What’s HVP?
The FDA says: “HVP stands for hydrolyzed vegetable protein, a substance used in small amounts to add flavor to many commercially processed foods, such as soups, hot dogs, chilis, stews, dips, salad dressings, gravies, frozen dinners, and snack foods.”
The stuff is everywhere, which is why Moi’s post, Hydrolized Vegetable Protein Recall, affects a hell of a lot of people, most of whom wouldn’t welcome the addition of Salmonella to the list of ingredients.
The FDA has a PDF of the products being recalled, eight pages and growing. You will note that a number of the products have “organic” in their names. Excuse me, but I seriously doubt that HVP is a naturally occurring substance, although Salmonella certainly is.
More information at FoodSafety.gov.
5 comments
This reminds me of something I noticed on the side of a box of Bigelow “Lemon Lift” tea bags. “Natural Lemon Flavor” it proclaimed. Then in parentheses: “(soy lecithin)”. I guess I’m not up on all this newfangled stuff, I thought lemons grew on trees, not on soybean plants, but so it goes ;).
Reading the side labels of processed foods is a trip. They seem to have everything in them other than, well, actual food. And they love the word “natural”. Well, salmonella, arsenic, and cyanide are all natural. But I’m not interested in having them in my food, thank you very much!
– Badtux the Foodie Penguin
Avoid supermarket ice cream, because almost all of it involves chemistry not cooking. Have an uncle who loves it, and leaves the stuff in the freezer when he goes. I won’t leave it out for the feral cats because I don’t think it’s good for living creatures.
The manufacturers overdue “flavors” and people lose the ability to taste real food. People are missing out on great things, like real bread, things that we have love for most of the existence of the species. They miss the point that spices were introduced to overcome the flavors of rotting food, not to enhance anything.
Actually, bread dates back to near-historic times. We didn’t have bread prior to about 8,000 years ago, when the same guy who discovered that malt, hops and barley would turn into beer also discovered that wheat dough left on the windowsill would get frothy as it was colonized by yeast. Before that time we likely did have grain products, but more like the AmerInds did — i.e., as flat tortillas.
I’ve been making my own home-made corn tortillas for a while now. It’s quite easy — corn flour (*not* corn meal, different product), water, flatten a ball into a disk, toss onto a hot griddle for 30 seconds per side. They’re good hot, they’re lousy cold. I suppose you could call this “bread”, but that’s sort of stretching it.
But anyhow, spices have been used in different ways by different people, it wasn’t always to cover up the taste of rotting meats, often it was as a method of preservation. Salted cod, pickled vegetables, smoked sausages, etc. all arose as methods of preserving foods, not of covering up the taste of rotted food. My great-grandparents grew most of the food they ate for most of their lives, and salt pork and black pepper were common ingredients used in their cooking, it made boiled cabbage or turnip greens or purple-hull peas or whatever taste good and so on and so forth. They also had a smokehouse and when they slaughtered one of their hogs they used it to make sausage as well, substituting smoking and spices for some of the salt they’d otherwise have to use to preserve the meat. The notion that spices are a recent innovation, or that modern processed foods somehow use them in a way that kills our taste for real food, just doesn’t work for me, because as a child I ate at my great-grandmother and grandmother’s table, and there wasn’t a processed food to be found — even the biscuits were baked from scratch using flour and baking powder.
I actually asked a Bigelow rep about the soy lecithin thingy, and their response was basically that actual lemon juice wouldn’t work unless it were mixed with the soy lecithin to turn it into something that had actual body to it. In other words, it simply was physically impossible for them to include real actual lemon juice as part of their tea bags so they were faking it because that was the only way to do it. In the end, processed foods are attempting to taste like real foods — and not really succeeding, I can definitely tell the difference between the soy lecithin “lemon flavoring” and putting actual lemon into my tea. The problem is that actual lemon is rarely available in the settings where I drink tea (primarily at the office and on the trail)…
– Badtux the Foodie Penguin
I’ve gotten to the point where I just want to eat things only found at our local Farmer’s Markets. (well…except for a few things from Trader Jose’s…the nuts, etc.) When something says “Natural” on the label…I turn and run away.
.-= last blog ..Flickr Foto Friday =-.
So you’re not fond of that all-natural salmonella ingredient, Cookie? :).
.-= last blog ..In the dark =-.