The 10 Weirdest, Grossest Ingredients in Processed Food

Mmmmmm... Twinkies.
Spongy.
Phallic.
Cream Filled.

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According to the Oxford, rennet is partially curdled milk taken from the stomach of an un-weaned calf. It actually evolves from the practice of storing curd in GOAT stomachs. The longer the curd stayed, the firmer it would get, until the stomach lost it's properties.

But, even so, all manner of mold, fungi, bacteria, microbe, etc., are used in cheese making. Some are mixed in, some injected later, some swabbed on during ripening.

One could say that the holes in Swiss cheese are bacteria fart bubbles. The holes in bread are yeast fart bubbles.

Next time your little brother gets on your nerves, you could say "Hold on there, fart bubble!" And then you could say it's just holy bread.

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sir, do you realise this means that that many vegatarians eat Animals products without knowing it??

Answer;
It is no problem for many vegans animals are;
smiling, soft things you can caress, you can play with.
Beetles and ants are NO animals at all...

i.e. in some popular ICE cream eaten by many nonmeat eaters are;

protein from the tails and heads of the fish industry but who cares.

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Some of these sound suspicious. Some are telling me things I already knew. Some are telling me things I didn't know, but even if the were true, I'd say "So?....".

A very lame, biased, juvenile chunk of pro-vegan propaganda trying to gross people into becoming a vegan, as if becoming one will save you from creepy ingredients.

Get real. A lot of what you eat these days, and what you ate 100 years ago contains a whole list of things you'd rather not think about while you're eating it. That's food. Deal with it.

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Reason to buy food to cook yourself...Whats that? OH.. buyer beware...

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Essentially, the author is saying that some of the weird natural ingredients traditionally used in non-corporate food production have not yet been fully replaced by factory chemicals; therefore we should not eat meat.

That's like saying the main problem with global warming is that there is not enough exploitation of tar sands, therefore, we should all live in treetops.

Talk about your silly religious beliefs...

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This was shrill, and barring a couple of items, completely uninformative.

OMG food is made of bugs!!!!!!!1!1

Plus, silicon dioxide is in those wonderful organic potatoes, unless you peel them, and remove one of the better sources of trace minerals (outside of meat or supplements) I know of.

Seriously, that list is trivial compared to what's in most perfumes, or cheap hot dogs...

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Sorry, but I'm just not "grossed-out". It's all how you define things....and this author has chosen to define these various ingredients in a manner calculated to afford the maximum shock-value.

Yes, we all know that shellac is made from beetle carapaces.....but who cares? If you really want the "sensationalist" effect, then please tell us how many people have been sickened from ingesting any of these "gross" ingredients.

Please...go toss the tidbit somewhere else....Bleh!

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Because they're made from ground-up Yellow Pages.

BTW, the red dye from the crushed-up beetles has a long history. The Aztec and Maya used the cochineal beetles to extract red dye. So it is ancient and organic and certainly not gross.

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Also goes by a few other names.
Can be produced from cow bones. Often used for water filtration, both for some bottled and in some places tap water, and in the refining of sugar. Not many precessed foods that are not covered by those two!

This is one of those things, along with whey, and red colourings that give veggies i know the most problems.

Personally I'm in the 'if your going to kill it use as much of it as you can' group so have no problem with that or rennet in cheese production.

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Not necessarily with food.

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Yucko, right! But it's the truth. Animals poop and then it grows into vegetables! And the rain? Every drop of rain has been peed out of some super-gross yucky animal's bladder, probably a million times over.

Gross-er-oni! Vegetarians actually want you NOT to eat the animal, but rather to eat its processed poop and urine! Whatta buncha sickos!

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ohh my, you mean we actually eat stuff from bugs! I thought only 3rd world barbarians did that! ewwwww

(note: I consume a mostly plant based diet, but hell, it is absolutely short sighted and stupid to get all persnickety about eating things like bugs. They're much lower on the food chain and are energetically more efficient. Somebody worried about the planet ought to be encouraging people to find alternate sources of protein, as people in many parts of the world do, every day. Beef fat on the other hand, I can do without)

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"Sugar of lead" (cooked lead oxide + vinegar) was added to wine in late 1500s / 1600s Europe and basically poisoned the common alcoholics of that era. This coincided with the expulsion of protestant religious fanatics from Holland and England to... America.

So, America was founded by lead-poisoned alcoholic protestant misfits.

We cannot afford to cease the practice of adding industrial by-products to food, or we risk losing the next future America.

Now that we've bombed the heck outta them moonie bastids, can we please start expelling America's ideological misfits to the next great frontier on the moon?

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Gotta eat my sausage burrito now ! MORE FOOD ! MORE TAX CUTS !

