To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Jam too sweet?
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:38:22 -0700 (PDT)
Food processors do a lot of things that would make most people avoid their products if they knew about them. The USDA has been steadily diluting the requirements for the National Organic Program to allow them to do the same things and still call the food "organic." As far as milk goes, any milk from a "standard" dairy will have not only antibiotic residues, but hormone residues as well. They will not dump a load of milk for antibiotic residues, because all non-organic milk contains them. Most likely, if they dump milk it is because it has higher than ALLOWABLE LEVELS in it. In any case I find the hormones to be more disturbing than the antibiotics.
From: Mark Angermayer <hangermayer@isp.com> To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org> Sent: Monday, March 9, 2009 9:29:30 PM Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Jam too sweet?
Michael,
That's astounding. Why would jam companies go to the trouble of bleaching the berries first, then recoloring them? If they want darker jam, why don't they just add food coloring?
It sounds strangely like urban legends I've heard in the ag industry. Like the one, milk is full of antibiotics (My wife (who works in the dairy industry) tells me they test each load before it's unloaded. If they find antibiotics, the whole semi-load is dumped.) Bleaching strawberries and recoloring them is so weird, if I hadn't heard of it from you, I'd never believed it.
Mark KS ----- Original Message ----- From: Michael Dossett To: North American Fruit Explorers Sent: Monday, March 09, 2009 12:35 PM Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Jam too sweet?
Unfortunately, bleaching the strawberries and then adding red dye to make them an even color is an all too common
practice. Not all the jam companies do this, but many if not most do. I think part of it depends on where the berry comes from and what variety it is too. A lot of the jam processors use California strawberries. The growers there make their real money on the berries from the first and second pick for the fresh market because of their size. I can't remember what the price was that way but I want to say it was around 75 cents a pound. The tertiary and quaternary berries on each raceme are smaller and are almost worthless to them so they dump them on the processing market for around 19 cents a pound just to get a little something for them. A lot of the jam and yogurt etc. processors use these berries because of the cost.
Oregon and Washington strawberries, in part because of climate and in part because of genetics, have good color throughout the fruit, i.e. they
aren't white inside like California ones. They are also darker red than the strawberries from the eastern half of the US. A few processors still like these berries in part because of flavor but also in part because of the color so they don't have to add the dyes etc. Unfortunately because of a shorter season and higher labor costs our growers can barely make a go of it at 50 cents a pound for a processing berry which means that the acreage here in the Pacific Northwest has been steadily shrinking. It is basically because of the few remaining processors here that the strawberry breeding programs in Oregon and Washington place a large emphasis on selecting for fruit color both internally and externally before a new variety gets released.
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