Okay, I’m watching Letterman just now and he has this cooking guy on. I think he used to be “the naked chef” from the old food channel (do you remember when you actually watched that crap?). Anyway, his name is Jamie Oliver and he’s gained a lot of weight since then.
On Letterman, he dropped a gross-out bomb about what the food industry has been putting into our food. Although I was shocked, angry and outraged – I was mostly amused and knew that I had to share it with you – after not until I doubled-checked the accuracy of what he said. Well it was true, but opened the door to even more disgusting stuff you put in your mouth every day.
Starting with Jamie’s gross-out:
Next time you eat raspberry ice cream or candy, think about the ingredient castoreum it contains. What’s castoreum, you ask. Officially, it's a “natural flavoring” so how bad can it be? Well, it’s made from – wait for it – the extract of the anal glands of beavers. Both male and female beavers. All sorts of questions immediately come to mind: How do they harvest the glands? Does someone squeeze them to get the extract? And the one question that almost everyone quickly get around to: Who was the first person to discover that beaver asses taste good?
Some more quick goodies … every brand of gum made in the U.S. since World War II is made of plastic. Styrene-butadiene rubbers and polyvinyl acetate to be exact. It’s the stuff that makes it chewy. A natural rubber called chicle made from tree sap used to serve that purpose but you know how much that costs now.
Do you like red food? Well the “natural color” (there’s that word natural again) called carmine or carminic acid is made by harvesting thousands of red insects, drying them and then boiling the solution to get the natural red dye.
Speaking of bugs, that shiny coating on your kid’s Skittles and the sprinkles (some people know them as jimmies) comes from the secretions of the female lac beetle. The same substance is also called shellac and used to coat your kitchen table.
Jello. Everyone knows it’s made of gelatin. Gelatin is made from ground cow hoofs. How about some Jello shots.
Do you like Wendy’s chili? It used to be pretty good but I haven't had any in years. One of its ingredients is silicon dioxide. That’s sand. They use it as an “anti-caking agent.”
And this from just about seven minutes of research. I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.
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