The Solution To Record Meat Prices: The Return Of Pink Slime
A few months ago we reported that while the Fed is seeing nothing but hedonic deflation as far as the eye can see, food prices - for whatever reason but "certainly not" due to trillions in liquidity entering a close system so just blame it on the weather - were soaring to record highs. Among them was the price of beef, which in 2014 alone has soared by the most in over a decade. This led the US Department of Agriculture to warn of "sticker shock" facing home chefs on the eve of the Memorial Day holiday weekend, the unofficial start of the U.S. summer grilling season.
According to the USDA, reported by Reuters, conditions in California could have "large and lasting effects on U.S. fruit, vegetable, dairy and egg prices," as the most populous U.S. state struggles through what officials are calling a catastrophic drought. Alas, the USDA had nothing to say about the Fed's unprecedented desire to reflate the US economy which is still suffering from the catastrophic depression which started nearly 7 years ago.
More:
The consumer price index (CPI) for U.S. beef and veal is up almost 10 percent so far in 2014, reflecting the fastest increase in retail beef prices since the end of 2003. Prices, even after adjusting for inflation, are at record highs."The drought in Texas and Oklahoma has worsened somewhat in the last month, providing further complications to the beef production industry," USDA said.Beef and veal prices for the whole of 2014 are now forecast to increase by 5.5 percent to 6.5 percent, a sharp advance from last month's forecast for a 3 to 4 percent rise. Pork prices are set to rise by 3 percent to 4 percent, up from a 2 to 3 percent advance expected a month ago.The USDA said overall U.S. food price inflation for 2014, including food bought at grocery stores and food bought at restaurants, would rise by 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent in 2014.That is up from 2013, when retail food prices were almost flat, but in line with historical norms and unchanged from April's forecast."The food-at-home CPI has already increased more in the first four months of 2014 then it did in all of 2013," USDA noted. At-home spending accounts for about 60 percent of the U.S. food CPI.
Ok we get it: soaring food prices are not only already here but are set to surge even more, especially for those who rather eat real meat than mystery meat dispensed with largesse at your favorite $0.99 fast food outlet.
So what are food processors to do facing soaring meat input costs and unwilling to suffer bottom line hits? Why, return to that old staple of unknown origin of course.
Here comes Pink Slime... again.
According to the WSJ, "finely textured beef,dubbed "pink slime" by critics, is mounting a comeback as retailers seek cheaper trimmings to include in hamburger meat and processors find new products to put it in."
Proving that popular memory lasts at best a couple of years, it was only in 2012 when sales of pink slime, processed from beef scraps left after cattle are butchered, collapsed in 2012 after a "social-media frenzy spurred by television reports raising questions about its legitimacy as a beef product. The ingredient's two largest producers, Beef Products Inc. and Cargill Inc., closed plants that made it and cut hundreds of jobs—while defending the product's quality and pointing out that the U.S. Department of Agriculture deems it safe."
What really allowed the scrapping of pink slime, however, was the broad decline in prices of non-alternative meat, as in the real deal. However, now that meat prices are soaring again (all weather mind you, nothing to do with the Fed), it is time for US consumers to eat "hedonically-cheap" "meat" once again.
Today, Cargill sells finely textured beef to about 400 retail, food-service and food-processing customers, more than before the 2012 controversy, though overall they now buy smaller amounts, company officials said. Production of finely textured beef at Beef Products has doubled from its low point.The resurgence is being driven, in part, by an aversion to something many consumers and companies find even less pleasant than the pink-slime nickname: red-hot prices. Prolonged drought in the southern Great Plains has shrunk U.S. cattle supplies to historic lows. The retail price of ground beef soared 27% in the two years through April to a record $3.808 a pound, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.That means serious sticker shock for U.S. consumers preparing to fire up their barbecues for Memorial Day weekend—the traditional start to the summer grilling season. The week leading up to the Monday holiday is typically one of the biggest sales periods for ground beef, with an estimated 160 million pounds likely to be sold during that stretch this year, according to CattleFax, a Colorado-based research firm.How much of that burger meat contains finely textured beef isn't clear. Prior to the flurry of media attention in 2012, Beef Products estimates, the ingredient was in as much as 70% of the ground beef sold in the U.S. at retail and in food service. Cargill and Beef Products decline to give a similar estimate now, but they say sales have rebounded sharply from their 2012 lows.
