Chew On This #2

Chew On This is an excellent book about fast food. It combines startling facts with humorous opinions. The sections I recently read are written in stunning detail about the ingredients in modern fast food. A good example is the section about artificial flavorings and artificial colorings. The co-authors, Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson, explain exactly what goes into the mysterious "natural and artificial flavorings and colorings" that are present in almost everything a fast food restaurant sells.

Flavorings began to be widely used in the mid-1900's. They were used to replace the flavors lost during processing. For example, cooking and heating large amounts of food and the process of canning, freezing, or dehydrating food destroyed most of the good natural taste. The natural taste of food is extremely complex. For example, the taste of coffee is made up of thousands of chemicals. The chemicals used as artificial flavors that go into most foods are supposed to mimic nature as closely as possible and should not present any danger to peoples' health. The book described an example of the way artificial flavors are used in fast food. To make a strawberry milkshake at home, all you would need is ice cream, strawberries, sugar, and vanilla. However, a strawberry flavored milkshake from a fast food restaurant would contain extracted milkfat and preserved milk, sugar, sweet whey, high fructose corn syrup, guar gum, mono- and diglycerides, cellulose gum, sodium phosphate, carageenan, citric acid, red food coloring, and artificial strawberry flavor. But what is in the artificial strawberry flavor? Let's just name a few chemicals, such as amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, and many more. These chemicals may be safe to be consumed alone in the short term. However, little is known about their long term accumulative effects when all ingested together. Studies suggest that artificial chemicals may cause hyperactivity in children. These chemicals should simply be avoided if possible.

Artificial coloring is used to mimic the natural color of food. These artificial colorings have many chemicals, which may have long term side effects to health. However, manufacturers now go beyond natural food colors, and use colors like bright blue and purple. This has led to accidental poisonings because young children drink liquid laundry detergents that are the same color as many popular sports drinks. Surely, I don't want to turn my skin blue because I drank too much Gatorade!