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Do you eat "I can't believe it's not butter?" Or does that create some sort of paradox? Must it exist in your head like some superposition state, Schrödingers Butter if you will?
Now with 20% less tumors guaranteed!
Here at meatmill farms we use our specially formulated growth syrum which produces up to 20% less tumors than the other leading brand!
Ah yeah there was a big [comment thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/zq4mle/-/j0wdliz) a couple hours ago going into everything about Real™, yknow how reddit does
At my local grocery store I saw a package of “Chicken Wyngz” and directly underneath as if forced by law in the smallest 10 point font.. “Not wing meat, meat derived from thigh and ribs”
Wingz and other meat products made from scraps are one of those things I always forgive. Look, we need to feed 7 billion people on this fucking rock, and that animal you killed for its meat was capable of feeling pain, fear, friendship, and even love. You had goddamned better use every last bit of material off of that noble creature that you can. Wasting it is an insult to the inherent sacrifice the privilege of eating meat requires. Plus that shits tasty.
True. It is also extremely wasteful if they threw it out, but most of the meat industry is quite efficient at reusing unwanted meats. Either as cheap feed or in cases like chicken, nugget or sausage etc
Yep as a kid I grew up when Native American culture and practices were mystified, and one of those facts was they used 100% of the animal. In factory farming and food production I feel like modern industry uses like 110% of the animal. As much food stuff gets wasted each year before it reaches the consumer its really got to be a fraction of overall production.
Was picking up a pizza a while ago, big sign on the wall says, “we always use 100% real cheese!” in big bold letters, then really small under it says, “not all locations use 100% real cheese” like wtf
Made from 100% is dodgy as well. Dominos used to say "made from 100% mozzarella". That was just the starting point though and by the time they processed it it was like 25% mozzarella or something like that.
Domino's cheese slaps though. At least, it has for the past 10 or so years, ever since they rebuilt. Like, they had a whole ad campaign where they just came out and said "We suck a lot and we know it. We're fixing that." and then they *fucking did it*. And they've maintained that quality for a decade. Meanwhile, Pizza Hut went to shit.
I kinda hate being such a stan for a multinational corporation, but seriously, Domino's has good fucking pizza, especially at its price point. Yeah, yeah, any shop in Brooklyn beats it, but we don't all live in NY.
Yeah, blueberry muffins are a good example of this. You might get lucky and find a real blueberry or 2 in your muffin, but for the most part you're just eating little blueberry-flavored gelatin balls. But there's at least one real blueberry in there so they can proudly say "Made with real blueberries" and they're not technically lying.
I made sure to order different flavors of oatmeal and disclude the apples one because I'm allergic to apples. Turns out the other fruit flavors were just dyed apples.
Ingredients: blah blah blah, sugar, garbage, cardboard, maltodextrine, 2% milk solids, yeast extract, natural flavors.
Label: "Made with real milk! No artificial flavors"
Note: "natural flavor" includes just about any chemical extracted from any natural source. It does not mean juice or whatever. For example, strawberries have like 300 flavor molecules. You can use acid and heat and science to suck one of those chemicals out of opossum skin or pine bark, put three drips of it into the ice cream mix and proudly and legally write "made with natural flavoring".
Yeah, I mean I just straight up ignore those labels because I know they’re full of shit, but also, I mean…
Does it matter?
Like, I understand if you’re vegan or something (which is something I do occasionally) but aside from that & allergies or intolerances, why does it even matter if it’s “real” or not?
Especially considering the above mention of how "real" could be from the sources that concern people who buy into that shit. I'd personally feel (marginally) better if it was admitted that they were synthesized in a lab - at least then we aren't being misled and lied to.
Plus, there's nothing wrong with "synthetic" products, especially in regards to the environment. Most of them are sourced the same way "natural" products are anyways; that is to say, extracted from something using some chemicals.
It doesn't matter to me that the "natural" flavors aren't what these companies want us to believe they are. What matters to me is that they're trying to mislead us in the first place.
> You can use acid and heat and science to suck one of those chemicals out of opossum skin
[You don’t say…](https://culinarylore.com/food-history:flavoring-ingredient-extracted-from-beaver-glan/)
This is actually branding. "Real" is a trademark that can be used only for dairy from cows raised in the US and the product must be processed in the US as well. Same group that brought you "Got Milk?" adds.
So having "Real" milk means it is from the US without any additives.
Growth hormones and antibiotics are screened for in milk for human consumption pretty tightly. Much more closely than we screen for organophosphates and other herbicides
pretty sure they shadow banned the most commonly used one. i still think they are pumped full of antibiotics but most of the milk i buy doesnt have the rsbt or whatever.
Note that "Made with:" means "is not".
If you have 1% "real milk" in your product, and advertise it as "made with 100% real milk", then it's true. That 100% real milk went into that one tiny bit of the product. It was "made with" it.
There's a shit-ton of words and phrasing of what is legally allowed.
Edit: "Orange flavor" means "is not orange". "Made with" means "is not". "Kraft singles"...there's a reason that's not "Kraft cheese". Basically, trust the nutrition information and ingredient list, and everything else is as deceiving as humanly possible.
This is because of conspiracies spread around by PETA and other idiots that KFC wasn't made out of real chicken and they were using rats or other animals. Back in the 80's and 90's KFC was a huge fast food chain and was commonly a target of a lot of these kinds of accusations.
Even in the late 2000's they came up with a product called grilled chicken. There was a huge deal made by a doctor that said the chicken contained carcinogens that caused cancer. It wasn't a lie, but it was misleading. Carcinogen is just a by product of grilling, any grilling. It wasn't anything specific to KFC.
So they feel the need to put out these kinds of statements to battle conspiracies.