So... 100%? But at least the Fed will soon be able to claim that "food" (or byproducts rather, but who cares) prices are plunging, even as it itself announced that food prices in its cafeteria have soared by up to 33% as Zero Hedge reported yesterday.
Meanwhile, it's a feeding frenzy, pardon the pun, out there by those who know too well that Americans don't really care what they shove in their mouths as long as it i) tastes kinda meaty and ii) is cheap.
"Two years ago, no one would return our calls," said Jeremy Jacobsen, spokesman for BPI, which closed three of its four plants in operation in 2012. "Now some of those same people are calling us unsolicited, and we don't have the sales staff to maintain the new business."
Finally for those who may have forgotten the prehistory of Pink Slime, here it is again. First, a look at how it is made.
And its recent turbulent history.
The ingredient began attracting wider attention last decade. A 2009 New York Times article cited a 2002 email by a USDA microbiologist who called the product "pink slime." TV chef Jamie Oliver used the epithet in an on-air critique in 2011.After ABC News reports in 2012 scrutinized the product, a public backlash ensued, spread through social media. That prompted several supermarket chains, including Kroger Co. and Supervalu Inc. to drop the beef additive from their meat cases. Neither Kroger nor Supervalu sell the product today.Critics were partly repulsed by images of the product—some of which the industry says were false—and by the idea of using chemical treatments such as ammonia gas on food products. Supporters of finely textured beef pointed out that many foods contain similar traces of ammonia naturally. BPI says it uses a form of the chemical called ammonium hydroxide. That compound falls under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's "generally recognized as safe" category, which means they are safe when used as intended.Officials including Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack defended the product's safety.But its sales fell so sharply that they effectively reduced total U.S. beef supplies by 2% in 2012, according to agricultural lender Rabobank.BPI, based in Dakota Dunes, S.D., said it lost contracts with 72 customers, many over the course of one weekend in March 2012, forcing its production to slide below one million pounds a week at their nadir that year. Customers were "dropping like flies," said Mr. Jacobsen, the BPI spokesman.BPI in 2012 sued ABC and several other defendants for defamation in South Dakota Circuit Court, seeking at least $1.2 billion in damages. The state's Supreme Court on Thursday affirmed a decision by a lower court to let the case proceed, denying an appeal by ABC. The case hasn't gone to trial. Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said the news organization continues to vigorously contest the charges.At Cargill, about 80% of sales of the product evaporated "overnight" in 2012, said John Keating, president of Cargill Beef. The company ceased production at a plant in Vernon, Calif., in 2012, laying off about 50 workers. Mr. Keating said the lost business also contributed to Cargill's decision last year to idle a beef-processing plant in Plainview, Texas, where about 2,000 people were laid off. At other plants, production slowed.Cargill's meat processors and chefs have been working with its customers to find new uses, such as frozen meatloaf and sausages, though 90% to 95% continues to go into ground beef, Mr. Keating said. Earlier this year Cargill, based in suburban Minneapolis, began to label boxes and packages of ground beef containing the product. Mr. Keating said the labels haven't much affected Cargill's ground-beef sales."It's a product we're working very hard to reintroduce," Mr. Keating said.
And a product which the Fed will be delighted when it is reintroduced because remember: it is all about hedonics. And there is nothing in the Fed rulebook that says replacing meat with "meat" if only to keep prices lower, is a bad thing. As long as the Fed academics running the centrally-planned economy get to keep eating the real thing of course.
Four Things Grosser Than Pink Slime
| Wed Apr. 18, 2012 6:00 AM EDT
One way that nasty bacterial strains from factory farms make it to "the community"--i.e., you.
The specter of "pink slime"—pureed, defatted, and ammonia-laced slaughterhouse scraps—has caused quite the uproar over the past six weeks. (The latest: Propublica has a greatexplainer on pink slime and other filler products.) The current fixation on pink slime may well lead to the demise of the product; already, supermarket and fast-food chains and school cafeterias are opting to stop adding the stuff into their burger mixes. The company's maker, Beef Products International, has had to temporarily shut down three of its four plants in response to collapsing demand, which doesn't augur well for the company's long-term health.
