Warning: Do not read while eating store-bought bread

by Leanne Ely www.savingdinner.com

Let me ask you something...

Would you purposely put a bowl of wood chips in front of your children in the morning, pour some milk on it, hand them a spoon and tell them to eat it?

How about slicing up some pizza topped with human hair clippings, swept off the floor of a barbershop in China. Yummy, right?

Let me tell you, if you knew half of what's in the stuff you eat on a daily basis, you would probably lock yourself in a greenhouse until you could manage to grow all the food you need to feed yourself and your family for the rest of your days.

Between the stabilizers that are put in bread and bread products to keep it "safe" for human consumption past a certain date, to the chemicals used to rinse meat to "save" us all from E-coli poisoning, as a nation, we ingest some awfully nasty stuff in the run of a day.

I'll explore this topic more in future posts, but for today, I'd like to tell you about a couple of pretty common food additives that you probably would like to know that you're putting into your mouth.

Cellulose. We're all starting to get the message that we need to have lots of dietary fiber in our diets. This translates to big food companies trying to stuff more "fiber" into their products to get us to buy them. Well guess what? When you see "cellulose" on your food labels it has most likely been taken from wood pulp or cotton. This won't really hurt you physically, but when you consider that you paid for food made with wood...well...that hurts in its own way, now, doesn't it? 

L-cysteine. This one really grosses me out, people. I actually don't want to get into it too much here because it's seriously disgusting, so feel free to do your own Google search on this one. There is a ton of information out there. L-cysteine is a common ingredient that you'll find in commercial bread products. It's actually added to all kinds of baked products because it helps to speed up the process of industrial dough making. It's found in everything from pastries to pizza. And guess what? It comes from an abundant, natural and cheap source of protein. Human hair. And that's all I'm going to say about that. 

Cochineal extract and Castoreum. You know that pretty pink color in your Starbucks Strawberries & Creme Frappucino? It comes from bugs. Crushed bugs = cochineal extract. Why they don't use...oh I don't know...strawberries to color their food I will never know. Speaking of ice cream, when you see the word "castoreum" on your "naturally flavored" strawberry or raspberry ice cream container, you're actually eating a product containing liquid taken from the castor sac of a beaver, combined with beaver urine. It comes from the butts of beavers, folks. Mmmm, mmm, good!

That's about all of this I can take for now! LOL!

So, learn anything new here today? 

What's for dessert?