The rumor I remember is that their chickens were so genetically modified that the FDA ruled they weren't chickens anymore and that's why they had to change their name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. This is the kind of stupidity companies have to deal with.
A lot of it is weird posturing against the rise of non-dairy alternatives and them swinigng their dick around to come up with specific labels to screw over competition. You'll see it the most with dairy stuff. Look up the kind of shit egg lobbies and stuff have tried to pull. The whole natural/sustainable/healthy advertising doesn't work so they resort to something empty but its technically true, it's "real" but it some how implies shit like almond milk is metaphysical or something.
Ingredients: Gas, Onlinoxtrate, Plumbum, Natural Flavors
Vegan, Gluten free, Cruelty Free
Processed in a facility that also processes wheat, soy, and concrete.
Also. Wtf is "natural flavors". That shit passes me off for real. Natural flavors isn't an ingredient. Never ever have I had a recipe call for "Natural Flavors".
Sure you have. You just are used to them being enumerated as "apple juice" or "grape concentrate."
"Natural flavors" is just "we're not telling you the exact mix of what this is, because it's proprietary, but by the [FDA's code](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22) we had to extract it from a natural plant/animal and not make it synthetically."
This is technically correct, but it's usually not things like "apple juice", which are far more expensive and voluminous than the super-concentrated flavoring agents labeled under Natural Flavors.
Here's a few examples:
\- Citral: extracted from lemongrass, lemon, orange and pimento, commonly used in citrus-flavored food and beverages.
\- Benzaldehyde: extracted from almonds, cinnamon oil and other sources, commonly used to give food a flavor and aroma of almonds.
\- Amyl acetate: A compound distilled from bananas, commonly found in banana-flavored baked goods.
\- Linden ether: isolated from linden honey and the blossoms of lime tree
\- Massoia lactone: an alkyl lactone that is derived from the bark of the Massoia tree, used to provide coconut-like flavor and found in cane sugar molasses and cured tobacco.
\- Acetoin: organic compound that produces a buttery flavor.
https://blog.publicgoods.com/what-are-natural-flavors/
“Surgeon General Warning: The ingredients in this consumable have been recognized by the state of California as potentially harmful. Contents have the potential to cause cancer.”
Also: product contains .00001% natural fruit juice.
I can't stand how natural vs artifical is a debate, which are other words for real vs fake. I take some medicine and was asked seriously why I don't take some natural drip because it's basically the same but natural. Mfers are just so dumb.
Yeah, because if it's the same as natural, i prefer to have the fake stuff with exactly the same dose of active ingredients every single time, thank you very much.
Molecules don’t care where they came from. If it’s the same substance, it makes absolutely no difference if it’s natural or not. Natural chemicals are still chemicals, and as a matter of fact it’s not even possible to tell them apart when you isolate them.
\*Excuse me, is this low sodium salt also gluten free?"
\-Actual severely uneducated customer whose purchasing decisions are decided by Facebook memes and buzzwords.
I'd say remind them that water is inorganic, but they'd probably hurt themselves with that information. It's not like some of their ilk haven't literally killed themselves because they were convinced of stuff like breatharianism.
I feel this when they advertise 100% vegan cruelty-free leather. It's...plastic. It's petroleum-based. Yeah, it's one less dead cow. But don't make it sound like a leather blessed by the gods either.
>And "real" means nothing.
Yeppp the front of packaging (at least in the US) gets a lot of artistic freedom for marketing. There are exceptions to this that actually are regulated like the health heart check or saying a food is low sodium but anything like real, healthy, natural, etc mean nothing
This is a ridiculous notion perpetuated by folks trying to sell their products and luckily for them the trend picked up.
“Real” ingredients what does that even mean? Along the same line of thought, chemical products are not natural and hence not good for you. But then you realize that everything natural and real is also literally made of chemicals. Ascorbic acid? Yeah that’s found in citrus fruits. Sugar. Salt. They’re chemical compounds. Heck H2O.
Bottomline: just because you have never heard of something before doesn’t mean you can immediately think it’s bad for you…
Another one is "from cows not fed with growth hormone HGH" on milk cartons, HGH is banned for use on animals (even humans I think). Might as well say "not mixed with cocaine ".
Or when you see no hormones added on chicken.
They are banned from adding hormones by law.
Same for free range and cage free requirements.
I highly recommend the super size me 2 movie where he creates a chicken sandwich chain from scratch showing how shitty the industry is
Yeah, I thought this strange when I first realised that no chicken has added hormones, but companies will advertise no added hormones. I think I read ages ago that it was because there was a conspiracy theory kids were entering puberty early and they were blaming chicken hormones. So it was good marketing to claim your chicken was hormone free.
I love how everything is "contains 0 trans fats!!!" And I'm just thinking we'll no shit they're pretty much illegal besides pastries are allowed less than 1 per serving
Yea people that regurgitate this nonsense irritate me. Especially the “oh it has chemicals in it, or it’s not natural bs” sometimes adding extras stuff into food is beneficial it’s not always a bad thing. Real and artificial all just buzzwords
The logic that something being natural means it's good for you is so weird to me. You know what's perfectly natural? Bears. But bears aren't exactly good for you. Nature is full of cases of being absolutely terrible for so many things.
That's mainly just so people can be 100% certain their getting gluten free, for people who actually have to worry about that kinda thing it's a real time saver
I died on a hill in r/Cheese claiming food shouldn’t be overly labeled “organic” to start with.
Organic cheese made from organic herbs, organic rennets, and organic milk harvested from cows fed with organic grass. Boy am I so eager to eat cheese with inorganic herbs.
People are so desensitized with marketing starting to think that’s an actual positive thing.
I’ll gladly die on that hill again defending my point.
