I walked up to the Seattle’s Best Coffee on the second floor of the Borders downtown. On a display table propped up in the front of all sorts of Starbuck-like merchandise was a copy of Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food. The erudite ironist in me laughed and said, “Now that’s hilarious! Here’s a book whose whole purpose is to debunk the myth that what is being pawned off as food at this Seattle’s Best can be considered actual food, and damn right.”

I then stepped past the book and up to the counter and ordered myself a piece of the alleged “cinnamon pecan coffee cake.”

If my brief experience working in a Starbucks was any indication, “food” of this nature might as well be an agglomeration of sugar derivatives and children’s paste for all the nutritional (or even satisfying) food value it has. Frankly, if it were wrapped in plastic to prevent drying, I have my doubts that it wouldn’t keep its freshness entirely throughout and even after a nuclear apocalypse.

It concerns me that I ate this as I was jotting the notes down for this article. It concerns me that it went into my body. Not just because I feel like I can actually see each bite extend the girth of my stomach outward another inch as I swallow it, but particularly because I have no idea of what it actually is.

“What are you?” I asked the confectionery hunk of rubble on my plate, “What are you?” This is a question that we must unfortunately ask ourselves during almost every edible interaction in this day in age of food. Processed foods, irradiated foods, foods with paragraphs of ingredients (a whopping total of more than 50 individual ingredients* in this case) rather than one simple line - it makes people suspicious about what exactly they are putting in their mouths, no?

As Dr. Samuel Epstein, head of the Cancer Prevention Coalition says in this video on chemicals in cosmetics and personal care products:

“…listing of ingredients means nothing to, I would say, almost 100 percent of consumers and very little to the overwhelming majority of scientists because the chemistry is complex, and to understand…what the ingredients mean, you’ve got to understand chemistry, toxicology and carcinogenesis and all of these together. So the listing of the ingredients alone, without any warning as to the hazards of these ingredients, is meaningless.”

I would argue that the same applies to our food, and I am by far not the first person to say so. There are also the ingredients that aren’t even ingredients in and of themselves, but require parenthetical notation to describe their contents and break them down even further, because an ingredient cannot be, just simply, “cake” (the number one ingredient on the list in this case.)

I tend to agree. Of the ingredients (see below*), I recognized maybe a handful, and I counted a total of more than 50 individual substances. Ingredients were counted by individual name; as in the ingredients that make up “cake,” rather than “cake” by itself. Also, there is the case of “enriched flour bleached” versus “bleached enriched flour”. Typo? Could be, but one has regular iron and the other had reduced iron, and, for all I know, they could be two slightly different ingredients and used as industrial baking fillers. So for the purposes of this article, each independent substance was counted on its own.

Without thinking, how many of you can tell me exactly what “calcium disodium EDTA” is off the top of your head?

Anyone?

Exactly.

I learned from reading the ingredient list (provided to me by the lovely and bubbly young ladies peddling the Seattle’s Best) that it is a preservative, but I am curious to know quite a bit more. I mean, formaldehyde is a preservative too (you may remember it from the oh-so-delicious embalming process, and, potentially, any farmed or “aquaculture” fish that you ate at least up until 2006), but just because something can perform a task, does that really mean that it should be used to do so to the exclusion of all common sense? For example, an Uzi submachine gun can provide some extra light and ventilation for your living room, but does that mean it should be the preferred method of choice? No.

For the nerdy like myself, it can be summed up in my favorite line from the movie Jurassic Park, delivered by Jeff Goldblum’s character, Dr. Ian Malcom, during a heated discussion about environmental ethics (we all remember the spirited exchange over Chilean sea bass on whether or not manipulating modern amphibian DNA to complete the broken DNA sequences of dinosaurs that scientists in the film have extracted from samples preserved in prehistoric amber to grow real, live, giant dinosaurs for a theme park attraction was a good thing, right? Anyway, here’s the quote):

“...Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”

With all of the additives in our food and all the chemicals lining our clothes and filling our personal care products (for more on this I would recommend checking out a copy of Slow Death by Rubber Duck from the library), we need to be asking the same question. The next time we are tempted to make a bad choice about food, our concern should not only be with the caloric damage (by the by, this gem contained a whopping 590 calories) we could potentially do, but rather the much more devastating consequences of ingesting compounds and substances that are simply not food at all.

