I had a summer job, back in my college days, at a factory that turned wood pulp into the additives that replace fat in fat-free foods. It was a pretty fascinating process (to me, anyway), which a search reveals I’ve already prattled on about, elsewhere in this forum, but I’ll paste in here, to spare you a click, if you’re interested.
The wood pulp arrived at the factory in the form of giant rolls (say, meter wide strips rolled up 'til the rolls stood 1.5-2m tall) of what I’d describe as blotter paper: white, spongy paper, ~3mm thick. The paper would be diced into ~1cm squares which would then be broken down into a slurry, via hydrochloric acid, and the slurry chemically neutralized with ammonia. The moisture would be spun out in a drier, resulting in cakes of pale grey fudge. Chunks of this fudge would tumble down a chute, at the bottom of which we’d collect barrels full, load the barrels onto pallets, and forklift them over to another part of the plant, where the fudge would be mixed in with a binder of some sort. It might be xanthan gum, or guar gum, or, most commonly, carboxymethycellulose, a/k/a CMC gum. That, to my knowledge, was the only ingredient that would show up on the package in the grocery aisles: whatever gum was used to stick the wood pulp to the rest of the food, which speaks to how we react to the notion of wood pulp being in our food. I.e., by and large, society seems much more comfortable with a mysterious gum, or multi-syllabic word salad on the ingredients list, than the words “wood pulp”.
This blend of pulp and gum would be further dried and sifted into a fine powder, and shipped off to wherever people have had the fat sucked out of their food. I remember this stuff went into Miracle Whip, and some kind of Sealtest fat-free ice cream-ish substance. Not sure who else our clients were/are, but I gather it’s a pretty common method for replacing fat in fat-free foodstuffs: acid- and ammonia-soaked wood pulp, blended with gum.
Add a little stank, and I bet it tastes like grated parm!
