DMB Digest: Delicious Food Monstrosity
Industrial food complex, get off my shelf!
I’m not buying it. Literally and figuratively. If you Google search “Why are there so many ingredients in my baked goods?” you’ll get some sort of AI response like:
Baked goods often contain a variety of ingredients because each one plays a specific role in achieving the desired texture, flavor, and appearance, with common additions including leavening agents to make the product rise, emulsifiers to bind ingredients, preservatives to extend shelf life, and flavorings to enhance taste; commercially produced baked goods may have even more ingredients to optimize consistency and appeal to consumers.
Balderdash. Blah, blah, blah. Sure, this is all true to a certain extent. I understand what an emulsifier is. I get that some preservatives may be necessary due to the dark path of industrialization we embarked upon for our foodstuffs many decades ago in the name of profit. I also understand that baking brownie bites at home is a different endeavor than baking them by the thousands or even hundreds of thousands.
I also understand that eating a brownie bite with 58 ingredients is a terrible idea, even if it tastes good. Most of us have baked a batch of brownies that ended up being tasty enough, even if a little over or under baked. We’re aware of the essential ingredients: butter, eggs, flour, sugar, cocoa powder, vanilla, and salt. That’s seven items, for those of you who prefer not to count.
I don’t mind a little coconut oil or even a little guar gum here and there. Baking soda or baking powder. But do I really need corn starch, wheat protein isolate, mono-and-diglycerides, modified food starch, sunflower lecithin, soybean oil, palm oil, corn syrup, natural flavor, soy lecithin, artificial flavors, modified corn starch, and a handful of other chemical compounds I don’t want to bother spelling out?
And this is for a brownie. Never mind you some highly processed snacky item like an oreo-fudge-roll-crisp resplendent with red, white and blue frosting (or some such nonsense). Working at my local food rescue pantry, I’ve come across such items with ingredient lists so long it would take twenty seconds to read the entire list at 2x speed.
I mean, I’m a relatively educated guy (not a chemist or anything) and I can’t even deduce half of the ingredients in some of these “edible monstrosities.” And that’s just the thing. You shouldn’t have to be a chemist to understand the ingredients going into your food. You know what I’ve also seen at the same food pantry? Baked goods almost identical to the monstrosities with less than ten ingredients in them. Commercially produced, industrial food complex bakery items with under ten ingredients—all of which I recognized and understood.
Out of curiosity, I’ve opened some of these items and eaten them side by side. While I’m no patisserie connoisseur, they tasted the same to me. Having taken these items off of the shelf (two to three weeks past their expiry date) and eaten them, I can’t discern any noticeable difference in taste, texture, uniformity, consistency or appeal. This experience leads me to my initial statement of balderdash.
Something else is going on here. I’m not sure what, but if I was more of a conspiracy theorist, I might think companies were sitting around trying to come up with additional products they can toss chemicals into without people noticing. As if they had some financial incentive for doing so…
Anywho, my new proposal is that we pester the floundering, big-pharma compromised, and underfunded FDA to create a “processed food warning” label to be slapped on the packaging of any food item that is deemed as having more ingredients than necessary in its particular category. This way, companies would be forced to make decisions around their ingredient lists based on which ingredients where truly essential instead of mildly appealing for whatever monetary reason/industrial process. (When these companies attempt to pass the additional expense onto the consumer, we can call B.S. on that as well.) At the same time, those of us with enough free-time to read labels can refuse to buy processed foods with ingredients requiring a chemistry major to comprehend.
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