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FDA Considers Redefining Chocolate
shewfig writes "The US Food and Drug Administration is considering redefining 'chocolate' to allow substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb.) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb.), and whey protein for dry whole milk. There are already standard terms to differentiate these products from chocolate, such as 'chocolatey' and 'chocolate-flavored.' The change was requested by the industry group Chocolate Manufacturers of America. Leading the resistance to this change is high-end chocolate maker Guittard, with significant grass-roots support from the Candyblog. The FDA is taking consumer comments until April 25. Here is the FDA page on the proposed change, which oddly enough does not say what the proposed change is."
My name is Harmonious Botch and I'm a chocoholic. A fucking serious chocoholic. I figure I spend about 200 per month on it. Were I this hooked on booze or heroin, I'd be dead by now.
There is already crud in the chocolate. Any serious consumer of chocolate already knows to read the ingredients.
To write this post, I went to the trash can, pulled out a package of inferior quality candy that my wonderful but misguided wife had bought. I had thrown it away because of the crud in it. Under "ingredients", it says: "palm, shea, sunflower, and/or safflower oil". There is already whey protein in it also.
A little vegetable oil is not going to make a big difference. Over the last decade or two they have snuck palm oil in, and sometimes even wax, and most consumers didn't notice. Most of you won't notice the vegtable oil either, and those of us who do already read the labels.
There is a reason the FDA's summary is so vague---the proposal isn't about chocolate. Well, not just about chocolate. The proposal is supported by a substantial range of food manufacturer's and distributors, touching on chocolate, meat, poultry, frozen food, and more.
The proposed changes affect divergences from standard labeling guidelines for a lot of reasons, including things like "improvements in nutritional properties", "use of safe suitable flavors and flavor enhancers", "alternate manufacturing processes", etc.
You can read the whole thing yourself (pdf warning) here. See especially the last 4 pages or so.
Is the change in guidelines a good thing for consumers? I don't know. I don't know enough about food manufacturing to judge.
Hershey owns both Scharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt chocolates, but has thankfully let them continue their good work.
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http://www.thehersheycompany.com/news/release.asp
"Vegetable oil" is a synonym for "heavily processed, hydrogenated oil which will kill you but makes good financial sense to the corporatised US food production industry"
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It is poisonous bloody stuff. If you want to know why America (in particular) and western nations (in general) are all suffering out of control obesity and diabetes epidemics you need to look no further than the replacement of natural oils (peanut, coconut and butter), with so-called "healthy" polyunsaturates. Countries like India uses huge amounts of butter (ghee) and coconut oil and you don't see them with rampaging blood sugar levels, heart disease and all of the other side effects of eating crap like "Crisco" and margarines.
Ask yourself why these types of oils never spoil? If you leave margarine out of the refridgerator for a week, does it go off? Why? It doesn't go off because it is not bio-degradeable. If it is not biodegradable, then how is your body meant to metabolise it? Of course it can't, so what it does is "put it aside" and get on with the job of digesting everything else. After sufficient time of course your body will have put enough fat aside that you become fat. Fat builds up around the pancreas and voila, you've got diabetes.
So why do we eat this crap? Because US food interests want you to. The problem for US business interests is that most natural oils such as peanut, olive and coconut/palm oil are not produced in the US. The US does produce gobs of corn and soy however, not to mention that canola rubbish. The problem is that these crops do not produce much edible oil naturally, it has to be processed out of them. Another problem is that the resulting oils are quite unstable, meaning they react to oxygen (oxidize) quickly and spoil. This is a problem for the manufacturing, distribution and retail industries however, who really like long shelf lives and cheap storage (non-refrigerated). So what the industry does is to hydrogenate their oils, which means superheating the oil and passing it through hydrogen to fuse hydrogen molecules to the receptors that would normally fuse with the oxygen. This makes for an oil that is extremely stable but an unfortunate side effect is that it also becomes virtually undigestable. Sure you can eat it and you won't turn blue and die in a week, but then the same can be said for smoking too. Remember how corporate interests insisted that smoking couldn't hurt you until only a few years ago? Well the edible oil industry is no better than those criminals. They too use bogus science and massive amounts of money to produce a steady stream of lies and bullshit regarding the health benefits of eating processed vegetable oils. This began during the thirties and over time it has worked so well that the US is now the most overweight and unhealthy nation on earth, with other western nations scrambling to follow suit.
Now they want to stick that crap in chocolate. It's getting to the point that you wont be able to buy anything that isn't filled with this rubbish.
Essential reading:
The Oiling of America
http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/oiling.h
Other good sites;
http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=7
http://www.thescreamonline.com/essays/essays5-1/v
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/DiabetesDec
http://www.jctonic.com/include/healingcrisis/12Hy
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Isn't Ghiradelli really just re branded Nestlé though?
:)
No, it's a 150 year old chocolate company in SF that was bought by Lindt in 1998.
Weird how 3 of the best American chocolate companies are in the Bay Area... Ghiradelli, Guittard, and my personal favorite, Scharffen Berger (which really is one of the world's best, even if it was just bought by Hershey's last year
There is a lot of american cuisine.
_ origins_of_American_cuisine
Spinach Salad
Waldorf Salad
Apple Pie
Brownies
Fudge
Crabcake
Garbage Plate (yay Rochester)
TexMex
on and on and on...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cuisine#The
Come on, we might be a country full of people from everywhere else, but we have our own style and cuisine.
