this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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Food Crimes - Offenses against nutrition

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Welcome to Food Crimes! This community is here to collect all and any post about cursed food and generally unusual consumables.

Right now, here’s the rules:

  1. Posts must include an image or video containing food or drink.
  2. It must be unusual or cursed in some way. a. For example, something like Doritos Milk would be unusual, but normal milk would not.
  3. No AI posts whatsoever, and any images that were altered (Ex: Photoshop, Gimp) need to be tagged.

How to tag: To tag your posts, please prepend or append the tag name inside square brackets. For example,[OC] Foo bar baz or foo bar baz [Meta] would be acceptable. Multiple tags will require separate pairs of brackets, like so: [Edited][OC] foo bar baz

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Also fair. I won't pretend I'm following USDA or whatever naming rules (the "uncured" labeling is bullshit - oh we didn't use straight potassium nitrate - just celery juice which contains the potassium nitrate), just going with the general language trend I see. YMMV

I did conflate cheese that has built in emulsifiers, "american cheese", with imitation cheese product (likely the plastic wrapped slices melted onto that dish) which also has emulsifiers and has lower fat content and isn't as nice. That's on me, my bad.

tongue-in-cheek, not really ragging it but: "oooooo chemicals" like salt? The potassium nitrate in cured/"uncured" meats? Sodium citrate, one of the most common additives to keep cheese emulsified, is often used in sausage making...and apparently blood banks if wikipedia is to be believed. I know there are horrible things put in processed foods, but "chemicals" is not a useful way to distinguish them. I apologize in advance if I've read a too-unfavorable slant into your use of the word chemical.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Fair enough, but in reality, it's not always sodium citrate, as the FDA permits a whole variety of other emulsifying agents to be used:

Monosodium phosphate, disodium phosphate, dipotassium phosphate, trisodium phosphate, sodium metaphosphate (sodium hexametaphosphate), sodium acid pyrophosphate, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, sodium citrate, potassium citrate, calcium citrate, sodium tartrate, and sodium potassium tartrate

I'm not a chemist so I can't tell you how good are bad those are for your long term health but as far Kraft Singles are concerned, the choice appears to be sodium phosphate, not citrate.