26 Ingredients in a Burger?
In a recent addition of Tiny Desk Kitchen, Allison Aubrey set out to determine why Thiamine mononitrate, disodium inosinate, and pyridoxine hydrochloride — just three of 26 ingredients — are added to everything from a burger served in schools to veggie burgers in the grocery store.
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“For me, it’s just a huge red flag,” says Ryan Lonnett, a parent of children in Fairfax County, Virginia schools. He’s an advocate with the group Real Food For Kids.
Lonnett says things like disodium inosinate stand out. “Since I don’t know what it is, I’d rather not put it in my body.”
Real Food For Kids is an advocacy group of concerned parents who want schools to stop serving highly processed foods with additives, and they want Fairfax County schools to phase out or reformulate processed foods such as a grilled cheese served in a bag, a jumbo turkey frank and a cheese quesadilla.
The group also wants the county to purchase new kitchen equipment and begin preparing some foods from scratch.
“We now have 36 school [parent teacher associations] that have signed a resolution that encourages the county to make changes,” says JoAnne Hammermaster, head of RFFK.
Not eating anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food is one of many rules in Pollan’s book “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.”
“Don’t eat anything with more than five ingredients, or ingredients you can’t pronounce,”says Pollan.
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Penny McConnell, who directs Fairfax County’s Office of Food and Nutrition Services, has agreed to replace the 26-ingredient burger with a frozen patty made of 100 percent beef.
But McConnell has no intention of preparing meals from scratch, claiming she doesn’t have the kitchen equipment, the space or the labor force.
McConnell makes the absurd claim that the processed food the county serves is healthy and limits the risks of food-borne illness because they prevent the chance of cross-contamination that comes with handling raw meat.
“That product that comes from a manufacturer, it’s gone through lab analysis and safety checks,” McConnell says. “I know it’s safe.”
No she doesn’t. Meat manufactures are plagued by having to issue scores of recalls every year, despite their so-called safety checks.
And in the past, thousands of schoolchildren have been served contaminated peanut butter and canned vegetables weeks after recalls were announced.
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One report revealed kids on the school lunch program were served thousands of tons of tough, stringy “spent hen”meat from millions of egg-laying hens culled each year and supplied to schools by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The meat from these old egg layers is normally used by pet food producers, but found its way into chicken patties and salads on U.S. school menus.
In 2011, U.S. legislators blocked a proposal to improve the nutritional quality of the nation’s school lunches.
But because of vested interests, major food corporations, including Coca-Cola, Del Monte, frozen pizza-producers ConAgra and other manufacturers of processed foods, objected to USDA proposed regulations, claiming they would raise costs and mandate food children would only end up throwing away.
As a result, children raised in public schools feast on fried, salty meals that are delivered frozen and pre-cooked off site, courtesy of large agri-food companies.
Aubrey points out that the debate about school food is a reflection of a wider cultural rethink about the way we eat.
“What I believe is that we’re going back,” says Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado.
“If we want to be healthy and want our kids to be healthy, we’ve got to find our kitchens again.”