Today’s Americans are eating “pretty much whatever they want”, but few actually know what goes into “whatever they want.” Many companies have masked stomach churning ingredients with terse names such as natural ingredients, castoreum, and L-Cysteine.
Ruining vanilla and strawberry flavors forever is the beaver anal gland. This gland is used to mark a beaver’s territory and is located near the anus, but apparently is marking our food too. This gland is labeled under “natural flavors” or “Castoreum” in vanilla and strawberry flavored ice creams, while true vanilla is labeled as “vanilla extract”.
Junior Samantha Manookian said she thought, “It sounds disgusting; it sounds like something I’d never eat.”
L-Cysteine is a product many have most-likely have consumed multiple times. This amino acid is used in commercial company’s breads to prevent mold. What is it really? Human hair or duck feathers that are gathered from barber shops and added during processing. In the end, locks of love may not be the only one getting some of your hair.
High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is a genetically modified sweetener and has been around since the late 60’s. Recently scientists fed rats HFCS for their entire lifetime and the effects on the lab rats were outrageous; the rats had tumors the sizes of their heads growing on their bodies. HFCS is an ingredient in numerous amounts of processed foods and has tried to have been justified, but there is no way that HFCS is good when this comes of it.
“I think they should inform us if there is possibility of cancer or find us a substitute ingredient that’s not going to kill us later on.” said sophomore Nafisa Musofa.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows many flawed flavors in their foods. For every 225 grams, about one cup, of your mac n’ cheese there are 225 insect fragments and 4.5 rodent hairs, but according to the FDA that’s okay. In frozen fruit punch they allow either one maggot or five or more fly eggs per 250 grams. Knowing what goes into the foods, the FDA must not eat any of the ones they approve.
Vegetarian and freshman Christian Beardsley said, “That is disgusting and I think they should not allow [any] parts whatsoever because people could be allergic to things like mosquito eggs.”
The FDA will label many things as “generally recognized as safe (GRAS)”, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these ingredients are sanitary or appetizing. Ignorance may be bliss, but ignorance won’t mask the reality of food that fights back.