#761 Ingredients are Hot

Who knows what cancerous or hormone-altering evils really lurk in the murky world of our food additives? Recently I looked closely for the first time at a taco bell hot sauce packet.
There are no nutritional warnings on a taco bell hot sauce packet. I guess the government’s telling us we don’t have to be afraid of food when we eat it a tablespoon at a time.
But it’s amazing how many ingredients are listed in one little packet. There’s water, then what you’d expect from a hot condiment: tomato paste, Jalapeno, distilled vinegar, salt, chili pepper, dehydrated onion sugar and, um, modified food starch.
That one always gets me. What is the source of food starch? And how do they modify it? Sounds like a brainwashed potato.
Then there’s onion juice, spices, and chili seeds, instead of jalapeño and chili pepper. Then this odd one—brewers yeast extract. Are we making bread here? Excuse me. I thought I was looking at a hot sauce packet.
The next listing is even weirder. It says natural capsicum and tomato flavors. What the heck is a capsicum? Doesn’t sound natural.
From there the packet heads to more familiar additive territory, potassium sorbate and sodium benzoate, the ubiquitous preservatives found in every single manufactured food. And xanthan gum. This one always scares me. It too is in everything foodular and I have no idea why, or if it’s safe in the quantities that must have accumulated in my body after a lifetime of pre-packaged food.
I mean, there’s every chance it’s assembling into a toxic load, like dioxins and mercury in the fat of salmon, and I’d never know it until I went stark-raving mad and AK-47ed a McDonalds, or had a hyper-allergic reaction to peanuts or something.
The ingredients list finishes with garlic powder, lactic acid and a wonderful Mexican food flavor, soy sauce.
Last there’s yeast. Sort of. Yeast is a fungus. Nearly the simplest organism in the food chain. But we can’t even leave that alone. Because the final item is described as “autolyzed” yeast “extract.”
Someone get me an apple.
America, ya gotta love it.