But I'm wondering if focusing on the ew-gross aspects of "lean, finely textured beef" (as the industry calls it) doesn't miss the bigger picture, which is that the meat industry's very business model is deeply gross. Even if pink slime is purged from the face of the earth, the system that produces our meat and related products (eggs, milk) won't be fundamentally changed. A while back, I identified something about meat production that's "even grosser than pink slime"—proposed new rules that would privatize inspection at poultry slaughterhouses while dramatically speeding up kill lines. Here are four more.
1. "Rodents on egg conveyor belts." Want to see for yourself what it is like inside a teeming livestock confinements—or at least read an account from a journalist who's been inside one? Good luck. The meat industry strictly protects its facilities from public view. That's why animal-welfare groups have taken to sneaking camera-toting undercover agents into facilities posing as employees. Over and over again, what they record is horrific. The latest: An undercover Humane Society of the United States investigation found stomach-turning conditions at a facility run by Pennsylvania egg giant Kreider Farms. Here are some highlights:
• Rodents on egg conveyor belts
• Rotting corpses in cages with hens laying eggs for human consumption
• Hens stuck by their heads, legs and wings in cage wires
• Mummified hen carcasses in cages
• Overcrowding of hens in cages that only provide 54-58 square inches [less than 8 inches by eight inches] of living space per hen (well below the national average for egg-laying hens)
• Flies in barns so thick that the investigator had to scrape off his boots after walking down each aisle
• Piles of dead hens on floors of barns
• Dead flies in hens’ feeding troughs
• Barns so dark that workers needed head lamps and flashlights
• Ammonia levels so high that workers often had to wear masks
• Manure and eggs from some barns tested positive for salmonella
• Each worker is tasked with overseeing more than 100,000 animals.
There is nothing unusual about what the Humane Society found at Kreider. Last year, an enormous Iowa-based egg producer caused a salmonella outbreak by releasing more than half a billion tainted eggs. It was only after the fact that the FDA, which is supposed to oversee the egg industry, took a hard look at the company's operations. The resulting reportreads an awful lot like the Humane Society's recent one. A picture emerges of the company's egg-laying facilities as salmonella-ridden, dilapidated hovels characterized by rodent infestations, flies, and, everywhere, feces—both from the laying hens themselves and from wild birds scrounging for free feed.
Other investigations by animal-welfare groups have shown similar conditions at hog and cowconfinements.
2. Chickens on sex hormones. What sort of additives is the livestock industry feeding the billions of creatures in its cages? Hard to say, because feed rations are a tightly guarded trade secret. So researchers at Johns Hopkins recently took a backdoor route to getting information on feeding practices: they analyzed the ground-up feathers of post-slaughter factory-farmed chickens (a product known as "feather meal"), on the principle that what birds eat gets taken up by their feathers. (Abstract here.)
The researchers analyzed 12 samples—10 from the US, two from China. First, the headline finding: Two of the US samples contained something called norgestimate, which the study disturbingly calls a "sex hormone." The researchers found a range of other pharmaceuticals in the feathers as well. Ten of 12 samples contained caffeine, and the same number showed acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol. Four US samples contained diphenhydramin, active ingredient of Benadryl. Both Chinese samples contained the antidepressant fluoxetine, aka, Prozac. Prozac? What can all of this mean? It's not hard to conjecture that factory-farm operators dose birds with caffeine to keep them awake and eating as long as possible—the better to fatten them up for slaughter—and then hitting them with painkillers and antihistamines to calm them down for needed rest. (The sex hormone norgestimate, the authors report, is used to reduce anxiety in birds.)
Then there's the antibiotics. It's not surprising that all 12 samples contained traces of at least two and as many as 10 different antibiotics. We know that the livestock industry gobbles up 80 percent of the antibiotics consumed in the US, which is a pretty gross fact in and of itself. The weird part is that 6 of the ten US samples contained a class of antibiotics that have been banned in poultry production since 2005—suggesting that some poultry producers may be feeding their birds products that have been prohibited by the FDA. If producers really are flouting the FDA's mandatory rules, that's sobering news, given that the agency is crossing its fingers that the industry will comply with its new "voluntary" set of antibiotics guidelines.
