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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The 6 Weirdest, Scariest Processed Foods
  • Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2009 13:17:51 -0700


The 6 Weirdest, Scariest Processed Foods
By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted December 6, 2009.
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/144395/the_6_weirdest%2C_scariest_processed_foods?page=entire

Once upon a time, some brave scientists had a noble dream of ridding our food
of the plague of nutrients.

Today, at the start of the 21st century, the miracle of food processing has
brought that dream closer to reality than ever before. From vitamin-free
"blueberry bits" to spray-can cheese to avocado-free guacamole, food
scientists have worked tirelessly to bring us new and exciting foods that
contain as little nutrition as possible. Even apparently "healthy" foods such
as soups have been ingeniously overloaded with so much salt you feel as if
you’re eating French fries.

In this article, we’ll provide a handy guide to six uniquely unnatural
processed foods that will hopefully serve as a blueprint for humanity’s
eventual triumph over the tyrannical fist of Mother Nature.

1. Spray-Can 'Easy Cheese'

Dipping a butter knife into a tub of cheese spread and putting it on a
cracker takes a lot of time and effort. Thankfully for all of us, the wizards
at Kraft have developed a product that ensures we’ll never again run the risk
of hurting our wrists trying to spread processed cheese. Kraft’s Easy Cheese
cans combine the soulless tastelessness of its cheese products with the
convenience and simplicity of whipped cream cans.

The most interesting aspect of Easy Cheese is its remarkable consistency.
Normally, cheese comes in a solid state when kept at room temperature and
only becomes liquid when melted at high temperatures. Easy Cheese, on the
other hand, has a Goldilocks-like "not too solid, not too viscous" quality
that makes it easy to spread on food without having it drip on your clothing.

According to an exposé in Wired magazine, Easy Cheese achieves this amazing
texture by containing lots of unhealthy crap, such as the stain-removing
chemical trisodium phosphate and a healthy dose of canola oil that keeps the
cheese from solidifying. Oh, and they also load Easy Cheese with about twice
the amount of salt you'd normally find in natural cheddar cheese.

But the best ingredient in Easy Cheese is calcium phosphate, which is used as
a calcium supplement. "But wait," you say. "Why does a cheese product need
calcium added artificially?" Well, as Wired speculates, the sodium phosphate
could actually negate the calcium in the natural cheese. Thus, Kraft had to
put in an additive that would make up for the calcium that's taken away
through food processing. Genius!

2. Oreo Cookie Death Filling

It’s rare to encounter a food that makes you say, "If only this were as
healthy as frosting!" And yet, the filling in Oreo cookies manages to
accomplish just that.

You see, typical frosting is made mostly from butter, milk, sugar and vanilla
extract. No one will ever accuse it of being good for you, but at least
you're eating fairly natural fats. Oreo stuffing, on the other hand, is
basically sugar-flavored Crisco. Seriously, that’s what you’re consuming when
you eat an Oreo.

Oreos' death filling is so bad it even inspired an ill-fated lawsuit in
California a few years back that tried to stop the sale of Oreos to children.
While the suit was eventually dropped, it did introduce trans fats to the
public consciousness and helped spearhead the campaign to make food companies
indicate on their labels whether their products contained any trans fats, so
it wasn’t a total waste.

That said, I think the best way to stop people from eating Oreos wouldn’t be
to ban them outright but to force Kraft to rebrand them to reflect their
actual ingredients. So let’s say you mandate that Kraft label its cookies
"Criscoroes" and have the package depict a kid gorging himself in a tub of
vegetable shortening. Yum!

3. Condensed Soups

Ah, soup. It’s the food mom used to feed us when we were sick. Every child
has fond memories of being nursed back to health by sipping at the warm,
nutritious broth of chicken noodle soup. Of course, mom probably didn’t
realize at the time that she was setting you up for a future of high blood
pressure and kidney failure. Because if she fed you condensed soup from a
can, she was loading your young body up with insanely high amounts of sodium.

How insanely high, you ask? Well, consider that a mere half-cup of Campbell’s
Vegetable Soup contains a heart-stopping 890 mg of sodium, or roughly 37
percent of your daily recommended sodium intake. But wait, there’s more! The
typical Campbell’s soup can contains one-and-a-half cups of soup, meaning
that one can of soup contains more than 90 percent of your daily recommended
sodium intake.

