For many people, there are few things in life more intoxicating than being in the know. And when it feels like you’re uncovering a mystery, even the most mundane aspects of a profession can seem fascinating.
So when someone comes to us with knowledge that purports to expose something sinister about an industry we support every day, it’s almost impossible for our curiosity not to get the better of us.
And since that knowledge often helps us better understand what the people we meet go through or what we shouldn’t order at fast food restaurants , we can sometimes come away with information we can really use when people tell us their secrets.
But while these insider tips tend to involve specific businesses or parts of a larger industry, it seems that one woman is looking to blow the lid off the food industry in general.
And from what she has to tell us, it sounds like that sector is full of lies and half-truths.
Back in August, a woman named Kassandra uploaded a TikTok spilling some unsavory facts about the foods we eat.
And she started off with perhaps the biggest one. In her words, “We’ve got wood chips in all our food disguised as cellulose.”
More specifically, this is actually wood pulp we’re talking about, but an NPR article confirmed that the lion’s share of bread products, shredded cheeses, and barbecue sauces have cellulose in them that’s derived from wood pulp.
It’s so widely used because it’s a cheap way to keep ingredients from clumping together and our bodies don’t absorb this cellulose when it passes through our digestive systems.
She went on to say that while companies who sell “freshly-squeezed” orange juice aren’t technically lying, their messaging is very misleading.
As she told it, the orange juice is freshly squeezed, but then stored in tanks like these for about a year. Since this causes the juice to lose a lot of its flavor, it then has to be added back through “flavor packets.”
As she put it, “These flavor packets are just a bunch of undisclosed chemicals with fragrance added to them.”
Indeed, both the existence of these flavor packets and the claim that they’re made by the same facilities that supply perfume companies were corroborated by Alissa Hamilton from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy during an interview with The New Yorker .
Kassandra pointed out that it isn’t just people like us who are being short-changed by the food industry.
And we can see that in how easily abused the term “free range” is for chicken products. That’s because all it functionally means is that the chickens aren’t technically caged and the confines that they’re packed into are technically possible to exit.
In Kassandra’s words, “Most of the chickens are caged and live in horrible conditions and this is considered free range.”
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Not only was this confirmed by an article in The Guardian , but that piece makes it clear that Kassandra is only scratching the surface of what’s allowed to happen to “free range” chickens.
And as we’ll see from the full video available here, this is only a sample of the misleading labels and buzzwords the food industry loves to use.
Whether we’re talking about ammonia-infused beef, blueberry muffins that only need one actual blueberry in them, or the wide world of labels touting dubious health claims, it seems that the only foods we can truly trust are the ones we make ourselves.
