25 Most Disturbing Foods You Eat Every Day
In furthering my attempts to get you to eat healthier (hell I still think tomatoes are healthy ... or are they?), here are some daily foods that you should think twice about eating.
1. Raisins
According to the FDA, there are allowed to be 5% moldy raisins in 10 sub-samples (what that means, I do not know) and at most 40 mg of sand and grit in 100 grams of raisins.
2. Cinnamon
Cinnamon is allowed to contain at most 400 insect fragments for every 50 grams and at most 10 rodent hairs for every 50 hairs. Plus, due to the cinnamon challenge, there is high caution around its use for non conventional ideas.
3. Potatoes
Much like tomatoes containing glycoalkaloid, potato stems and roots are very poisonous and can lead to headaches, nausea and intestinal problems.
4. Tomatoes
Tomatoes contain this chemical called Glycoalkaloid that is able to cause extreme upset stomachs in people. And tomatoes are neither a fruit nor vegetable, but an ovary.
5. Rhubarb Leaves
Cooked rhubarb stalks make a great pie filling, but the leaves contain corrosive oxalic acid, which is poisonous in large doses. Cooking with baking soda can make the poisoning even more acute.
6. Almonds
Almonds have a huge amount of cyanide in them- so huge in fact that it is illegal to sell in most countries raw (New Zealand is not one of those countries). That’s why every almond product (as well as almonds themselves) are cooked to remove the cyanide.
7. Castor Oil
Castor Oil is the most dangerous concentrated food available. It has enough poison in it to kill a fully grown human with one bean and enough ricin to kill a horse in four, depending on how it's pressed. What makes it so fascinating is that we eat castor oil products everyday, like in candy or in medicine.
8. Fugu
Known as pufferfish, this is one of the most dangerous and poisonous foods in the world. It’s not what’s it made of that makes it dangerous (oh, you know what I mean), it’s how the chef prepares it. Apparently, chefs have to go into training for three years learning how to cut one fish. After their training is over, they take a final test which consists of an extensive written portion as well as a food test. (It sounds like getting a drivers license). The final food test involves the chef cutting their own fugu fish ... and eating it. 30% of all people pass the course (that doesn’t mean they die from eating their food, it means some drop out, some fail during the three years and others, most, die).
9. Mushrooms
If you’re buying mushrooms in containers, the FDA has a rather elicit regulations surrounding the amount of bugs that can be in the container. Twenty maggots or less are allowed in 100 grams of liquid (if you’re buying the mushrooms in a liquid) or 15 grams of dried mushrooms. Then 5 maggots or less measuring at most two millimeters are allowed in 100 grams of liquid or 15 grams of dried mushrooms. Much more so, 74 mites or less are allowed in 100 grams of liquid mushrooms and in 15 grams of dried mushrooms, and at most, 10% of the mushrooms in the container are allowed to be decomposed.
10. Ketchup
Well maybe not now, but ketchup used to be made with fish. That’s right, your fries’ best friend could have been fish instead of tomatoes. Now can someone explain to me why ketchup isn’t considered a smoothie?
11. Tap Water
This is more of an environmental and regional problem than a “disturbing ingredient” or process. As I have stated before, I saw Gaslands Part II and there are actual people whose tap water can burst into flames due to the methane gas that leaked into it. So that one sided documentary really changed my view on a subject I knew nothing about.
12. Peanut Butter
There are so many more examples of disgusting foods from other countries, (Google blood pudding for one), but I’ll just go the coward’s way out (I’m talking about you guys, I already saw the pictures, plus a few wrong links that led me to a page of rats and thumbs found in food) and tell you about the horrors of daily foods. The FDA has certain regulations for foods, and for peanut butter, the FDA allows 30 or so insect fragments for every 100 grams. So in that 16.3 ounce container of peanut butter, you have 462.097 grams, or 138.6 insect fragments. Not only that, but there is an average of one rodent hair for every hundred grams and about 25 milligrams of grit for every 100 grams. Enjoy that PB&J.
13. Casu Marzu
I was originally trying to go for everyday foods that people eat regularly, not extremely disgusting foods you will never eat solely for the fact it’s disgusting and can only be found in another country. Anyhow. Would you like some ancient cheese with maggot eggs living inside? Referred to as maggot cheese, casu marzu is made from goat milk, where cheese flies are added on purpose (to help the cheese age and ferment) that lay maggot eggs. If you want to make this illegal (in the world it’s illegal, in Italy it’s overlooked) cheese, you are forced to wear goggles since the maggot larvae can jump up to six inches in the air. As the larvae hatch and eat the cheese, they produced a flavor (what is it? I’m not sure, but I’m guessing it’s secretions) which apparently is what people want to eat.
