Following on from the last post about food and its sources, I will let you into a little game I play when I am in the supermarket.
There are three things which are routinely added to the food you eat, and which ought to be avoided where possible. These are artificial flavourings, artificial colourings, and preservatives. If a product is advertised as free from any of these, you can bet your life that what is not being said is the real story. You can translate the advertising or packaging as follows:
NO ARTIFICIAL FLAVOURINGS!!!
Full of artificial colourings and stuffed with preservatives.
NO ARTIFICIAL COLOURINGS!!!
Flavours from a chemistry lab, and it won't rot in a million years.
NO PRESERVATIVES!!!
But the colourings and flavour all begin with the letter E.
I say this on the basis that the manufacturers know that artificial additives are unpopular, and therefore if they were able to claim (honestly) that the product was made without a certain type of additive, they would do so, and in capital letters and a snazzy font.
Check the ingredients list on the side of the packet for the additives not mentioned in the headline. You will see I am right.
OK, confession: white (undyed) smoked haddock doesn't taste the same. Guilty on this one.
Or, you could claim a full-house by buying a box of Quorn.
ReplyDeleteThe fungus-extract manufactured in large vats by Imperial Chemical Industries. ;-)
Heh. Exactly. I once shared a house with a guy who was into TVP (textured vegetable protein), which was like mashed-up cornflakes packets and marmite mixed together. We didn't die from it, and it was cheap, but - never again :)
DeleteOh, I prefer undyed smoked haddock! I always buy it.
ReplyDelete"Flavours from a chemistry lab, and it won't rot in a million years."
When you look at the 'eat by' dates on some of the ready meals...
*shudders*
I know I ought to buy undyed, but it just isn't the same ...
DeleteIf you think your food system is bad, don't eat in the USA where they let any kind of chemical or process into our food. The government only cares about money unfortunately and where other sane countries ban a lot of ingredients, they don't here. Processed food is so scary.
ReplyDeleteIt's no wonder we're vegan. I think most of our fruits, veggies and beans are safe if we buy organic (non GMO)
Over here, we have a pretty good system of food safety. The problem appears to be that until this crisis, no-one was actually following it :) I avoid processed food where possible (and fail often, I might add), but I'm happy that proper meat from the butcher and clean veggies are as safe as is reasonable. We are very locky here in that there is a lot of local produce available. In the city, it's much more difficult.
DeleteYou can't go wrong with road kill!!!?
ReplyDeleteI had heard (long ago, unverified) that hitting an animal at speed explodes its internal organs and drives the contents of the gut out into the flesh, and that roadkill was therefore contaminated with gut bacteria and potentially quite hazardous. I suppose it depends on the nature of the 'kill', and whather it was done (on a bike at least) with nice smooth plastic or a knobbly TKC80. Although, come to think of it, the TKC would make a nice job of tenderising a bunny steak.
DeleteSo it turns into a haggis, above say 25mph...good to know :-)
DeleteBlearghhh
DeleteThose artificial flavourings and colours aren't necessarily totally artificial. They are sometimes based on extracts from natural products, or the essence of flavour/colour from a natural product. It would surprise you to find that many E numbers are actually totally natural products. It's just the EU and it's bureaucratic paper work that desires to codify everything that gives them numbers rather than nice normal names.
ReplyDeleteAs for the food safety system - it's all based on paper work and nothing else. All the responsibility is in the end customer (the shop or supermarket) but they are the ones with the least information on the product. It doesn't matter if meat is processed or not, both types could be switched for something different.
In my view, now is the best time to buy cheap processed food. The amount of testing now going on now proves that the food is really what it is. DNA testing is never going to be routine (it's bloody expensive) but this is the only time it's being carried out - so take advantage of it.
Agreed that the additives question is much more complex than additives = bad in all cases. My post was more on the issue of how advertisers accentuate the good and ignore the less good, as you might expect. Just amused to see that wherever 'no flavourings' is highlighted, the list of ingredients invariably includes shedloads of the other two.
DeleteThe horsemeat crisis is yet another example of how reducing everything to forms and targets and service guarantees and traceability actually makes things crap. And, of course, any attempt to simply block the dodgy stuff from entering the country in the first place falls foul of EU rules on free trade.
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ReplyDeleteSpam spam spam spam' wonderful spam.....
ReplyDeleteThanks for the heads-up, Nikos. Most spam arrives on posts older then 14 days, so it is automatically quarantined. For some reason, the spammers got hold of a newer post this time and it all got through. Right, no more Mr Nice Guy. Moderation is on.
Delete(Ought to point out that Nikos' comment was in response to about 40 spam posts that I have now deleted.)
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ReplyDelete