Are You Gonna Eat That?
8th October 2023
Let’s say you’re scanning a few labels of convenience foods you have on hand. The “modified starch” in your tub of rice pudding sounds more innocuous than hydroxypropyl distarch phosphate, one of its scientific synthetic names. But maybe the “yellow prussiate of soda” vs. sodium ferrocyanide in your rolled oats is a closer call.
No matter. You as an average consumer in an industrialized nation probably don’t give either of them much thought, even though you are estimated to ingest 17.6 pounds of food additives per year. You assume they have been deemed safe for consumption and that they serve a purpose: to emulsify or stabilize, to extend shelf life, to keep bits from clumping together. Better living through chemistry!
What these ingredients have in common, though, is that they are among the thousands of “self-certified” industrial substances on the FDA’s list of GRAS additives, or Generally Recognized as Safe. Certified, as in, declared safe not by government standards, but by or on behalf of the companies who make and use them.