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Most of these examples don't even pertain to veganism.
This article was mildly entertaining but learning that there might be human hair in my bread really isn't an arguement for veganism. Maybe an arguement for Atkins but not veganism.

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Oh crap another stupid Alternet article about vegans, full of the usual misinformation and scare tactics.

So there's bugs in your food - big effing deal - there's a ton of bugs in every scoop of flour you use making your vegan meals. Get real. Eat Meat but not a lot.

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That's F@cking gross!

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Yeah? Well, there's hydrochloric acid in your stomach, you moron! This is like saying that the steel frame of a building is made from iron ore, or that wheat flour is made from dirt (actully, whole wheat flour is a polyglucose starch (C6H10O5) with trace amounts of chromium, copper, and zinc. Yum, yum!).

People like the author of this piece weild a "yuck" factor as a rubber knife aimed at people with limited scientific knowledge. Ignorance is their byword and fear their method, and they are more like the idiots promoting the idea of death panels and sex clinics in schools as part of health care reform than they are rational human beings. They're pathetic.

#1: Yeast needs to grow; growing things need fertilizer. The ammonium nitrate used in preparing the dough is consumed by the living yeast. So?

#2: Yeah, right. They just bring in a beaver and have it fart in the candy mix. No, it's a processed product.

#3: So what? I'm not a vegan.

#4: It's not crushed whole bugs, you nitwit, it's an extract - you know, like vanilla extract? It is a natural product - what's unnatural about it? Would it be better to make it from petroleum - you know, crude oil, drilled from the ground (like most other food dyes)? Besides, lots of people around the world eat bugs.

#5: "...secretions of the female lac beetle..." And honey is the secretions of the female insects of the genus Apis - eeew!

#6: Lanolin - an animal product, and another extract.

#7: What's the problem? It's another extract, not an actual hair or feather, and hair and feathers are not the only sources. It's an essential nutrient for infants and the elderly, and the hair-keratin extraction process has largely been replaced by the hydrolysis of carboxylic acid. It's also been proven to reduce the damaging effrects of alcohol consumption, and that's arguably a good thing.

#8: Coal tar is the basis for almost every topical dandruff and psoriasis product made; red food dye is no longer made from coal tar, by the way, and when you break human body tissue down into its hydrocarbon components, it's not that much different from the gasoline we pump into our cars.

#9: Again, another extract. Animal rennet is only used in parts of Europe; there aren't enough calves to supply the world demand. In North America, rennet is grown from molds, fungi, yeasts and bacteria (yum!), making it more like penicillin.

#10: They'd like you to believe that because silica is used in food products, someone just goes to the beach to scoop up a handful of sand to throw into the pot (silica is also used in artificial sweeteners to keep it from forming indissoluable lumps). It could just as easily be called ground glass. "...a name you might remember from high school chemistry class..." The author of this piece sounds like someone who flunked high school chemistry and dropped out immediately thereafter.

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was number 1: ammonium nitrate. For all I know that might be bad for you, but the argument here was that because it is -- ugh -- a "chemical fertilizer"(as though some other kind of fertilizer has no chemistry), it must be bad for you. It makes the soil more productive, so it does something nasty to you? How about sodium chloride, which definitely makes soil UNproductive: you can sterilize ground that way, and even small amounts of nice organic seawater are a problem. Does this mean we should allow zero salt in our diet?
Arguments against ingredients should use actual effects, not gross-by-association smears.

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Chik'n'cutlets and Meatless Brats. Give me cheese, even if for some reason modern people forgot that it's been around for thousands of years, and isn't really appropriately lumped with "processed" or fast foods. Although Chik'n'cutlets certainly are.

Veganism is an eating disorder.

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It provoked some of the funniest comments I've ever seen on AlterNet.

Laughing my ass off, a great way to start the day! Thanks.

Oh, I guess I should make a comment on the story itself. Aside from the provocation of laughter, it was a total waste of electrons.

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The thinking behind this article falls into the "ew, gross! category instead of science or commonsense. Of all these ingredients only coal tar is a problem, it's a proven carcinogen. The rest are just "ew gross!" Every indigenous society uses animal products to maintain health, aborigines use lovely green ants as a vitamin C source (taste like lemonade!) beef fat saved the Lewis and Clark expedition from grave illness with diarrhea (too much salmon!) etc. etc. Issues of toxic contamination are genuine health considerations, as are ethical issues of humane treatment of animals. Otherwise, it's just squeamish ignorance. 'Scuse me, I have to go humanely butcher one of my old hens for Sunday dinner....

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why are there ads for Bob McDonnell, the uptight Republican running for VA governor, on my AlterNet site?

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