The authors say that the industry generates 4 billion pounds of ground-up feathers each year. What happens to it all, and all of the weird pharmaceuticals it contains? According to the authors, a significant portion of it gets put into livestock feed—for pigs, cows, fish, and even, yes, chickens. It also ends up on cropland as fertilizer.
3. Flies and cockroaches carrying antibiotic-resistant pathogens from factory farms to surrounding towns. I've written a lot about how the meat available at supermarkets routinely carries bacteria resistant to a range of antibiotics—and how that uncomfortable fact occasionally leads to deadly outbreaks, like one last year involving a Cargill plant in Arkansas that sent out 36 million pounds of turkey tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella. Well, there's another way bacteria strains make their way from factory farms to what public-health officials call "the community" (i.e., potentially, you): through the cockroaches and flies drawn to the vast amounts of manure produced on factory farms. For apaper published last year in the journal Microbiology, researchers from North Carolina State and Kansas State universities took one for the team — i.e., the public. They did something few of us would want to do: rounded up common flies and roaches hanging around factory hog farms, and tested them to see what kinds of bacteria they were harboring.
Their finding? More than 90 percent of the insects sampled carried forms of the bacteria Enterococci that are resistant to at least one common antibiotic, and often more than one. In a press release, study coauthor Coby Schal, entomology professor at NC State, put the situation like this:
The big concern is not that humans will acquire drug-resistant bacteria from their properly cooked bacon or sausage, but rather that the bacteria will be transferred to humans from the common pests that live with pigs and then move in with us.
4. Slaughterhouse workers sometimes get weird brain disorders along with their crap wages. In a long and devastating Mother Jones article last summer, Ted Genoways described the plight of workers at the "head table" of a factory-scale pig-processing plant. Not only did they come down with a strange brain condition, apparently as a consequence of breathing in pulverized pig brains, but they also had to endure the evasions of their employer, Hormel, in its effort to escape liability.
The story's brain angle is spectacular, but the broader narrative Genoways lays out is all too routine. In a single long piece, Genoways lays out the crude history of US meat over the past 80 years. We get the unionization of the kill floor in the wake of Sinclair's The Jungle, the post-war emergence of meat packing as a proper middle-class job, the fierce anti-union backlash of the '70s, followed by corporatization, scaling up, plunging wages, and then, well, all manner of hell breaking loose, graphically documented by Genoways.
By 2005, things had gotten so dire for meat-packing workers that Human Rights Watch—typically on the lookout for atrocities in war zones—saw fit to issue a scathing report on their plight. The report's title says it all: "Blood, Sweat, and Fear." Here's a taste:
Constant fear and risk is another feature of meat and poultry labor. Meatpacking work has extraordinarily high rates of injury. Workers injured on the job may then face dismissal. Workers risk losing their jobs when they exercise their rights to organize and bargain collectively in an attempt to improve working conditions. And immigrant workers—an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry—are particularly at risk. Language difficulties often prevent them from being aware of their rights under the law and of specific hazards in their work. Immigrant workers who are undocumented, as many are, risk deportation if they seek to organize and to improve conditions.
For their trouble, meatpacking workers earn median annual income of $24,190, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—barely above the poverty line for a family of four.
So, yes, pink slime is gross stuff. Call me crazy, but I prefer my burgers without added ammonia. But it's not even close to the grossest thing about our meat-production system—far from it.
‘Pink slime’ is the tip of the iceberg: Look what else is in industrial meat
Photo by Cobalt123.
You didn’t think I’d miss my chance to weigh in on the latest round of pink slime discussions, did you? Rather than recapitulate the horror that is your favorite form of “lean finely textured beef,” I will instead point you to my favorite statement in defense of pink slime. It was given by American Meat Institute Director of Scientific Affairs Betsy Booren to NPR:
“This is not the same ammonia you’d use in cleaning supplies,” explains Betsy Booren of the AMI Foundation. “It’s a gas, it’s a different compound, and it’s a well-established processing intervention that has a long history of success.”
First off, the AMI Foundation? AMI’s own website identifies the group as “a national trade association that represents companies that process 95 percent of red meat and 70 percent of turkey in the U.S. and their suppliers throughout America.” Foundation my arse.
