#944 Low Mercury, Feeling Chili?

I was contemplating a simple can of chili the other day. Chili with beans is a great dietary staple for economically challenging times. It can be purchased in generic form for as little as 79 cents a can. A can makes a relatively decent sized meal.
It’s also a fairly dangerous thing to eat. It contains copious amounts of high blood pressure causing salt and diabetes triggering sugar. It also contains lots of saturated fat, thought to contribute to heart and artery disease, and the questionable cuts of beef usually reserved for hot dogs.
In the old days, such beef was likely to have originated in a greasy blood-spattered meatpacking house which exercised limited efforts in the direction of hygiene.
Hey, safety-minded consumers could always turn to peanut butter.
But still, canned chili stayed on the shelves, and still it sold to and was consumed by the hearty American public. Well recently it developed that cans of chili had another secret sickener, the can itself. Many of them are now coated with BPA, a plastic known to interfere with the reproductive system.
Not content to kill the current generation, chili producers seemed bent on decimating the next. Still we ate on.
Now it seems we have one more item to fear. Most chili no longer contains sugar. In its place is high fructose corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup has recently been shown to contain trace amounts of mercury.
Rendering corn grain into corn sugar uses a process involving caustic soda, which is produced at certain chlorine plants, some of which use a method that involves mercury. So you get what is known as Mercury grade caustic soda. A recent study showed 9 in 20 high fructose corn syrup samples included trace amounts of mercury.
The mercury grade caustic soda comes from older plants and costs less. Although there is no way of knowing which high fructose corn syrup ends up where, tests of more expensive products like Coca Cola show no mercury traces.
Chili’s cheap.
Hmm. I feel a little sick. Maybe it’s a cold.
I wonder how much high fructose corn syrup is in chicken noodle soup?
America, ya gotta love it.