To be fair to Campbell’s, it does have a "Healthy Request" brand of soup that
contains roughly half the salt of Campbell's other soups. Still, one of
soup’s supposed key virtues is that it isn’t a cheeseburger. In other words,
when you buy a bowl of soup you shouldn’t have to "request" a healthy version
of it.

4. Spam

Spam was really a major miracle of food science, as it solved a mystery that
humanity had been trying for centuries to figure out: namely, how to make
meat-flavored Jell-O. Developed in the 1930s, Spam is derived primarily from
pork shoulder meat (seriously) and combined with water, sugar, sodium nitrate
(of course) and copious amounts of salt. The result is a meat-like goo that
derives 80 percent of its calories from fat and that delivers a whopping 790
mg of sodium per two-ounce serving.

Spam first hit the big-time during World War II when its highly preserved
state made it the ideal food to feed to our protein-needy soldiers fighting
over in Europe. Now there's a fine tribute to our fighting boys! Thanks for
risking your butts against the Nazis, fellas, now here’s a mound of pork
slime! When you think about it, it’s remarkable that more of our troops
didn’t defect to the German army, which assuredly would have offered them
generous helpings of bratwurst, knockwurst and schweineschnitzel in exchange
for changing sides. The fact that Americans bravely suffered through Spam
prior to fighting the Battle of the Bulge adds yet another heroic chapter to
the Greatest Generation’s legacy.

5. Artificially Flavored Blueberry Bits

Frozen waffles are fairly non-nutritious. Indeed, the only real way to get
any sort of vitamins in your waffles each morning is to buy blueberry waffles
that contain….

But, hang on! It turns out those aren’t blueberries at all! They’re more like…
well, just what are they? An apt description would be "purple globs of sugary
goo," but they’re actually called "artificially flavored blueberry bits."
Their ingredients include sugar, dextrose, soybean oil, soy protein, salt,
citric acid, cellulose gum, artificial flavor, malic acid, Red 40 Lake, Blue
2 Lake and…that’s it. Notice anything missing? Oh yeah: blueberries!

For a long time, companies such as Aunt Jemima parent Pinnacle Foods were
able to get away with implying that these little unfruity lumps were actual
blueberries, as the box for Aunt Jemima’s blueberry waffles had pictures of
actual blueberries strewn across it. But the threat of a lawsuit from Center
for Science in the Public Interest made Pinnacle decide to tell people that
their waffles didn’t contain any actual blueberries.

What makes the development of fake blueberries so exciting is the number of
possibilities it opens up for other fake fruits. Picture artificial
strawberry strips, made mostly of bacon and high-fructose corn syrup. Or
perhaps artificial melon mounds made of solidified vegetable oil and dextrose
monohydrate. Or the coup de grace, artificial artificial blueberry bits, made
with NutraSweet and artificial soy protein. Not one natural ingredient, baby!

Kraft’s Avocado-Free Guacamole

This right here may be the pinnacle of processed food magic. Kraft has
managed to make a food product without an actual main ingredient, akin to
tomato-free tomato sauce or potato-free baked potato. Yes, there are no
avocados in Kraft’s guacamole. Then what is it made of, you ask? How about
some modified food starch, coconut and soybean oils, corn syrup, food
coloring…in other words, you’re eating green-colored oil.

As with a lot of phony processed foods, the avocado-free guacamole compelled
somebody to sue the product’s manufacturer for false advertising. In this
case, California resident Brenda Lifsey got upset because she thought Kraft’s
guacamole "didn’t taste avocadoey." She then looked at the ingredients, and
lo and behold, "there was almost no avocado in it."

Kraft’s response to Lifsey’s lawsuit was a masterwork of poor corporate spin,
as a company spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times, "We think customers
understand that it isn't made from avocado." Well actually, no. Customers
tend to buy guacamole with the understanding that it will be made from, oh, I
don’t know, avocados. This is akin to a Viagra spokesperson saying, "We think
customers understand that our pills won’t really give them erections."

For the record, Kraft is no longer selling congealed green oil as "guacamole"
but rather as "guacamole-flavored dip." It’s an improvement, I suppose,
though I think somebody should file a suit against Kraft that prevents the
company from ever again describing its products as "foods."






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