You mean the substance made out of plants which has been eaten for a couple millennia?
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Trust me on this. Tofu isn’t food. It’s some kind of alien waste product foisted on us by our Evil Robot Overlords in an attempt to remain financially solvent in a time frame where the real food is far cheaper and better for you.
I kid, I kid.
I’d suspect that people in Asian and Southeast Asian countries who have eaten it for longer than most western countries have been a country might disagree.
You may not like it, but it’s real food.
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Of course it is, but my point here is that maybe (in the case of the plastic rice) we are seeing a completely artificial food, created from raw feedstocks, like say, natural gas byproducts, or even coal.
It’s an idea that has been proffered in literature: see Gateway by Frederic Pohl (from the wiki:
The Gateway novel focuses on the exploits of one of those explorers, Robinette Broadhead. Broadhead hits the jackpot by becoming the first person to return from a black hole’s event horizon. In the sequel, Broadhead uses the money to fund further discoveries involving Heechee technology, locating a Heechee food factory that is capable of turning raw carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (CHON) from comets into edible food for an overpopulated Earth.)
I guess I’m unsure how this relates to your comments about tofu as being “non-food” then? I’m fairly certain that tofu is just just processed soy beans. Hell, you can make it at home, pretty easy. [quote=“1AuthenticDude, post:64, topic:91798”]
we are seeing a completely artificial food, created from raw feedstocks, like say, natural gas byproducts, or even coal.
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What would lead you to conclude that at all, though? It’s been confiscated by the Nigerian government and is under going testing to see what the deal with this rice is and if it’s tainted or just fake.
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It looks like it may have been an overzealous official in the wrong department who came to the wrong conclusion based on a cursory examination. It smelled odd and was sticky, so sticky rice treated with chemicals is the most reasonable answer. In any case, the Nigerian article @Max_Blancke posted commented that it was irresponsible for this department to share rumours without evidence, and the department that actually tested the rice didn’t find any evidence of plastic.
@1AuthenticDude Synthetic foods may be an interesting development, but the kind of fakes that are sold in China as the real thing are only designed to be cheap, look right and possibly act in a similar way to the real thing - nutritional value and safety are not a concern.
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There is one more thing along these lines I’d like to say.
Olestra.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) originally approved olestra for use as a replacement for fats and oils in prepackaged ready-to-eat snacks in 1996, concluding that such use “meets the safety standard for food additives, reasonable certainty of no harm”. In the late 1990s, Olestra lost its popularity due to side effects *, but products containing the ingredient can still be purchased at grocery stores in some countries.
Because olestra is synthesized from sucrose, it can bond with six, seven, or eight fatty acids. The resulting radial arrangement is too large and irregular to move through the intestinal wall and be absorbed. Olestra has the same taste and mouthfeel as fat, but it passes through the gastrointestinal tract undigested without contributing calories or nutritive value to the diet.
From a mechanical point of view, scientists were able to manipulate the compound in such a way that it could be used in place of cooking oils in the preparation of many types of food.
Since it contains fatty acid functional groups, olestra is able to dissolve lipid-soluble vitamins, such as vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, and vitamin A, along with carotenoids. Fat-soluble nutrients consumed with olestra products are excreted with the undigested olestra molecules. To counteract this loss of nutrients, products made with olestra are fortified with oil-soluble vitamins.
*Starting in 1996, an FDA-mandated health warning label read "This Product Contains Olestra. Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools (anal leakage). Olestra inhibits the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients.
And Olestra is off the market, of course.
Again, nothing to do with tofu, which is not artificial food in anyway. I think you’re conflating a whole bunch of stuff into a single category here.[quote=“jsroberts, post:66, topic:91798”]
look right and possibly act in a similar way to the real thing - nutritional value and safety are not a concern.
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Let me highlight what @jsroberts said, cause I entirely agree with it.
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Eh, I think there are still a few products out there using it. My goolge-fu came up with a few chip varieties in use in 2014 and it is still legal in the US. I swear I saw some chips at the store recently.
But yes, it is nothing like tofu, which is more or less like a soy cheese. It isn’t a synthetic food any more than cheese is.
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Yes, I sometimes toast brown rice (just a little) in a dry pan. More often, I soften some onion and garlic in oil, then put in the rice for a few minutes to get toasty and oiled up, and finally add the boiling water.
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There are any number of ways to cook rice. @deerpig mentioned a rice cooker. But this is far from universal, even in the United States.
In Nigeria, they have their own methods.
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WHAT IS THAT MADNESS!
Goes back to eating risotto.
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My understanding with Olestra is that because it is not digested, it tends to come out the same way it came in.
If it was a solid, saturated fat (like, say, from a pie crust, or a french fry made in shortening instead of oil), it’ll come out solid or semisolid, and will be mixed nicely in with whatever else come out.
If it was a liquid fat (like, say, from a potato chip, which you don’t want to have a waxy mouthfeel), it’ll come out liquid, and thus “loose stools (anal leakage)”.
You can make Olestra out of any mix of fatty acids you want, to make it solid or liquid, and to control its melting point and other cooking characteristics. But if you can pour it in your mouth, it’ll pour out…the other end…just as easily.
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BBC rolls back the plastic rice story. Apparently it’s real rice which is ‘contaminated’
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There aren’t many things cheaper than doggy poo, but there’s a whole industry to make the fake stuff.
There isn’t a large demand for real doggy poo, but there’s a market for the fake stuff.
Similarly, there’s a whole industry to make fake food, too; but like dog poo, it costs more and lasts longer than the real stuff, and isn’t used for the same purpose.
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I just found this out too and came to post, though I thought this thread was dead.
Now one may ask, “Isn’t that still horrible?”
Yes it is. But at least its people selling old rice, and not something even more evil - selling plastic rice you can’t eat.
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some fake stuff is cheaper.
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How do people selling fake eggs or gutter oil not get lynched the next time they show up at market?
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People in China are well aware of fake eggs being commonly sold – even if no one knows anyone who has actually seen them. I wish I could look up the podcast I heard a while ago which debunked the “fake egg” urban myth – by going to China and looking for them. Plenty of people knew about them, but no one they could track down had actually seen one for sale.
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