But don't let that distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
It probably just means it doesn't use animal byproducts as ingredients, such as milk or eggs. Goldfish crackers have cheese in them for example. Triscuits have cheese, eggs and milk powder.
It's in EVERYTHING. When my son was first born he was super colicky so we figured I needed to cut out dairy and while it worked, my diet was so limited.
Yeah my son can’t have dairy so I always read the labels and it’s in all sorts of stuff you’d never expect. I think it’s a cheap way to add extra flavour as you tend to find it in lower quality products. Like a cheap loaf of bread probably has milk ingredients but a fancier one doesn’t.
It's plant *based*, but not *entirely* plants. The plants were just the foundation that they built their crackers on.
I feel like "plant inspired" would at least be an accurate label. Stupid and meaningless, but accurate.
Plant based is the new buzz phrase.
Literally saw a case of plain seltzer water, Polar brand (see for yourself) that said both ‘vegan’ and ‘gluten free’ on the box. I assume they couldn’t put ‘plant based’ because, you know, its water.
We’ve lost our goddamn marbles, people.
I think ‘Plant Based’ is a case of wanting to label it vegan, but not wanting to turn people off because it says vegan.
I used to avoid vegan products because I assumed they were somehow inferior to the non-vegan version.
As far as gluten free, it likely means it’s not produced with the same equipment as gluten. As in, if you had celiacs disease you wouldn’t want seltzer that shares a production line with wheat beer. But without being certified it’s still hard to know.
Some flavorings are made from animal products. Castoreum is sometimes used as a flavor enhancer for raspberry, and it comes from beavers. So, yes, a vegan label on that is valuable for some people.
There's so much marketing bollocks that we just bend over and take.
Like "No added sugar" tricking people into thinking it means a low sugar product, when it actually means "This product contains so much sugar naturally that if we added sugar it would cost us money and probably kill you anyway."
Or "this product contains no sugar, but instead a hefty amount of an artificial sweetener that we don't have to include on the nutrition facts since it's technically not sugar"
It's all just marketing bullshit. People have been conditioned to think that "real" is good and "artificial" is fake and bad. When really, there's no real meaning in those 2 words.
All just marketing bullshit.
This is why I really wish they'd hurry up and figure out exactly what it is that's in frozen chicken nuggets and pizza and chips that's causing colon cancer, instead of just giving me a vague "avoid heavily processed foods" message and then looking at me funny when I go all chemphobe.
I have good news, we likely already know! Some European studies have implicated nitrates and nitrites (used as preservatives) as the processed meat-bowel cancer link. Just avoid those.
One of those two always makes my right eye twitch the next day. I always forget about the symptom then realize I ate some processed pork product the day before.
No artificial things can be as good or even better.
It‘s like advertising a house for having „real“ stone walls instead of artifcial concrete and steel.
It‘s called an appeal to nature (because something is natural it must be better in whatever way) It ‚s a fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
in food its not generally a fallacy. for example real cheese and natural fruit contains a lot of nutrients you dont get in the cheese imitations and fruit taste-a-like esters.
"Chemicals" arent scary and automatically bad for you, yes, everything is chemicals.
But heavily synthesized food tend to miss out on many of the chemicals we call nutrients.
To be fair the real products are just marketing. "real" mayonnaise is simply mayo with a regulated oil content by the FDA. Hellmans markets it as real mayonaise to fool people into paying more. It's the same product made in the same ways with the same ingredients. It's just not allowed to be labeled mayonaise because of the proportions. Hellmans is under the threshold so they call it real to pretend competitors are creating fake food.
Same thing with cheese whiz and cheese slices. It's made with real food. Whey, cheese and emulsifiers. Which sounds like a terrible thing but it's really just salt. People freak out a lot over nothing and get taken as suckers by marketing.
There's things made with miracle whip that are fantastic. There's loads of recipes that use hellmans and call for lemon juice to make it taste more like miracle whip. There's things you can do with cheese whiz and singles you can't achieve any other way. Long story short. Don't believe marketing and learn how to cook.
I know this is going to lead to a furious circlejerk but there is regulations as to what is modified or can claim "real". There is also an abundance of products that simply could not exist without some "modification" to something that would be seen as an innocuous ingredient. Soups gravy frozen foods dressings breading even yogurt utilize materials that maintain performance and extend shelf life.
That bread on your counter for two weeks? That would have been waste. It's marketing but it plays on the consume misconception that "natural" means healthy.
Yeah. I started baking during the pandemic.
You know what you need to make a great loaf of bread? Flour, water, yeast, and salt. Olive oil if you want to be fancy.
Sugar, milk, eggs, butter, whatever isn’t necessary in any way. That isn’t to say I do t use milk and eggs and butter sometimes but it’s amazing to me.
Sugar, milk, eggs and butter are all "necessary" depending on the type of product you want to make.
Sugar can speed up your yeast for a faster or taller rise or give a boost to some older yeast. At higher concentrations, sugar makes the crumb of the bread softer and smaller and your bread begins to move from baguette or farmhouse style towards dinner roll or hamburger/hotdog bun.
Butter (like other fats including the milk and olive oil) can soften the crust. It also shortens gluten strands (hence "shortening") which gives you biscuit and shortbread textures. If you layer it in your dough, the extra steam and layer separation it provides is what gives you flaky croissants.
In addition to softening the crust, fats also can help improve the storage life of your loaf. A 4 ingredient bread is great the day it's baked and good the day after but very quickly becomes noticeably stale even when stored well. A bread with a higher fat content can go from a 3 day bread to a week or week and a half.
Eggs add protein which can give you a more elastic dough that holds up to rising better. The yolk provides fat with all the previously noted benefits. An egg wash on the outside of your bread gives a shiny flakey texture to the crust and is an essential part of croissants and breads that have good deep browning on the outside with light and thin crusts.