And granted, I’m no chemist — but my understanding is that the form of ammonia used in cleaning products is typically ammonium hydroxide. And the form used in pink slime is … ammonium hydroxide! The only difference is the household cleaner is a liquid and pink slime is treated with a gas.
But that’s not really the issue. When you have to defend your food production practice by saying, “Hey, at least we don’t use household cleaners on it!” you know you’ve got a big problem.
What pink slime represents is an open admission by the food industry that it is hard-pressed to produce meat that won’t make you sick. Because, I hate to break it to you folks, but ammonium hydroxide is just one in a long list of unlabeled chemical treatments used on almost all industrial meat and poultry.
Helena Bottemiller of Food Safety News dug up this United Stated Department of Agriculture document [PDF], which lists dozens of chemicals that processors can apply to meat without any labeling requirement. Things like calcium hypochlorite (also used to bleach cotton and clean swimming pools), hypobromous acid (also used as a germicide in hot tubs), DBDMH (or 1,3-dibromo-5,5-dimethylhydantoin, which is also used in water treatment), and chlorine dioxide (also used to bleach wood pulp), to name just a few.
All these chemicals can go on meat. Not that you’d know it, because both the industry and the USDA keep it on the down-low. In fact, they work together on this. The USDA requires processors to label certain approved antimicrobials, such as salt, spices, and even lemon as ingredients, but not their hard-to-pronounce brethren. Why not? Perhaps because it might shock and disgust consumers to know how thoroughly their meat must be chemically disinfected before it can be sold. USDA’s head of food safety Elizabeth Hagen told Bottemillerrecently that, “Just being honest, I don’t think your average consumer probably knows a lot about how food is produced.” She’s right. We don’t know the half of it — and the more we find out, the angrier many of us get.
Andy Bellatti recently wrote a piece he called “Beyond Pink Slime,” in which he enumerates all the problems with industrial meat production that led it to this point. And in many ways pink slime is the perfect embodiment of a food industry gone off the rails.
In short, they took meat that was too dangerous to feed to humans, disinfected it so thoroughly that a block of the stuff will make your eyes water, and then celebrated the fact that they’d created a two-fer (it’s a food! it’s a disinfectant!). The industry embraced their creation so completely that around 70 percent of all supermarket ground beef now contains the stuff. But this goes way beyond hamburger. As Tom Philpott points out, pink slime is used in a huge variety of products including “hot dogs, lunch meats, chili, sausages, pepperoni, retail frozen entrees, roast beef, and canned foods.” By industry standards, it is nothing short of a food “intervention” success story.
The irony, of course, is that the 2010 debate over pink slime brought to light evidence that this treated meat product is not nearly as reliable a disinfecting agent as its maker asserted. It was likely those indications that led the fast food industry, in most ways farther ahead of the food safety curve than supermarkets or school food providers, to abandon the ingredient late last year. And now that the mainstream media has taken notice of pink slime, even the USDA has had to back off its wholehearted endorsement for it in school lunch.
But don’t let the appearance of a back-and-forth debate fool you. Pink slime is truly worse than other forms of disinfected treated meat since the trimmings used in pink slime are known to harbor pathogens at high levels before treatment. Should it disappear from store shelves, however, we can rest assured the meat that remains will continue to be treated with other industrial chemicals. Because that’s — pure and simple — the only way the industrial meat industry can prevent its products from making people sick.
I’d like to see more consumers and media outlets asking why exactly that is.
Pink Slime is Only the Beginning! 24 Disgusting Things You Probably Didn’t Know You Were Eating
Pink Slime is Only the Beginning!
Do you know what you are eating? Of course you do, right? You are buying a food product and putting it into your own mouth.
But do you really know what you are putting into your body?
If you aren’t making most of your food from scratch or at least being very careful about what you purchase, chances are you are consuming some pretty scary stuff.
I am going to cut right to the chase in an effort to help steer you onto a road of better health. Below I outline some of the scariest ingredients found in many of those convenience foods that you have come to not only rely on, but also enjoy.
My intention is to open your eyes to the damage that the packaged food industry is causing YOU. They don’t care about you or your health. They pretend to with clever marketing and all kinds of food labeling tricks. But the fact of the matter is that they are selling products with some really scary and downright disgusting ingredients/additives.
Let’s do this, shall we?
