Why am I eating this?

Several people have told me recently that I absolutely must see the new movie Food, Inc., which tells about all the horrible stuff we eat as a result of the food chain having been taken over by the evil food industry and its corporations. Well, as an old failed chemist, I’m already far more aware than I want to be of the shit the evil food corporations want to feed me, and I try to avoid it to a great extent (though I’m not purist enough to avoid it entirely) by not eating their more egregiously disgusting products. In my naïve innocence, I thought I might achieve this in part by buying salads from the deli of the local supermarket—which is, of course, part of the evil conspiracy. And I often read the labels they put on the salad containers, which contain the list of ingredients of these innocuous-looking salads. But I recently paid slightly closer attention than usual to this label and its list for a “cashew chicken salad.” It was quite a revelation.

Blogger won’t let me do formatting, and I have formatted the list by tab-indenting for each of several nested levels, in which the ingredients of sub-components are listed under the components. But you can’t see this, which is a pain in the ass, and a major fault of Blogger, in my opinion. To try to describe it without formatting: the first ingredient is chicken, which is a good start. Then under this is a solution (in which I suppose the chicken is soaked) which has a seasoning with seventeen ingredients. Next major heading is a “rub” with nine ingredients, then a “creamy dressing” with mayonnaise and sour cream, each of which has its list of sub-ingredients, of which the mayonnaise has eight.

At this point, they ran out of space on the label, and they hadn’t even gotten around to the cashews yet! (Makes you wonder what kind of processing they submitted the cashews to.) Or a warning label that says, “This food has been processed in a facility that employs Moslems.” The reason for this is that the nested levels require them to list sub-ingredients present in microscopic quantities before they list macro-level ingredients like cashews and celery. And an old failed chemist has to wonder about some of the ingredients present even in microscopic quantities. Disodium inosinate (in the rub)? What the fuck is that? An old failed chemist might assume it’s a sodium salt of inosinic acid, which I never heard of back when I was flunking Chem 201; but there really is such a thing as inosinic acid—C10H13N4O8P (Blogger doesn't do subscript numbers either—piece of shit), a “nucleotide of hypoxanthine.” Similarly, disodium guanylate (also in the rub) is a sodium salt of guanylic acid, C10H14N5O8P. Calcium disodium EDTA (in the mayonnaise)? Salt of ethylene-diamine-tetra-acetic acid, a chelating agent “capable of producing toxic effects which can be fatal”; so what the fuck is it doing in food? (Are you getting all this? You’ll be tested tomorrow. And I already know it without even seeing the movie.) And there is corn in four different forms—hydrolyzed corn protein and corn syrup solids in the soaking solution, corn starch in the rub, and the ubiquitous corn syrup in the mayonnaise. Corn is everywhere in the industrial food chain and is now regarded as the new villain, for economic as well as dietary reasons. High fructose corn syrup is increasingly replacing sugar as the omnipresent sweetener, since white sugar has long been regarded as another toxin (although it's a major component of the rub anyway), but corn syrup isn’t much better.

Further, a Google on disodium inosinate reveals that the inosinate-guanylate combination is now a standard flavor enhancer comparable to monosodium glutamate (MSG), which has gotten decades of bad press for the allergic reactions it causes, and which the inosinate-guanylate combination is evidently intended to supplant. I’m skeptical enough to take a rather cynical view of some of the more hysterical claims of the food fanatics that MSG and, by association, inosinate-guanylate are deadly toxins, but the fact remains, they are additives that shouldn’t need to be added. Back in the old days, foods had enough flavor on their own so they didn’t need enhancing, but we’re talking about Food, Inc. here. The flavor would not need to be enhanced if it hadn’t already been destroyed by production and processing.

Fortunately, east Boulder County (including Lafayette and Longmont), has a number of “health food” stores where one can shop to avoid the toxic assaults of Food, Inc. By way of contrast to the above, perhaps erring on the side of brevity, an egg salad sandwich made locally and sold at the local Vitamin Cottage lists the following ingredients: “Egg salad (eggs, mayonnaise, mustard, onion, herbs, spices, salt), bread, lettuce (contains eggs & wheat)”. What dark secrets lie hidden in those simple words “mayonnaise” and “bread”? Hopefully not calcium disodium EDTA. The warning that egg salad contains eggs is, of course, consistent with the warning that peanut butter contains peanuts, or that items just removed from the oven may be hot. Anyone selling anything in this degenerate society these days has to assume that everyone is halfwitted, in order to avoid being sued for not telling them the glaringly obvious; unfortunately, the assumption is correct depressingly often. However, rumor has it that the sinister fiends of Food, Inc. are now infiltrating and taking over the “health food” market and passing off their vile poisons under false pretenses. Which naturally (sic!) leads to the boom in farmer’s markets and home gardens. We are gradually learning not to trust any food store—the latest member of the long list of institutions we can’t trust. They’re all out to get us.

So, why do I keep eating this shit? Because it’s cheap and I’m lazy. That’s how they entrap everybody, isn’t it?