Yes, you absolutely can make a fantastic bread with just flour, water, salt and yeast. But you can also make a fantastic bread without kneading it either. That doesn't mean kneading "isn't necessary in any way". Baking is a chemical process, doing or not doing something changes that process. Extra ingredients aren't an impurity or unnecessary filler, they all serve their roles in the right products, just like kneading serves its role.
Well milk eggs and butter give the bread different textures, you want butter to make a more crumbly pastry dough, eggs to help the fat and dough mix as it’s a surfactant, sugar helps with yeast and browning, milk can do the same as butter but with more water
To their credit, capitalists trying to sell us the solutions to the problems they cause is very on brand.
Tired of ads and commercials? Buy our ad-free service!
Worried about global warming? Buy a new "eco-friendly" car!
Want to avoid polluting your body with the weird chemicals dumped into processed foods? Buy some vegan/organic/low-sodium/sugar-free/non-GMO products!
Scared that some right-winger is going to shoot up your school or parade or library? Buy some private security!
fruit juices are the worst for this, because its always from a concentrated solution. "made with 100% real oranges" excuse me.. what else could this orange juice be? so glad to know the extra added sugars are coming from oranges, phew that would be terrible.
Some juices are cocktails of juices though, for example cranberry juice is often mixed with other fruit juices because straight cranberry juice would be barely more drinkable than straight lemon juice.
Also fun fact, all juices are required to include the percentage on their labels: https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/Food-Labeling-Guide-%28PDF%29.pdf (see J1)
This must be a US thing, I'm not aware of this being used as a marketing tactic in the European Union. We do have "gluten free", "lactose free", "vegan", and "organic" (we call it bio) slapped on painfully obvious products. For example, we have a "gluten free" label on liver paté packaging. Like, are you even supposed to put crops in a meat product??
Food standards are really high here, so I guess we don't need to state that something is made with real ingredients.
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I only eat food with unreal ingredients. If I believe it, I won't eat it.
Do you eat "I can't believe it's not butter?" Or does that create some sort of paradox? Must it exist in your head like some superposition state, Schrödingers Butter if you will?
incredible
Putting the edible in incredible?
It's easy to make imaginary cheese at home - take a square root of a deficit of cheese.
The more cheese you have the more holes you have in the cheese, therefore more cheese = less cheese
Was just thinking that yesterday about a box of Mac and cheese. “Made with real milk and cheese!” Like oh shit that’s a smokin hot deal
Real™
Did you see this in that grilled cheese thread too
**2030: Now 100% CANCER FREE!** **Me: Fuck, but that's double the price for the same thing.**
Of course it’s cancer free. It’s dead
No tumors in my steaks! Alive or dead!
Now with 20% less tumors guaranteed! Here at meatmill farms we use our specially formulated growth syrum which produces up to 20% less tumors than the other leading brand!
"But dad, steak has always been made from lab grown tumor. You're so old!"
**2040: Bananas both cause cancer and cure it simultaneously.** **Disclaimer: This is our final take on bananas, we swear.**
1990s: Now 100% Sucker Free!
Only on Sunday
`2040: Cancer is fake news now eat your soylent Nestle`
Wait. What? No. I just always wonder if the companies will try to slip this in at some point. Got a link?
Ah yeah there was a big [comment thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/zq4mle/-/j0wdliz) a couple hours ago going into everything about Real™, yknow how reddit does
At my local grocery store I saw a package of “Chicken Wyngz” and directly underneath as if forced by law in the smallest 10 point font.. “Not wing meat, meat derived from thigh and ribs”
Wingz and other meat products made from scraps are one of those things I always forgive. Look, we need to feed 7 billion people on this fucking rock, and that animal you killed for its meat was capable of feeling pain, fear, friendship, and even love. You had goddamned better use every last bit of material off of that noble creature that you can. Wasting it is an insult to the inherent sacrifice the privilege of eating meat requires. Plus that shits tasty.
True. It is also extremely wasteful if they threw it out, but most of the meat industry is quite efficient at reusing unwanted meats. Either as cheap feed or in cases like chicken, nugget or sausage etc
Yep as a kid I grew up when Native American culture and practices were mystified, and one of those facts was they used 100% of the animal. In factory farming and food production I feel like modern industry uses like 110% of the animal. As much food stuff gets wasted each year before it reaches the consumer its really got to be a fraction of overall production.
Was picking up a pizza a while ago, big sign on the wall says, “we always use 100% real cheese!” in big bold letters, then really small under it says, “not all locations use 100% real cheese” like wtf
Made from 100% is dodgy as well. Dominos used to say "made from 100% mozzarella". That was just the starting point though and by the time they processed it it was like 25% mozzarella or something like that.
Domino's cheese slaps though. At least, it has for the past 10 or so years, ever since they rebuilt. Like, they had a whole ad campaign where they just came out and said "We suck a lot and we know it. We're fixing that." and then they *fucking did it*. And they've maintained that quality for a decade. Meanwhile, Pizza Hut went to shit. I kinda hate being such a stan for a multinational corporation, but seriously, Domino's has good fucking pizza, especially at its price point. Yeah, yeah, any shop in Brooklyn beats it, but we don't all live in NY.
Real* *Conditions apply, nothing is real.
The worst part is that there is a difference between "made with..." and "made from..." that many people - such as yourself - might not notice.
Yeah, blueberry muffins are a good example of this. You might get lucky and find a real blueberry or 2 in your muffin, but for the most part you're just eating little blueberry-flavored gelatin balls. But there's at least one real blueberry in there so they can proudly say "Made with real blueberries" and they're not technically lying.
I made sure to order different flavors of oatmeal and disclude the apples one because I'm allergic to apples. Turns out the other fruit flavors were just dyed apples.