I don't know why parent is marked troll. Ghirardelli isn't bad, but several years ago it was better. These days Scharffen Berger is good, though we'll see how long that lasts now that Hershey owns them. Distribution is a little messed up, but the quality is still there. Vosges is also good, if a bit strange. There are also many American chocolatiers that do not have wide distribution (and probably never will) that make very good chocolates. Still, this is rather sad. Already there are things sold as chocolate in the United States that cannot even be sold as food in Europe.
Remember RFC 873!
Personally, I think that most "wine experts" are overblown windbags who engage in the worst overuse of metaphors in modern language. However, I do happen to agree with them now and again: every single time I've had anything from Stag's Leap, it's been incredible. Wines, like many other issues of taste, are difficult to come to any lasting consensus. You would do well to continue to trust your own taste over anyone else's.
(If you're in the mood for advice, you would do yourself a favor to lose the bit about California wines not being world class. You just come across as uninformed.)
Regards,
Ross
WOW - There's a lot of misinformation floating around here! Obviously this is a topic that's near and dear to many of your hearts!
I'm the technical director of a chocolate company. I've been making chocolate for many, many years.
The proposal from the GMA isn't directed just at chocolate, but would include it. It essentially calls for the use of 'all safe and suitable' sweeteners and oils. Chocolate has a standard of identity, which means that the government controls the definition of chocolate. That definition can be changed (white chocolate actually didn't legally exist until a few years go, at which time a white chocolate section was added to the CFR) - however it takes many, many years to do so (white chocolate took over a decade).
This is driven by a number of things, which include, but are not limited to:
1) the desire to be able to legally call sugar free products sugar free chocolate, when formulated to meet the other standards
2) the desire to harmonize global chocolate standards - most of the rest of the world allows the use of up to 5% CBE (cocoa butter equivilants - these are oils that are chemically the same as cocoa butter, but are usually - not always - more economical).
ANY change would be required to be labelled, so no one would pull anything over on you, same as it is today. Mfr's would be able to choose to do this or not, it would not be a requirement, so it's not that all chocolate would change overnight. My take on it is that the GMA has written this petition so broadly as to be ridiculous, hoping that the FDA allows on a portion of what was asked for. It will likely take years before the FDA even acknowledges it 8-)
Let's try someone who knows food, then. The entire Cajun cuisine, for example, is essentially new. Chowder (there's more to chowder than clam and corn) is an entirely American practice, as are Burgoo, Chioppino and Bouillabase. We invented recirculated roasting (no, it's not the same as a dutch oven.) The number two prepared food on earth is an American invention, despite its foreign name - whereas China beat us to rice with egg, we invented the Hamburger. We're responsible for nachos, hard tacos, chili con queso and chili con carne (look it up.) We're why Mexico loves cumin now. Basically anything you eat that you think is mexican food that has yellow cheese on it instead of white is America's fault.
The current state of Barbeque is entirely an American thing, though the Dutch independently reinvented it in South Africa later under the name "braai." (This is unfair to foreigners, as we use the word "barbeque" very differently than they do; a Briton hearing that word will think of the situation we think of as "grilled," and when they hear grill, they think of what we think of as stove-top burners. I do not know what foreigners call what we call Barbeque, though I know Australia uses the word the way we do.) We also invented Pit Barbeque (yes, we mean something different by that phrase too, sorry.) There's also Saint Louis Barbeque, Kentucky Barbeque and Louisiana Barbeque, all of which are substantially different (one's stewed in sauce, one's over a grill range open fire and one's surrounded by coal heat in a brick pit.)
We invented Chop Suey and General Tso's Chicken. Indeed, anything you see on a purportedly Chinese menu involving cheese, mango, brown/whole rice or tomato is our fault. Rangoon puffs (not crab rangoon) are our fault. What we call Egg Foo Yung is nothing like what the Cantonese call Fu Yung Egg. Spring rolls are Chinese; egg rolls are not. What we call beef with broccoli is supposed to use a relative of broccoli called gailan; however, the leafy parts are used, not the stalks and not the clubs, so it might as well be asparagus, it's so different. We invented Jibaritos and Jigaritos.
We invented the tri-tip steak. "You can't invent a steak, it grew in the cow that way!" Actually, no it didn't. We also invented cheesed steaks. (No, not Philly cheese-steaks; we didn't invent those, we just perfected them.) If you don't know what a cheesed steak is, look up what "new york strip" actually means; it's not a cut, like sirloin or delmonico. They're aged and molded. There's a reason they're that tender.
America includes several areas whose cuisines developed on their own before they were called America, such as Hawaii, Alaska, the Texarcana area and the pan-Florida area (Florribean food is awesome.) We're the country that merged Burmese and Oaxacan cuisine. We're about the only country to grill frog legs (the french batter them, the chinese boil them and the italians and thai fry them.) Chicken Vesuvio is ours.
We have a spectacular history of invention in the field of alcohol. I probably don't need to beleaguer this.
Americans use the phrase "fried chicken" differently than other countries, so when I say "fried chicken is ours," please understand that I mean something more specific than chicken which has been fried. We mean bone-in chicken ribcage halves and drumsticks which are larded, spiced, battered, breaded, deep fat fried and re-spiced, in that order. Furthermore, it involves a specific set of spices; it's a little like talking to the British about Shephard's Pie. You just have to know.
There are a lot of people who believe that the current popularity of the sandwich is largely due to their upsurge in use in America during the l
StoneCypher is Full of BS