Well, I would like to hear why you and other think that UK fries have 4 ingredients and US fries have 14. I have drawn no conclusions. I’m genuinely interested why the extra chemicals are needed in the US but not in the UK.
I updated the body of the post to note the concerns with Food Babe’s reliability. Now, if folks would like to talk about the reasons for the different number of ingredients, that would be interesting to me. If we want to continue to talk about how awful Food Babe is and how it was wrong for me to use her as a source I will let you continue without me.
Here’s the McDonald’s position on the subject of the scary anti-foamer:
My guess (and it’s just a guess) is that the European governments have privileged food regulations over worker-safety regulations on this issue, and that worker-safety regulations trump food regulations in the U.S., especially when regulating chemicals the FDA regards as safe.
Both ingredients lists are incorrect in the context presented, as they were prepared under different regulatory schemes. The first hint of this is that the American list says they are prepared in vegetable oil and goes on to list specific oils, while the British list simply says they are prepared in non-hydrogenated vegetable oil. (I believe salt is also added after cooking in the US, but only the UK list describes it thusly, once again letting you know you’re not comparing apples to apples.)
First, how do US fries have 14 ingredients, and how do UK fries have 4? The only way you get 4 UK ingredients is if you skip the oil(s) they’re prepared in (presumably as duplicative of the earlier-listed vegetable oil) and don’t count sub-ingredients.
I’m just guessing, but keep in mind that McDonalds in the USA does not pay fry cooks very well, so they are probably wise to add “anti-foaming agents” to protect their very unskilled staff. If anti-foaming chemicals aren’t used in the UK they’ll have to actually show the fry cooks how to manage hot oil, and that takes one entire five or six minute lesson! Obviously McDonalds would try to eliminate that waste of time, and certainly they wouldn’t want to give workers skills that they could then take to the competition.
Slightly off-topic - despite the ancient British tradition of chip-pan fires, I was on a British warship once and they had a quite large deep fat fryer. On a ship. I submit that the English have bigger balls than the Americans, based on this single data point.
Maybe it it will help to give an example of citations I’d react to similarly: WorldNetDaily on US immigration; The Daily Mail on… most things I guess. I’d put a Food Babe citation closer to a WorldNetDaily citation than to a Daily Mail citation in terms of usefulness.
In fact, here is a link to a list of “Vaccine Ingredients and Side Effects” from Jenny McCarthy’s site, Generation Rescue. Now, I’m only interested in the content of this list; please don’t waste my time with any criticism of the resource from which I’ve drawn it.
It was about three dozen years ago that my friends and colleagues at the then Rapeseed Association of Canada invited me over to discuss the specifications and definition for a new crop. When I arrived, Al Earl, the executive director of the association, told me that the board had decided to name the new double-zero-type of rapeseed “canola.” The name, he said, does not have a specific meaning other than the “can” in the name to designate it as Canadian in origin. The “ola” simply was a tag, like in mazola, or cola.
Another thing to keep in mind, linking one article from her brings up the rest of her claptrap articles in search result rankings and makes her appear more on social media websites; therefore spreading her chemophobia further. Reason 2 out of about 5 billion to not link to her.
The number of ingredients in a food are hardly a reason to object to it. Also, any reference to “Food Babe” is very alarming on bb. She is a noted quack and fear monger. Science Based Medicine and others have pretty on point criticisms of her:
Her popularity is a pretty clear sign of the sad state of science education.
But let’s address the ingredients. Let’s say they’re correct. Is that cause for alarm? The list indicated nothing about quantity. Poisoning depends on dosage. If the presence of “chemicals” is the point of this post, perhaps the item, “potato” should be replaced with a list of its ingredients… all chemicals. Everything is a chemical, and there is no meaningful distinction between a synthetic chemical and a “natural” chemical.
The discrepancy between USA and UK ingredient lists is likely due to different labeling laws. Can anyone comment on that?
Another possible explanation is that the recipes could actually be different. For instance, Nutella in the US is sickeningly sweet chocolate paste. Nutella in the UK is much less sweet and actually tastes like hazelnuts. There is a cultural difference in acceptable tastes that could be at play here.
