Food for Thought

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Food for Thought

Bug parts, human hair, and skatole (don't ask) are all ingredients in

the food you eat.

FORTUNE

Monday, July 7, 2003

By David Stipp

 

 

Say what you will about American food, at least we Yanks haven't

afflicted the world with calamities like haggis, the Scottish staple

made of boiled sheep's stomach, or hakarl, an Icelandic offering of

putrid shark. In fact, it's hard to think of a down-home American

recipe that would warrant inclusion in The Joy of Cooking a Dog's Ex-

Breakfast—the obvious title for a collection of demented dishes like

haggis. Unless, that is, you happen to know about the human-hair

extract in U.S. baked goods, the crushed-insect residue in many of

our foods, and the flavorings made with ... something unimaginable.

 

Those aren't contaminants. They are official ingredients that the

food industry rarely tells us about. Some yuck factors are fairly

obvious, such as the blue mold spores in Stilton cheese. But most are

hidden, since it's perfectly legal for manufacturers to lump

additives such as insect extracts under the comforting term " natural "

on food labels—or simply omit them (unlike artificial ingredients).

How many times have you seen " essence of squashed bug " listed on a

food package?

 

Yet if you scan the label on, say, a container of strawberry yogurt,

you may spot " carmine " —a popular coloring concocted from insects.

Used to give red, pink, and purple color to everything from ice cream

to lipstick, carmine is made from a pigment called cochineal.

Cochineal, in turn, is extracted from dried female insects that feed

on a cactus found in Peru, the Canary Islands, and other places. The

pigment builds up in the insects' bodies; after the six-legged moms

deposit their eggs on the cactus and die, their rotting carcasses,

along with the eggs and hatched larvae, are brushed off the plants,

crushed, and then baked, boiled, or steamed to produce cochineal.

 

Carmine may not be yummy, but it is GRAS. That's food-industry speak

for Generally Recognized as Safe, a classification almost as all-

embracing as " natural. " But skeptics say carmine can cause severe

allergic reactions, and hence should be classified as CRUD—Considered

Really Unsafe to Devour. (I just made up that category.) Several

years ago the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer

watchdog in Washington, D.C., petitioned the FDA either to ban

carmine or to require that manufacturers disclose its creepy-crawly

source on labels. So far the agency hasn't responded.

 

If you want to rid your diet of bug extracts, you'll need to avoid

not only reddish foods but also many shiny ones. Shellac, made from

the excretions of insects, is used to glaze everything from apples to

coffee beans. If you get really obsessed, you may starve; blended-in

insect remnants are everywhere. The FDA permits a typical jar of

peanut butter to contain over 100 bug parts. A can of tomatoes can

include one maggot or up to nine fly eggs.

 

But you'll find stranger things than insect parts if you hack into

the American cuisine's heart of darkness. Perhaps the creepiest

ingredient is l-cysteine. Sometimes derived from a human body part—to

wit, hair—it seems to have come right out of The Mistah Kurtz

Cookbook. (It also can be extracted from feathers or produced

synthetically.) An amino acid, l-cysteine is used to enhance the

stretchiness of dough, which facilitates its rapid processing by

machines into cookies, pizza crusts, bread, doughnuts, bagels, and

other baked goods.

 

Discovering whether a product contains stuff extruded from human

bodies isn't easy. When I put the question to a spokesman at

Interstate Brands, which makes Wonderbread, Hostess, and other baked

lines, he said, " I've no idea of the source. We don't use enough l-

cysteine to be interested. " A Sara Lee spokesman snapped that there

was no hair extract in his company's products but declined to say how

he knew. A spokesman at Puratos Group, a Belgium-based supplier of

bakery ingredients, was friendlier: " Very commonly l-cysteine is from

human hair, " he conceded, " but I'm 99% sure that ours comes from duck

feathers. "

 

Oh, well. Next question: Whose hair do we eat, anyway? Industry

experts say most human-derived l-cysteine comes from Chinese women,

who, in a case of life imitating O. Henry, help support their

families by peddling their tresses to small chemical-processing

plants scattered across the People's Republic.

 

The baking industry's hairy little secret takes the cake for weird,

but among all consumables, cigarettes stand out as richest for

bizarre ingredients. According to tobacco industry documents divulged

in court cases, various brands of cigarettes include cocoa, pine oil,

bee's wax, prune juice, cognac, vinegar, beet juice, apple skins,

butter, flour, yeast, maple syrup, urea, skatole, and several hundred

other additives.

 

To those with a smattering of chemistry, skatole is the most

startling—it is one of dung's key components. (Don't freak: The

skatole added to consumables is synthetic.) To flavorists, the fact

that cigarettes are spiked with simulated essence of excrement

doesn't seem odd at all. At low levels, skatole actually smells nice.

Indeed, it is often added to jasmine fragrances and flavorings, says

Frank Fischetti, a senior flavor chemist at Wynn Starr Specialty

Foods & Flavors in Allendale, N.J.

 

Similar olfactory paradoxes are at work in perfumes, says Fischetti.

Rose-scented fragrances often contain small amounts of civet

absolute, an extract from the anal scent glands of civet cats, weasel-

like creatures of Asia. Yet " when you taste concentrated civet, it

reminds you of fecal matter, " he adds. Taste it? " In the old days we

got civet from Asia, " says Fischetti. " It came packed in water

buffalo horns. One of my jobs was to tell if it really was civet. You

had to taste it to make sure. " (Instruments now do the job.)

 

Civet was once widely used in meat flavorings, cheese, and other

foods. Like skatole, its role is to help blend a mix of flavors or

fragrances together. But today a cheaper synthetic version, civetone,

has replaced the real thing in most products except high-end

perfumes.

 

One member of the scatological fragrance family hasn't yet been

synthetically replicated: castoreum. Extracted from beavers' anal

musk glands, it is sparingly used to impart a " smoothing and rounding

note " to raspberry flavorings. Which raises an issue that's been

crying out for attention for several paragraphs: How did things like

beaver excretions find their way into food in the first place? We'll

let that one cry itself to sleep; we wouldn't want to spoil your

appetite.