14. Balut
The casu cheese wasn’t enough for you? Have some balut, a delicacy in many Asian countries where fertilized duck eggs are served on your plate. The duck eggs are placed in the sun for about eight days where they are then cooked (after making sure there is an embryo in the egg) and served with salt.
15. Maraschino Cherries
So you decide to drink some Shirley Temples because you don’t want fish bladders and arsenic rolling around in your stomach - still not a great move. The cherries are picked and then brought to the factory where they soak in a bath of calcium chloride and sulfur dioxide. After the bleaching (meaning that soaking they just went through caused them to become yellowish-white), they are flavored and dyed with Red #2 (you betcha, carmine). Sometimes, they even come in different colors and flavors.
16. Beer
Would you like some fish with that? Isinglass is a type of gel found in fish bladders that is used in beer mixtures to help mix the yeast and other solids and keep them from staying clumped. Even arsenic is added to beer for the same reason: to get rid of clumps in the beer.
17. Salmon
You know that pink salmon that you ate, or you fed your cat? Farmed salmon is actually gray in color and doesn't smell the way you think it does. That’s right, the fish is treated to a seemingly healthy pink and then “smell” is added to make it seem fishlike in nature.
18. Coca Cola/Pepsi
You always hear those stories that you can use Coke or Pepsi as a nail polish remover or paint thinner. You even heard of the science experiments with meat inside the bottle, only to disintegrate three days later, or the car battery and steel nails. Well, Coca Cola and Pepsi have the same acidity level as vinegar (both with a pH level of 2.5, the lower the number, the more acidic). That’s why if you see a truck carrying soda, they are legally required to carry a sign stating a corrosive material is inside.
19. Strawberry Flavored Anything
There are over 50 chemicals that go into making strawberry the flavor we know and love. Enjoy that cherry dipped strawberry ice cream you got from Mr. Softee!
20. French Fries
Those fast food French fries are not only high in fat and all those fatty oils, they’re high in sugar too. Apparently so, to get that toasted brown color, sugar is added to the oil mixture. This not only gets the fries to a crispy feel and look, it also makes them addictive for all the people eating them.
21. Movie Theater Popcorn
It’s not that microwavable popcorn is any better, but movie theater popcorn is much worse. Honestly, would you want to eat anything from a movie theater? Anyhow, the popcorn is air-popped like popcorn is (similar to the microwave, you know what I’m talking about), and it’s then sprayed with coconut. Coconut. Wait for it. And canola popping oil. The Center for Science in the Public Interest even had a study of popcorn and all the snacks you can get at the theaters.
22. American Cheese
The American Cheese being those little yellow cheese squares you use to make cheese burgers and grilled cheese. (Living in a right off the boat Italian family, I’m kind of glad the only cheeses in the house are parmigiano, mozzarella, bocconcini, and ricotta. Is your mouth watering?). Now in America, it’s known as American Cheese, but all over the world, it’s known as processed cheese. And do you know what’s in bocconini (arguably the best cheese you will ever eat) but not processed cheese? Cheese and milk products. The main ingredients of American cheese (by percent composition) include “water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, food starch, casein, whey, modified food starch, salt, natural flavor” and more. Nowhere in there did you see cheese or milk or even milk byproduct. And the same goes for spray cheese.
23. Surimi
No not that crab you ate at that seafood restaurant* in Little Italy (*not including chain stores like Red Lobster and Long John Silver), it’s that crab you got in the supermarket, or Red Lobster and Long John Silver. Imitation crab meat is made out of the remains of other fish, and whatever is lurking at the bottom of the ocean (meaning for all you know, there could be some rubber humans down there). Surimi is made much how pink slime and mechanically separated beef is, except that while the latter two are used as fillers, surimi is literally just served as itself. Better yet, surimi is Japanese for ground meat. (And that red color? Carmine).
24. Blueberry anything
Blueberry muffins, blueberry cereal, blueberry anything. Odds are (if you don’t go to the store and buy the blueberries themselves) you have never eaten a real blueberry. That’s right, any blueberry products contain synthetic blueberries because they are cheaper than actual blueberries and faster to make. These fake blueberries are made out of blue food coloring and corn syrup.
25. Orange Juice
What? Is the most natural juice you can think of not natural, despite what the box claims? Silly human, tricks are for the packaging designers who can literally put anything on their boxes and people will buy it. That’s right. Orange juice is made with real oranges, but artificially flavored. Have you ever wondered why orange juice is available year round? Well the farmers and others collect all the oranges and then juice them to get the natural flavor out. It is then put into a large container with all the other juiced oranges, where it stays there for a year. That juice you’re serving to your toddler? It’s over a year old. Well why do orange juice brands do this? Oranges are not a year round staple, and the longer the juice stays in those containers, the more it loses its flavor. Thus, artificial flavors are added to the mixture to make it taste orange-y. That’s why most brands of orange juice always taste the same.