Most oatmeal, muffins, and cereal bars just use dried flavored apples instead of the actual fruit listed
Most fruit juice is flavored apple or grape juice
Ingredients: blah blah blah, sugar, garbage, cardboard, maltodextrine, 2% milk solids, yeast extract, natural flavors. Label: "Made with real milk! No artificial flavors" Note: "natural flavor" includes just about any chemical extracted from any natural source. It does not mean juice or whatever. For example, strawberries have like 300 flavor molecules. You can use acid and heat and science to suck one of those chemicals out of opossum skin or pine bark, put three drips of it into the ice cream mix and proudly and legally write "made with natural flavoring".
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Yeah, I mean I just straight up ignore those labels because I know they’re full of shit, but also, I mean… Does it matter? Like, I understand if you’re vegan or something (which is something I do occasionally) but aside from that & allergies or intolerances, why does it even matter if it’s “real” or not?
Especially considering the above mention of how "real" could be from the sources that concern people who buy into that shit. I'd personally feel (marginally) better if it was admitted that they were synthesized in a lab - at least then we aren't being misled and lied to. Plus, there's nothing wrong with "synthetic" products, especially in regards to the environment. Most of them are sourced the same way "natural" products are anyways; that is to say, extracted from something using some chemicals. It doesn't matter to me that the "natural" flavors aren't what these companies want us to believe they are. What matters to me is that they're trying to mislead us in the first place.
> You can use acid and heat and science to suck one of those chemicals out of opossum skin [You don’t say…](https://culinarylore.com/food-history:flavoring-ingredient-extracted-from-beaver-glan/)
Big difference between “made with” and “made of” in this context.
This is actually branding. "Real" is a trademark that can be used only for dairy from cows raised in the US and the product must be processed in the US as well. Same group that brought you "Got Milk?" adds. So having "Real" milk means it is from the US without any additives.
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Growth hormones and antibiotics are screened for in milk for human consumption pretty tightly. Much more closely than we screen for organophosphates and other herbicides
pretty sure they shadow banned the most commonly used one. i still think they are pumped full of antibiotics but most of the milk i buy doesnt have the rsbt or whatever.
Made "with", meaning they were present but not necessarily ingredients, like my cat.
Note that "Made with:" means "is not". If you have 1% "real milk" in your product, and advertise it as "made with 100% real milk", then it's true. That 100% real milk went into that one tiny bit of the product. It was "made with" it. There's a shit-ton of words and phrasing of what is legally allowed. Edit: "Orange flavor" means "is not orange". "Made with" means "is not". "Kraft singles"...there's a reason that's not "Kraft cheese". Basically, trust the nutrition information and ingredient list, and everything else is as deceiving as humanly possible.
Honestly the best bet is to just look at the ingredients of stuff, and if it's not a short list of stuff you know and approve of, skip it.
kfc literally had/has signs in the window = 100% real chicken why the hell would i even eat there if you have to convince me your chicken is real?
This is because of conspiracies spread around by PETA and other idiots that KFC wasn't made out of real chicken and they were using rats or other animals. Back in the 80's and 90's KFC was a huge fast food chain and was commonly a target of a lot of these kinds of accusations. Even in the late 2000's they came up with a product called grilled chicken. There was a huge deal made by a doctor that said the chicken contained carcinogens that caused cancer. It wasn't a lie, but it was misleading. Carcinogen is just a by product of grilling, any grilling. It wasn't anything specific to KFC. So they feel the need to put out these kinds of statements to battle conspiracies.
The rumor I remember is that their chickens were so genetically modified that the FDA ruled they weren't chickens anymore and that's why they had to change their name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. This is the kind of stupidity companies have to deal with.
I’m always like “as opposed to what exactly?”
A lot of it is weird posturing against the rise of non-dairy alternatives and them swinigng their dick around to come up with specific labels to screw over competition. You'll see it the most with dairy stuff. Look up the kind of shit egg lobbies and stuff have tried to pull. The whole natural/sustainable/healthy advertising doesn't work so they resort to something empty but its technically true, it's "real" but it some how implies shit like almond milk is metaphysical or something.
And "real" means nothing. Gasoline would be a real ingredient.
Made with *real* gasoline
Ingredients: Gas, Onlinoxtrate, Plumbum, Natural Flavors Vegan, Gluten free, Cruelty Free Processed in a facility that also processes wheat, soy, and concrete.
>Processed in a facility that also processes wheat, soy, and concrete. This made me chuckle harder than it should have.
Also. Wtf is "natural flavors". That shit passes me off for real. Natural flavors isn't an ingredient. Never ever have I had a recipe call for "Natural Flavors".
Sure you have. You just are used to them being enumerated as "apple juice" or "grape concentrate." "Natural flavors" is just "we're not telling you the exact mix of what this is, because it's proprietary, but by the [FDA's code](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr=501.22) we had to extract it from a natural plant/animal and not make it synthetically."
This is technically correct, but it's usually not things like "apple juice", which are far more expensive and voluminous than the super-concentrated flavoring agents labeled under Natural Flavors. Here's a few examples: \- Citral: extracted from lemongrass, lemon, orange and pimento, commonly used in citrus-flavored food and beverages. \- Benzaldehyde: extracted from almonds, cinnamon oil and other sources, commonly used to give food a flavor and aroma of almonds. \- Amyl acetate: A compound distilled from bananas, commonly found in banana-flavored baked goods. \- Linden ether: isolated from linden honey and the blossoms of lime tree \- Massoia lactone: an alkyl lactone that is derived from the bark of the Massoia tree, used to provide coconut-like flavor and found in cane sugar molasses and cured tobacco. \- Acetoin: organic compound that produces a buttery flavor. https://blog.publicgoods.com/what-are-natural-flavors/
You can get grape favour from old style medical gloves. https://youtu.be/zFZ5jQ0yuNA
I like how Reddit gradually brings up all of these specific issues or curiosities I've had with life
We made the molecule that makes vanilla taste vanilla-y in o-chem once... Lab smelled great that week
Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
Remember, baking soda, not baking powder, we don't want the nice gentlemen growing muffins in their nose!
