Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Epic List of Food Ingredients

I make a habit of scanning the ingredients of just about all the packaged food we buy. The salt, sugars, preservatives...;of course, the shorter the list, the better.

The Onion, 'America's Finest News Source', offers entertaining satire including a reference to those ubiquitous lists. This article from their archives from May, 1996 is still timely: 'Doritos Celebrating One Millionth Ingredient.'

"Amid much fanfare, the Frito-Lay Corporation, manufacturers of the world’s best-loved snack chip products for over 50 years, announced yesterday the addition of the one millionth ingredient in Doritos, the company’s flagship brand of cheese-flavored tortilla chips. The new ingredient, disodium guanylate, is expected not only to act as an additional emulsifying agent but also to make the big taste of Doritos even bigger..."

“Today, we have reached a major milestone in the proud history of Doritos,” the Frito-Lay CEO said at a formal chip-breaking ceremony yesterday. “One million ingredients!”

As if motivated by the achievement "the CEO is already thinking about two million."

"That would be incredible,” he said. “There’s just so much out there we could still add: Par--tially Hydrol-yzed Protein Ex-tract, Malto--dex-trin, Tri-so-di-um Pho---s-phate, cheese—the possibilities are endless.”

Oh, by the way, we had a bag of Doritos and I had to check. Sure enough, there was disodium guanylate within the epic list.