duty as an agricultural spray adjuvant for water soluble insecticides, herbicides and fungicides.

 

Meat paste-goop (mechanically separated meat)

Mechanically separated meat (MSM) has been produced since the 1960s, but has been enjoying new fame lately courtesy of a photo making the rounds which shows an industrial machine extruding a plump ribbon of pink paste into a box. It is commonly referred to as “pink slime.” Looking more like frosting than pureed meat and bone bits, the FDA defines mechanically separated poultry (MSP) as “a paste-like and batter-like poultry product produced by forcing bones, with attached edible tissue, through a sieve or similar device under high pressure to separate bone from the edible tissue.” Mechanically separated pork is used too, although in 2004 to protect consumers against Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, mechanically separated beef was considered inedible and prohibited for use as human food.

 

After the meat slurry has been produced, it is sometimes treated with ammonium hydroxide to remove excess bacteria. Ammonium hydroxide is also used as a household cleaner and in fertilizers. Since the resultant meat-bone-muscle-tendon-ammonium-hydroxide goop doesn’t taste much like meat, artificial flavors are added to finish the whole thing off.

 

Mechanically separated meat is to blame for a number of processed meat products; think hot dogs, salami, bologna, burgers and many a chicken nugget. Fast-food restaurants are known for employing pink slime, although recently McDonald’s made clear that it no longer relies upon it in its burgers.

Photo of Taco Bell worker licking shells sends shudders

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/06/03/taco-bell–gross-employee-action-public-relations-nightmare/2385919/

A Taco Bell employee’s social-media post of a photo of him licking a stack of empty taco shells has set off a PR mess.

 

• Controversial taco-licking photo showed up on ‘Consumerist’ blog
• Taco Bell insists the taco shells were never served
• One PR consultant says Taco Bell needs to improve its hiring practices

Here’s a Taco Bell employee who was thinking a bit too outside the bun.

On Monday, the Consumerist, a blog that’s a subsidiary of Consumer Reports, posted a hard-to-swallow photo of a Taco Bell employee holding a long stack of about 25 empty taco shells — while licking them with his long tongue fully exposed.

Ick!

YUCK: ‘Consumerist’ post about Taco Bell photo

The posting — which the employee originally posted on his Facebook page, has since gone seriously viral. The situation is eerily reminiscent of a video from 2009 that a Domino’s Pizza employee posted of another worker putting pizza cheese into his nose and blowing mucous on a sandwich. The unfortunate message to consumers: Unhappy fast-food employees will do disgusting things to the food they sell.

“It’s not a brand problem — it’s a brand practices problem,” says Erika Napoletano, a brand strategy consultant. “If you hire people who treat your brand as disposable, that’s the kind of PR you’ll get.”

To its credit, Taco Bell responded quickly.

“We have strict food and handling procedures and zero tolerance for any violations,” Taco Bell says in a statement. The company insists that the franchisee — whose name and location it hasn’t revealed — did not serve the taco shells to any customers. “They were used for training only and in the process of being thrown out,” the company says.

Taco Bell declined to specify whether the employees behind the photo were fired. “We will not tolerate this type of behavior, and particularly its impressions on our customers, fans, franchisees and team members.” The statement says, “We are working with the franchisee to take appropriate action against everyone involved.”

Is that enough to satisfy consumers?

Probably not, says PR consultant Chris Ann Goddard. While the response was rapid, she says, “Who really knows if the tacos were served or not?”

Taco Bell will see incidents like this repeat if it doesn’t change its hiring practices, says Napoletano. “You need to hire people who hold as much integrity for your brand as you do,” she says.

Besides the need for Taco Bell to establish clearer guidelines for its workers, the brand needs to make even more clear to consumers that this is “not a normal occurrence,” Goddard says. “People need to feel comfortable in whatever they purchase, whether it’s pudding or tacos. This picture is pretty wild.”

Fast-food workers stage protests for higher wages

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/14/food-workers-strikes/2159047/

Fast-food workers are staging unprecedented one-day walkouts in cities across the country. Milwaukee workers plan to join Wednesday as nearly 200 demand $15 an hour and the right to unionize.

A recent wave of strikes by fast-food employees in four cities is expected to spread to Milwaukee Wednesday as demands for higher pay shake up an industry previously insulated from worker unrest.

Front-line, limited-service restaurant workers, a category that includes fast-food employees, earned a nationwide average $9.05 an hour in March, up 2.7% the past three years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By contrast, the pay of all private-sector non-management employees is up 5.7% in that period.

Adjusting for inflation, fast-food wages have fallen 36 cents an hour since 2010, even as the industry has raked in record profits.

Saying they can’t live on such meager pay, the workers are demanding $15 an hour and the right to form unions without fear of reprisal. Although all U.S. workers legally have that freedom, many who try to organize are fired or punished with reduced hours, says Dorian Warren, an associate professor of political science and public affairs at Columbia University.

Some restaurants have said they’ll trim the hours of employees this year to get below the 30-hour threshold that will make them pay health insurance, starting next January, under the new health law

Until recently, there had been no efforts to unionize fast-food employees because the industry has been beset by high turnover and largely populated by teens and young adults working in part-time or seasonal jobs. The recession and sluggish recovery, however, has given rise to a new class of adult fast-food worker who can’t find other employment.

“It’s a job for adults supporting families,” says Tsedeye Gebreselassie, staff attorney for the National Employment Law Project.

The ranks of limited-service restaurant workers have increased 11.5% to 3.8 million since the job market hit bottom in February 2010, nearly twice the rate of all private employees.

Since early April, fast-food workers in New York, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have staged one-day walkouts and rallies. In Milwaukee,180 workers at outlets such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and KFC are expected to walk off the job.

“We’re inspired by what’s happening in other cities,” says Jennifer Epps-Addison, an official at Citizen Action of Wisconsin, one of the groups coordinating the protest, which unlike the others, will include some retail workers.

Milwaukee Burger King employee Tessie Harrell says she earned the state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour from 2008 through 2012, even after she was promoted to shift supervisor in 2011. Last year, she got a raise to $8.25 an hour. But she says that’s not enough to pay the $650 monthly rent on her two-bedroom apartment and support her six children.

“I can’t afford to buy my kids shoes,” says Harrell, 34, who gets food stamps and $150 a month from her mother. “There’s no way I should be struggling to make ends meet.”

In a statement, Burger King said its restaurants “have provided an entry point into the workforce for millions of Americans,” including many franchisees. Burger King and McDonald’s say their wages are in line with the rest of the fast-food industry.

Job actions in other cities already have made an impact. In New York, half the 70 restaurants affected by walkouts in November and early April have boosted wages from 25 cents to up to $2 an hour, says Jonathan Westin, head of New York Communities for Change.

In St. Louis, local clergy accompanied striking workers back to their jobs last week to ensure they wouldn’t be fired, says Martin Rafanan, head of the local workers’ campaign, “St. Louis Can’t Survive on $7.35.”

Workers, he says, have begun to feel empowered. “We are much stronger,” he says.