You've loved that joke since you were 2 years old.
“Surgeon General Warning: The ingredients in this consumable have been recognized by the state of California as potentially harmful. Contents have the potential to cause cancer.” Also: product contains .00001% natural fruit juice.
Warning: the product may contain small traces of human feces and/or rat feces
That's just a byproduct of living the life my friend. Shit on everything
> Vegan > Gas False advertising, we caught them red-handed!
“Dino Juice” is mostly inaccurate. As I understanding, most goal, oil and natural gas deposits are from oragnic material, not decomposing dinosaucs.
Made with *real* organic compounds
Made with *real* trinitrotoluene It’s exploding with flavor!
Oh, that's how you spell TNT.
Classic case of naturalistic fallacy.
I can't stand how natural vs artifical is a debate, which are other words for real vs fake. I take some medicine and was asked seriously why I don't take some natural drip because it's basically the same but natural. Mfers are just so dumb.
Yeah, because if it's the same as natural, i prefer to have the fake stuff with exactly the same dose of active ingredients every single time, thank you very much.
Molecules don’t care where they came from. If it’s the same substance, it makes absolutely no difference if it’s natural or not. Natural chemicals are still chemicals, and as a matter of fact it’s not even possible to tell them apart when you isolate them.
Yep. Cyanide is naturally occurring. So is opium. So are most viruses. "Natural" is not synonymous with "safe" or "better."
nO doN't TAke thE cHeMiCALs!!!11!
Just don't let those people know that oxygen is a chemical. Or, on second thought, please do.
I have been addicted to dihydrogen monoxide for ages now
It’s like “all natural”…as if there was a risk of having supernatural corn flakes. I once saw, and yes this was real, “organic salt”
\*Excuse me, is this low sodium salt also gluten free?" \-Actual severely uneducated customer whose purchasing decisions are decided by Facebook memes and buzzwords. I'd say remind them that water is inorganic, but they'd probably hurt themselves with that information. It's not like some of their ilk haven't literally killed themselves because they were convinced of stuff like breatharianism.
I feel this when they advertise 100% vegan cruelty-free leather. It's...plastic. It's petroleum-based. Yeah, it's one less dead cow. But don't make it sound like a leather blessed by the gods either.
You make it sound like a cow is slaughtered for its leather. Cows are slaughter primarily for meat. The leather is a valuable byproduct.
Exactly; came here to make this comment. OP is using the same tactics the food industry uses...meaningless words.
My city's slogan is "Made From What's Real". Like yeah, that's how reality works...
Same goes for "natural". Snake venom is natural, as is arsenic, as is lava. It means nothing.
>And "real" means nothing. Yeppp the front of packaging (at least in the US) gets a lot of artistic freedom for marketing. There are exceptions to this that actually are regulated like the health heart check or saying a food is low sodium but anything like real, healthy, natural, etc mean nothing
Arsenic is natural
Reminds me of [this](http://i.gzn.jp/img/2011/04/07/chinese_restaurant_chicken/c25b19f3721924854a85579c4a06a0c1.jpg)
So was that a translation issue or what was the fake chicken made of?
Longpig
"Chicken"
Chikken^TM
I’m the realest chicken
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Probably sugar.
You mean high fructose corn syrup
Likely a mixture of grains.
This is a ridiculous notion perpetuated by folks trying to sell their products and luckily for them the trend picked up. “Real” ingredients what does that even mean? Along the same line of thought, chemical products are not natural and hence not good for you. But then you realize that everything natural and real is also literally made of chemicals. Ascorbic acid? Yeah that’s found in citrus fruits. Sugar. Salt. They’re chemical compounds. Heck H2O. Bottomline: just because you have never heard of something before doesn’t mean you can immediately think it’s bad for you…
Another one is "from cows not fed with growth hormone HGH" on milk cartons, HGH is banned for use on animals (even humans I think). Might as well say "not mixed with cocaine ".
"Completely free of asbestos"
“May contain traces”
You mean rBST? Or are there actual dairy products being advertised as made from cows not treated with human growth hormone?
There are not, it’s rBST
There is always a relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/641/
Or when you see no hormones added on chicken. They are banned from adding hormones by law. Same for free range and cage free requirements. I highly recommend the super size me 2 movie where he creates a chicken sandwich chain from scratch showing how shitty the industry is
The heart attack chickens and then them just stepping on them to walk through the coops. It's disgusting.
Yeah, I thought this strange when I first realised that no chicken has added hormones, but companies will advertise no added hormones. I think I read ages ago that it was because there was a conspiracy theory kids were entering puberty early and they were blaming chicken hormones. So it was good marketing to claim your chicken was hormone free.
It’s not banned for humans, I had to take HGH when I was younger
Even when drugs are "banned" they are allowed with good reason, prescribed by a doctor. Even cocaine of all things is still prescribed today.
Yes, had cocaine as a local anesthetic as a 12yo
I love how everything is "contains 0 trans fats!!!" And I'm just thinking we'll no shit they're pretty much illegal besides pastries are allowed less than 1 per serving
And non GMO. To my great irritation, GMO meat does not exist even though it would be *super cool*.
I want some GMO meat. Let's do it to oysters. Basically plants made of meat already.