If I’m going to pickle my innards, I’d rather have some adult (and of course, responsible) fun doing it on my own terms with whiskey or a nice microbrew beer. Not, I repeat not by having eaten more than my fair share of calcium disodium EDTA or BHT (another food preservative, which, during my childhood was the cause of much consternation; my Mom would only buy us Cheerios because apparently it was one of the only cereals at the time that was not packaged with BHT - thank you Mom for not buckling to our pleas for sugary, fake-colored, drowned in preservatives nonsense foods), or god forbid, formaldehyde!

You know, perhaps we never should have strayed so far from the naturally existing and centuries-old food preservation methods of the past, i.e. salt, ice, root cellars, canning, pickling and fermenting. I mean, doesn’t it seem unnatural to anyone else that our demand for convenience and immediate gratification has effectively overridden all good sense and patience, not to mention all respect for natural cycles and limitations (that are there for a reason, thank you Mother Nature) where our food is concerned to the unbelievable detriment of the nutritional value of the majority of our food supply? Doesn’t it mean enough to us to notice the rising levels of diabetes in children or in different cancers and do something about it based on “common sense”?

And why should you be able to get a tomato in the middle of winter in Michigan? I have an idea: you shouldn’t. Unless you have a hoop house (and even then tomatoes are over, if I’m correct, by now), there is really no excuse. And I love tomatoes. Lord knows I bought some reddish things at the market a couple of weeks ago that resembled tomatoes but tasted like watery cardboard sprayed with kitchen cleaner and wax because I miss tomatoes so much in the winter, but I need to learn to exist within my local limits.

The health of the earth and all who live here depends on each of us reacquainting ourselves with the boundaries set forth by nature and reminding ourselves to be humble enough and unselfish enough to see that commitment through day after day. I’d rather not wrap this article up in a cliché, but change does start with one person, or one seed come to that. I am troubled as a person living in the early 21st century to see these times in which we are so profoundly disconnected from the earth on which we live.

This is apparently what I think about when I sit down for a piece of what I darn well know is not the cake my grandmother would have made and eaten.

Below are the ingredients from the trademarked pastry I ate the other day, and I’ll tell you, writing this article has been as good a cure as any to get me to stop that occasional indulgence. Look for yourself; how many ingredients don’t you know? I’ve gone ahead and done some basic linking to information on the top five that stuck out as completely unfamiliar to me. They are listed below the fine print. Thank you for reading, and join me next Tuesday as we chew on some more Food/Foe Thought.

*“Ingredients: Cake (Sugar, Enriched Flour Bleached (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin Folic Acid) Soybean Oil, Modified Corn Starch, Whey, Propelyne Glycol, Monoesters of Fatty Acids, Mono and Diglycerides, Leavening (Baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate), Vital Wheat Gluten, Salt, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Guar Gum, Xanthan Gum, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Egg, Soy Flour), Dark Brown Sugar (sugar, Cane Syrups), Egg, Unsalted Butter (Pasteurized Cream, Annatto), Sour Cream (Milk, Cream, Modified Food Starch, Lactic Acid, Mono-Diglycerides, Sodium Caseinate, Soy Lecithin, Sodium Phosphate, Guar Gum, Citric Acid, Potassium Sorbate, Acetic Acid, Xanthan Gum, Locust Bean Gum, Natural and Artificial Flavors), Pecans, Bleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Sugar, Margarine (Palm Oil, Water, Salt, Mono and Diglycerides, Artificial Flavor, Colored with Annatto, Calcium Disodium EDTA (a preservative), Vitamin A Palmitate added), Spice, Water, Natural Flavors, Baking Powder (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate, Corn Starch, Monocalcium Phosphate.)”
*List of ingredients was made available upon request at the Seattle’s Best location inside Borders.

My top five unknown offenders in alphabetical order:

1. Annatto
2. Calcium Disodium EDTA (preservative) - Also said to “…cause intestinal upsets, muscle cramps, kidney damage, and blood in urine. On the FDA priority list of food additives to be studied for mutagenic, teratogenic, subsacute, and reproductive effects.” This is according to the College of Health and Human Sciences at Oregon State University.
3. Guar Gum - Also, check out Guar Gum’s entry on WebMD.
4. Locust Bean Gum - Also known as Carob Bean Gum.
5. Palmitate - There are many links on this substance, which is a component of palm oil. And from our friends at Wikipedia, the basics.