I’m going to start with the ingredients that aren’t so obvious. These are things in foods you are consuming that you probably have no clue are in there. These items are not written out in lay-person terms on that nutrition label.
1. Hek 293 (Aborted Human Fetal Kidney Tissue Cells)
Sorry if this one disrupts your day but the fact that FETAL TISSUE is actually used in the creation of ANY consumable product is shocking and appalling on so many levels! Senomyx, the company responsible for this atrocity, states that “the company’s key flavor programs focus on the discovery and development of savory, sweet and salt flavor ingredients that are intended to allow for the reduction of MSG, sugar and salt in food and beverage products. Using isolated human taste receptors, we created proprietary taste receptor-based assay systems that provide a biochemical or electronic readout when a flavor ingredient interacts with the receptor.”
What Senomyx is NOT telling the public is that they are using HEK 293 – human embryonic kidney cells taken from electively aborted babies to produce those receptors. So what products are you consuming that have been developed using fetal tissues? Head over to this article to find the 19 drinks, and you are probably consuming at least one of.
2. Beaver Anal Glands as Flavoring
The anal glands of a beaver, known in the ingredient labeling world as castoreum, are used to enhance the flavor of raspberry candies and sweets.
3. Beetle Juice in Sprinkles and Candies
You know that shiny coating on candies like Jelly Bellies or Starburst? Or the sprinkles on cupcakes and cookies? That shine is made possible by the secretions of the female lac beetle. The substance is also known as shellac and commonly used as a wood varnish.
4. Crushed Bugs as Red Food Coloring
Carmine or Carmic Acid are pretty common ingredients in most any product with a “non-natural” red hue. How do manufacturers get this beautiful color? They kill thousands of bugs at a time (all varieties) and the dried insects are boiled to produce a liquid solution that can be turned to a dye using a variety of treatments. And trust me, there is nothing healthful about those “treatments.”
5. Coal Tar as Red Food Coloring
Coal tar is listed as number 199 on the United Nations list of “dangerous goods,” but that doesn’t stop people from using it in food. The coloring Allura Red AC is derived from coal tar and is commonly found in red colored candies, sodas, and other sweets.
6. Sheep Secretions in Bubble Gum
The oils inside sheep’s wool are collected to create the goopy substance called lanolin. From there, it ends up in chewing gum (sometimes under the guise of “gum base”), but also is used to create vitamin D3 supplements. Lanolin isn’t the most horrible additive out there but if you are a vegan/vegetarian, you may be unknowingly consuming an animal product.
7. Fertilizer in Bread
While chemical fertilizers inevitably make it into our produce in trace amounts, you would not expect it to be a common food additive. However, ammonium sulfate (a common fertilizer) can be found inside many brands of bread, including all of Subway’s sandwich rolls. The chemical provides nitrogen for the yeast, creating a more consistent product.
8. Human Hair and/or Duck Feathers in Bread Products
Do you love your morning bagel or English muffin? Enjoy that “healthy” whole grain bread? Chances are, it contains either human hair or duck feathers, and it’s your guess as to which. The substance, called L-cysteine or cystine, is used as a dough conditioner to produce a specific consistency. While artificial cysteine is available, it is cost prohibitive and mostly used to create kosher and halal products.
9. Sand
Sand is hidden in all kinds of food products under the innocent name of silicon dioxide. Manufacturers use sand as an “anti-caking agent,” especially with fast foods products that need to last for days and days over a heater.
10. Insect Fragments and Rodent Hair
FDA laws allow for an average of 30 insect fragments per 100 grams of processed peanut butter. In that same half cup of peanut butter, you’ll also find at least one rodent hair (on average).
11. Pink Slime
If you have been paying attention to the news this year, the term “pink slime” may not be news to you. In a nutshell, “pink slime” is the term used for a mixture of beef scraps and connective tissue (formerly used only for pet food and rendering) that is treated with ammonia hydroxide to remove pathogens like salmonella and E coli. These so-called “Lean Beef Trimmings,” are then added back into ground beef products to make it “affordable,” appealing to the consumer’s eye (since it will be a nice, bright, “fresh” pink color), and leaner in fat content.