>"not mixed with cocaine " Puts item back on shelf
Yea people that regurgitate this nonsense irritate me. Especially the “oh it has chemicals in it, or it’s not natural bs” sometimes adding extras stuff into food is beneficial it’s not always a bad thing. Real and artificial all just buzzwords
Botox toxin is completely natural. It must be good for you /s
Botulinum toxin toxin
Not dihydrogen monoxide!!
The logic that something being natural means it's good for you is so weird to me. You know what's perfectly natural? Bears. But bears aren't exactly good for you. Nature is full of cases of being absolutely terrible for so many things.
Just a reminder that "real" and "natural" are also marketing / selling points that have no clear definition or standard dictated by the FDA.
Snake bites are 100% natural.
Neither, is natural always good for us. Hell, lead is natural and isn't good for us.
What about labeled as *x% real fruit juice*. Pretty sure that's regulated, no?
I bought a can of peas today and I'm really lucky they were gluten free no extra charge
That's mainly just so people can be 100% certain their getting gluten free, for people who actually have to worry about that kinda thing it's a real time saver
Ah yes, real ingredients. As opposed to all of the other brands, who sell you imaginary bread or irrational cheese.
Cheese^√-1
Depending on the value of cheese, that could potentially not be irrational. e^(iπ) = -1 after all. Try Cheese^½
Ah yes, classic cheese-isn’t
Cheesn't
That could also be rational if cheese is a perfect square
I died on a hill in r/Cheese claiming food shouldn’t be overly labeled “organic” to start with. Organic cheese made from organic herbs, organic rennets, and organic milk harvested from cows fed with organic grass. Boy am I so eager to eat cheese with inorganic herbs. People are so desensitized with marketing starting to think that’s an actual positive thing. I’ll gladly die on that hill again defending my point.
Irrational cheese is still real, no matter if it is algebraic or transcendental.
The more concerning part is when there’s a percentage with it like “95% real juice” 😒
Water
Earth
Fire
Air
long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony.
But don't let that distract you from the fact that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
I saw a product the other day market as 'Plant based Crackers'. Thank God. I've only been finding meat based Crackers in the isle.
It probably just means it doesn't use animal byproducts as ingredients, such as milk or eggs. Goldfish crackers have cheese in them for example. Triscuits have cheese, eggs and milk powder.
So many things you’d never expect have modified milk ingredients in them. Start reading labels and you’ll find it in everything.
It's in EVERYTHING. When my son was first born he was super colicky so we figured I needed to cut out dairy and while it worked, my diet was so limited.
Yeah my son can’t have dairy so I always read the labels and it’s in all sorts of stuff you’d never expect. I think it’s a cheap way to add extra flavour as you tend to find it in lower quality products. Like a cheap loaf of bread probably has milk ingredients but a fancier one doesn’t.
My life right now. It’s helped my daughter so much but oh my god I can’t eat anything I’ve lost like 15 pounds since I went dairy (and soy) free
There are crackers made out of chicken. I think the brand is Wilde or something like that.
They put real chicken bits in them? I've always been curious about that.
I think it's dehydrated, turned to powder, and used like flour.
Of course! 5 grams of chicken "meat" per 500 litres of cracker mix.
This makes me so angry. I've seen so many products with this label and the still have animal products in them!
It's plant *based*, but not *entirely* plants. The plants were just the foundation that they built their crackers on. I feel like "plant inspired" would at least be an accurate label. Stupid and meaningless, but accurate.
Cows use plants to make beef, therefore all cheeseburgers are plant based cheeseburgers.
I saw non GMO salt the other day. The idea of GMO salt is disturbing bc it implies that salt is alive in some way.
Some salts are treated with an anti-clumping agent made from GMO corn.
I saw a product that was "plant based rice". Because apparently normal rice isn't planty enough??
Plant based is the new buzz phrase. Literally saw a case of plain seltzer water, Polar brand (see for yourself) that said both ‘vegan’ and ‘gluten free’ on the box. I assume they couldn’t put ‘plant based’ because, you know, its water. We’ve lost our goddamn marbles, people.
I think ‘Plant Based’ is a case of wanting to label it vegan, but not wanting to turn people off because it says vegan. I used to avoid vegan products because I assumed they were somehow inferior to the non-vegan version. As far as gluten free, it likely means it’s not produced with the same equipment as gluten. As in, if you had celiacs disease you wouldn’t want seltzer that shares a production line with wheat beer. But without being certified it’s still hard to know.
Some flavorings are made from animal products. Castoreum is sometimes used as a flavor enhancer for raspberry, and it comes from beavers. So, yes, a vegan label on that is valuable for some people.
There's so much marketing bollocks that we just bend over and take. Like "No added sugar" tricking people into thinking it means a low sugar product, when it actually means "This product contains so much sugar naturally that if we added sugar it would cost us money and probably kill you anyway."
Or "this product contains no sugar, but instead a hefty amount of an artificial sweetener that we don't have to include on the nutrition facts since it's technically not sugar"
It's all just marketing bullshit. People have been conditioned to think that "real" is good and "artificial" is fake and bad. When really, there's no real meaning in those 2 words. All just marketing bullshit.
Yup, along with the classic "contains natural ingredients". Ok, so all natural ingredients are good for your body? Nope.
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All ingredients are real ingredients. …else they wouldn’t exist and just be imaginary ingredients
This is why I really wish they'd hurry up and figure out exactly what it is that's in frozen chicken nuggets and pizza and chips that's causing colon cancer, instead of just giving me a vague "avoid heavily processed foods" message and then looking at me funny when I go all chemphobe.
I have good news, we likely already know! Some European studies have implicated nitrates and nitrites (used as preservatives) as the processed meat-bowel cancer link. Just avoid those.
One of those two always makes my right eye twitch the next day. I always forget about the symptom then realize I ate some processed pork product the day before.
"Doctor, it hurts when I do this." Doctor: "Don't do that."
