14 Things You Really Don’t Want To Know About Your Groceries
. This is a great article, enjoy
http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelysanders/dark-secrets-how-food-groceries-are-made
= new reply since forum marked as read
"Red- and pink-colored products are often dyed with cochineal extract, aka the bodies of crushed-up teeny insects."
Yes, those beetles have been used for red coloring by humans for thousands of years for everything from food to paint. Is there a problem with it?
"Many ice creams are thickened and stabilized with carrageenan, which is actually a seaweed extract."
Holy fuck! Something from a plant is in my FOOD! The sugar in ice creams comes from an extract of a grass too. So?
"This is how the ingredients for packaged veggie burgers get mixed together:"
Okay. Is it supposed to be mixed by elves in small bowls or something? It looks like someone in a sanitary facility wearing a sanitary outfit to mix ingredients in a sanitary container using a sanitary implement. What is mixing a hundred pounds of ingredients together supposed to look like?
"Not-from-concentrate orange juice is processed with “flavor packs” to artificially ensure that each bottle tastes exactly the same."
This one is cute, as it goes on to say - "Because the added flavor is technically derived from orange oil and extract, it doesn’t need to be specifically listed in the ingredients."
OMFG! They are putting stuff from ORANGES in ORANGE JUICE! How is that even legal!
"Most commercial milk is made by combining, heating, homogenizing, and repackaging the milk of hundreds of cows."
Repackaging the milk of hundreds of cows? You mean it's not sold IN THE COW? This, above all of them, is the real head-scratcher on the list for me since it is the one in which I have direct experience. I worked for local dairy farmer as a teenager and I did not realize at the time, how horrific it was that when we put the milking machines to work on the cows, all of the lines were going to the same tank. I had no idea there was a "one cow per bottle" rule.
Greek yogurt manufacturing produces millions of pounds of (toxic) acid whey waste every year, and no one knows what to do with it.
Why single out "Greek yogurt" here. This is true of ALL yogurt, as well as ALL cheese. Does anyone know what "cheescloth" is, and why it is called "cheescloth"? Because the process of making cheese - all kinds of cheese - has for thousands of years depended on using a fabric sieve to pull the curds out of the whey and separate them.
"Maraschino cherry producers bleach the fruit with chemicals and then marinate it in huge vats of corn syrup and dye to turn the cherries red again."
I want to see a head count of everyone who thought maraschino cherries came from marashino cherry trees. Bleached? With chemicals? I insist they start bleaching them with something other than "chemicals".
Seriously, where is the chucklehead who thought maraschino cherries were some kind of natural product.
Next thing, you'll tell me that Swedish Fish aren't really fish and don't come from Sweden.
"Hot dogs are filled with a gloopy blend of meat trimmings, fat, and starch or “cereal filler.”
OMG, it's "gloopy". I can't imagine how anyone can tolerate something "gloopy" being used in manufacturing SAUSAGE.
Shredded cheese is packed with cellulose — aka refined wood pulp — to keep it from clumping.
Anyone who buys "shredded cheese" is, in my book, too stupid to care what is in it. A grater costs next to nothing, and will pay for itself pretty much the first time it is used to shred cheese, instead of buying it in.... a plastic bag... made from chemicals.
milk products). Got a big kick out of your points on dairy (multiple-cow packaging) and cheese-making 
creatures to walk the planet. And the Jersey and Brown Swiss calves are so stinkin' cute!
I am an expert in the use of the microwave, radio, tv remote, and toilet to name just a few.....
this writer missed the point on a lot of these. Appears the research was pretty superficial. The point is carrageenan. Extracted from red seaweed. It is suspected of being carcinogenic, but it definitely has harmful effects on human intestinal cells.
It's used as a thickening or gelling agent or as an emulsifier to keep ingredients in food from separating. It’s injected into raw chicken and other meats to help them retain water. It’s used to keep cocoa from separating from milk in chocolate milk. It appears in ice creams, jellies, cottage cheese, toothpaste, fruit gushers, infant formulas and much, much more. Pretty useful stuff, I’d say. And the fact that Carrageenan is also used to de-ice frozen airplanes makes it even more impressive.
But lots of folks think it's pretty dangerous. Here's just one link: http://www.cornucopia.org/2012/06/eminent-scientist-addresses-impact-of-carrageenan-in-food/
Sort of the same thing going on with the cochineal (red dye). The real scandal here, if there is one, is that the coloring is rarely labeled. Some people have allergies. Some people just wouldn't like to eat bugs if they knew it. (not exactly vegetarian And some have religious issues.
There's some substance underneath several of the issues in the article, but it's delivered as yellow journalism and really pretty shallow.
at "IN THE COW?" 
However, you may be on to something: people will pay good money for single malt/single barrel whisky, so perhaps an enterprising dairy can cash in with a single pasture/single bovine bottling. Preferably not too aged...
Those poor, poor oleo cows. All they do all day, trapped in their barns, is get milked, milked, milked.
I delivered milk to people's homes in high school we did not do it that way. We put cows in a trailer and took them to each house. Then, i milked one of the cows directly into the bottles. Of course that was in ancient times. The early 1960s. I don't hold with this newfangled technology.