12. Pink Paste
Before reshaping, foods like chicken nuggets, hot dogs, bologna and pepperoni look like a disgusting sludge of pink paste. This is done through a process called mechanical separation, which is a cost-effective way to “smooth out” bone remnants left after the de-boning process. The process results in excessive bacteria, which is fixed by washing the meat in ammonia. To cover up that delicious ammonia flavor, the meat is then re-flavored artificially and dyed to resemble the type of meat it once was.
Now what about ingredients that you see all the time on labels but that you ignore OR assume are perfectly safe?
13. Genetically Modified Ingredients
Not currently listed on the label because the GMO industry absolutely does not want people to know which foods contain GMOs. Nearly all conventionally grown corn, soy and cotton are GMOs. They’re linked to severe infertility problems and may even cause the bacteria in your body to produce and release a pesticide in your own gut. This is a huge topic and I suggest you read more about it here.
14. High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)
Loaded with “unbound” fructose and glucose molecules, studies have shown that the reactive carbonyl molecules can cause tissue damage that may lead to obesity, diabetes, and also heart disease. HFCS is made from genetically modified corn and processed with genetically modified enzymes. To make matters worse, studies have recently revealed that nearly half of tested samples of HFCS contained mercury.
15. MSG (Monosodium Glutamate)
A flavor enhancer that tricks your body into thinking there is more protein in the food than is actually there. MSG allows food producers to cut down on the quality and cost while making up for the loss of flavor caused by the omission of real ingredients by adding this flavor enhancer. This nasty stuff is HIDDEN in all kinds of foods that claim to be MSG free! Yeast Extract is the most frequently hidden form of MSG. Find out what else MSG disguises itself as by reading this chart.
16. BHT (Butylated Hydroxytoluene)
This common additive used to prevent oxidation in a wide variety of foods and cosmetics is listed by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” on the basis of experimental findings in animals. It is also used in jet fuels, rubber petroleum products, transformer oil and embalming fluid. As if this were not enough, the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) warns that BHT should not be allowed to enter the environment, can cause liver damage, and is harmful to aquatic organisms.
17. Phosphoric Acid
This is the acid used in sodas to dissolve the carbon dioxide and add to the overall fizzy-ness of the soda. Phosphoric acid will eat steel nails. It’s also used by stone masons to etch rocks. The military uses it to clean the rust off battleships. In absolutely destroys tooth enamel and wreaks havoc on your gut.
18. Polysorbate 60
Short for polyoxyethylene-(20)- sorbitan monostearate, this emulsifier is widely used in the food industry. Made of made of corn, palm oil and petroleum, this gooey mix can’t spoil, so it often replaces dairy products in baked goods and other liquid products. Did you read that? Petroleum. As in oil!
19. Yellow #5
Almost all colorants approved for use in food are derived from coal tar and may contain up tp 10ppm of lead and arsenic. Also most coal tar colors could potentially cause cancer. Yellow #5 isn’t the only problem food dye. They are ALL bad and ALL linked to very serious health issues, especially in children. Check out this list of foods that contain food dyes.
20. Propylene Glycerol
Think getting that fast food salad is a good idea? To prolong crispness, packaged salads are dusted with Propylene Glycerol, a chemical commonly found in antifreeze. In its concentrated form, the chemical has been known to cause eye and skin irritation.
21. Propylene glycol alginate (E405)
This food thickener, stabilizer, and emulsifier is derived from alginic acid esterified and combined with propylene glycol. It is typically used as a food additive but it has many industrial uses including automotive antifreezes and airport runway de-icers.
22. Bacteriophages
Food production companies have long sought ways to combat unhealthy microbes found on processed foods such as lunch meat and hot dogs. A few years ago, the FDA approved the use of bacteriophages (a.k.a. viruses) that help kill these dangerous microbes. Basically, viruses are purposely being added to your food to improve shelf life.
23. Hidden Beef Additives
Many fast food chicken items contain beef additives used to enhance flavor and alter health statistics. Check the ingredients, and you’ll see no sign of beef. That’s because such beef additives are listed as “extract” or “essence.” If you avoid red meat or are a “poultry only” vegetarian, you are actually unknowingly consuming beef.
24. Textured Vegetable Protein
Usually made of soy protein which is extracted from genetically modified soybeans and then processed using hexane, an explosive chemical solvent. It is widely used in vegetarian foods such as “veggie burgers.”