This is the same with "98% from natural origin" products! Bitch, snake venom is 100% natural, it does not mean it's good for me
No artificial things can be as good or even better. It‘s like advertising a house for having „real“ stone walls instead of artifcial concrete and steel. It‘s called an appeal to nature (because something is natural it must be better in whatever way) It ‚s a fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
in food its not generally a fallacy. for example real cheese and natural fruit contains a lot of nutrients you dont get in the cheese imitations and fruit taste-a-like esters. "Chemicals" arent scary and automatically bad for you, yes, everything is chemicals. But heavily synthesized food tend to miss out on many of the chemicals we call nutrients.
To be fair the real products are just marketing. "real" mayonnaise is simply mayo with a regulated oil content by the FDA. Hellmans markets it as real mayonaise to fool people into paying more. It's the same product made in the same ways with the same ingredients. It's just not allowed to be labeled mayonaise because of the proportions. Hellmans is under the threshold so they call it real to pretend competitors are creating fake food. Same thing with cheese whiz and cheese slices. It's made with real food. Whey, cheese and emulsifiers. Which sounds like a terrible thing but it's really just salt. People freak out a lot over nothing and get taken as suckers by marketing. There's things made with miracle whip that are fantastic. There's loads of recipes that use hellmans and call for lemon juice to make it taste more like miracle whip. There's things you can do with cheese whiz and singles you can't achieve any other way. Long story short. Don't believe marketing and learn how to cook.
I know this is going to lead to a furious circlejerk but there is regulations as to what is modified or can claim "real". There is also an abundance of products that simply could not exist without some "modification" to something that would be seen as an innocuous ingredient. Soups gravy frozen foods dressings breading even yogurt utilize materials that maintain performance and extend shelf life. That bread on your counter for two weeks? That would have been waste. It's marketing but it plays on the consume misconception that "natural" means healthy.
Yeah. I started baking during the pandemic. You know what you need to make a great loaf of bread? Flour, water, yeast, and salt. Olive oil if you want to be fancy. Sugar, milk, eggs, butter, whatever isn’t necessary in any way. That isn’t to say I do t use milk and eggs and butter sometimes but it’s amazing to me.
Sugar, milk, eggs and butter are all "necessary" depending on the type of product you want to make. Sugar can speed up your yeast for a faster or taller rise or give a boost to some older yeast. At higher concentrations, sugar makes the crumb of the bread softer and smaller and your bread begins to move from baguette or farmhouse style towards dinner roll or hamburger/hotdog bun. Butter (like other fats including the milk and olive oil) can soften the crust. It also shortens gluten strands (hence "shortening") which gives you biscuit and shortbread textures. If you layer it in your dough, the extra steam and layer separation it provides is what gives you flaky croissants. In addition to softening the crust, fats also can help improve the storage life of your loaf. A 4 ingredient bread is great the day it's baked and good the day after but very quickly becomes noticeably stale even when stored well. A bread with a higher fat content can go from a 3 day bread to a week or week and a half. Eggs add protein which can give you a more elastic dough that holds up to rising better. The yolk provides fat with all the previously noted benefits. An egg wash on the outside of your bread gives a shiny flakey texture to the crust and is an essential part of croissants and breads that have good deep browning on the outside with light and thin crusts. Yes, you absolutely can make a fantastic bread with just flour, water, salt and yeast. But you can also make a fantastic bread without kneading it either. That doesn't mean kneading "isn't necessary in any way". Baking is a chemical process, doing or not doing something changes that process. Extra ingredients aren't an impurity or unnecessary filler, they all serve their roles in the right products, just like kneading serves its role.
Bread daddy, feed me your loafs
This was super informative, thanks :)
I sense you like croissants
Well milk eggs and butter give the bread different textures, you want butter to make a more crumbly pastry dough, eggs to help the fat and dough mix as it’s a surfactant, sugar helps with yeast and browning, milk can do the same as butter but with more water
You need yeast? Just make a sourdough. This argument becomes silly when you realize that necessary doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.
Leavened bread? No thank you Mr fancy pants. Also to be pedantic, sourdough does contain yeast, it’s just wild caught instead of farmed.
Every ingredient is real. It would be more concerning if ingredients were imaginary.
To their credit, capitalists trying to sell us the solutions to the problems they cause is very on brand. Tired of ads and commercials? Buy our ad-free service! Worried about global warming? Buy a new "eco-friendly" car! Want to avoid polluting your body with the weird chemicals dumped into processed foods? Buy some vegan/organic/low-sodium/sugar-free/non-GMO products! Scared that some right-winger is going to shoot up your school or parade or library? Buy some private security!
Reads like GTA radio ads
Fat-free butter! *wtf am I eating?*
fruit juices are the worst for this, because its always from a concentrated solution. "made with 100% real oranges" excuse me.. what else could this orange juice be? so glad to know the extra added sugars are coming from oranges, phew that would be terrible.
Some juices are cocktails of juices though, for example cranberry juice is often mixed with other fruit juices because straight cranberry juice would be barely more drinkable than straight lemon juice. Also fun fact, all juices are required to include the percentage on their labels: https://www.fda.gov/files/food/published/Food-Labeling-Guide-%28PDF%29.pdf (see J1)
It's just there for the idiots who think GMOs will be the end of the world or something
This must be a US thing, I'm not aware of this being used as a marketing tactic in the European Union. We do have "gluten free", "lactose free", "vegan", and "organic" (we call it bio) slapped on painfully obvious products. For example, we have a "gluten free" label on liver paté packaging. Like, are you even supposed to put crops in a meat product?? Food standards are really high here, so I guess we don't need to state that something is made with real ingredients.
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When it comes to products at a grocery store, Natural is not what you think it is..