I was going to write something completely different for today, but then I was checking through my Google Reader this morning (Saturday), just before I leave for my holiday, and realised that this is something I need to write about as soon as possible.
Methuselah of Pay Now Live Later has a tendency to write open letters to companies to query or complain about their products. To quote Methuselah, he writes “primarily to complain about ingredients or deception”.
Do you know what is in your food?
Do me a favour and go to your kitchen cupboards right now (unless you are out of the house of course) and get out some packets and tins of items that you, personally, use as base ingredients. This being the final day before I go away, our cupboards are pretty bare, but I’ve still got the following sorts of things: coconut milk, dessicated coconut, stock cubes, yoghurt (for today’s workout), cottage cheese (for Chris’s final meal before we leave), 85% chocolate (because every woman needs a bar of dark chocolate hidden at the back of the cupboard).
What is in them? Just the item written on the front, or are there plenty of other items included? Chemicals? Wheat and gluten products? Preservatives? Stabilisers? Colourings? How many of the labels tell you it is pure, original or premium on the front and the back reveals that there are lots of “hidden” extras to keep it in that condition?
Do you really know what's in your food?
Unless you have been label-watching every time you go shopping, there is a good chance that you’ll get a surprise from at least one item in your kitchen cupboards.
How do my (bare) cupboards do?
Most of the things in our house are fairly additive free. The only two that fail the “hidden extras” test are stock cubes and coconut milk, both of which I was already aware of.
Stock cubes I use sparingly for those moments when I don’t have a block of homemade stock in the freezer and I need to make a quick sauce. I use Oxo and accept that the nature of this is that it contains such horrors as monosodium glutamate, wheat flour and some stuff that I can’t even pronounce. I know there are stock cubes out there which are wheat and gluten free but I like the flexibility of the different ways I can use Oxo and so I accept the things in it and instead use it minimally, about once every two months.
The coconut milk is a different matter entirely. This should be a key ingredient in our house, especially when Chris is on a bulking cycle. Have you ever tried to bulk up on a Paleo diet without using coconut milk? Getting the calories in is pretty difficult. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to buy coconut milk without the extras.
What’s in my coconut milk?
I shop at a supermarket that sells two types of coconut milk. One costs £1.89 per can and contains additives to make it “premium”, the other costs 42 pence per can and contains even more additives. Since I get additives either way, I elect to buy the one where I get 4.5 cans for the price of a single can of the other brand.
The supermarket tends to cycle through the cheap brands. Every few months the brand being sold as the cheap brand changes. At one point it was Dunn’s River, currently it is made by Consumers Pride. However, the story on the preservatives front is usually the same (although Dunn’s River are brilliant and I really don’t mind that the texture is a bit lumpy and the colour a bit grey).
Here is the ingredients list for my current coconut milk:
- Coconut extract (75%)
- Water
- Thickener: Guar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Sodium Carboxymethyl Cellulose;
- Emulsifier: Distilled Monoglycerides, Polysorbate 60;
- Antioxidant: Sodium Metabisulphite E223.
Delicious! And at the end of this list, which feels more like something that I would see written up on the blackboard during a chemistry lesson at school than something I want to be eating, it says: “Contains no preservatives or colouring”. Well done to them for avoiding those evil preservatives and colourings!
Take action now!
I can’t congratulate Methuselah enough on having taken some action. He wrote to Tropical Sun when their labels started showing additives to a product that had previously been pure (according to the label). Surprisingly, they replied.
You can read his original letter and their response on his site. However, their response is contradictory and, frankly, concerning so he is following this up. He will be adding a link to the blog post when he responds to the Tropical Sun email and now he would like our help. Here’s a quote from his blog:
It’s important companies understand the strength of feeling around issues like this. I think they just assume I am some crackpot, with entirely unrepresentative views.
So if you agree with me, please drop a comment, however small, onto the post. I will wait a couple of days before emailing Kev at Tropical Sun so that (I hope) we have a ‘comment petition’ to reinforce that there plenty of people who are concerned about this issue.
If this is something you believe needs addressing, do please add your voice to the petition. Thanks!
I’m reminded of this video, which I’ve included on a links post before:
Related posts:
Yeah … I’m not actually opposed to food additives as a matter of principle. I mean, if they actually could do me harm, I suppose I am, but who knows, really, what the ‘safe’ levels are of many of these things?
And a lot of the additives given fancy names are fairly innocuous, naturally occuring substances.
So, I don’t know that I can really support ths one. Caveat emptor, and all that.
And monosodium glutamate? Not harmful, is it. It *may* cause headaches in a few people. But then so do other foods that are perfectly fine for the rest. And let’s face it, it makes food taste better.
Fair enough. I think my concern is in the fact that nobody really knows what food additives do or don’t do and I accept your point that they do often use fancy names for perfectly acceotable things (especially food colourings which are often naturally occuring colouring, but nobody wants to put “crushed beetle casings” on an ingredients list…). If I felt more strongly about food additives then I wouldn’t carry on stocking the Oxo cubes or coconut milk. For me, pricing is a definite decider and I will sometimes go for the cheaper item with the added bits.
What bothers me most is that in some cases it is virtually impossible to get the food item without the extras included and, in a few cases that knocks out certain foods for people who should be able to eat that food because they can’t get it without the extra item that they are allergic to (often some sort of gluten compound). I wouldn’t complain if it was just the ready-meals etc since if you are choosing to eat such things then you are already shunning some of the responsibility, but I feel it is different when they are base ingredients.
Great links for the weekend! // Oct 29, 2010 at 21:13
[...] did a post highlighting some recent correspondence that Methuselah had with Tropical Sun about the inclusion of various additives in their coconut milk. Methuselah went back to Tropical Sun and they have responded with a much [...]