Monday, January 4, 2010

Transparency in food

I've said before that transparency in our food is important for us to be responsible omnivores.  Since that isn't possible, I don't think we should be omnivores.  But for those who believe that there is enough transparency in our food, you might want to look at this link.  Two high school students, sequenced the DNA from a variety of food sources and found that they were not as advertised.  High quality caviar was in fact from a very common "low grade" source of caviar, the Mississippi Paddlefish.  Goat's milk cheese turned out to be made from a cow. 

It makes me worry as a vegetarian since if even the listed ingredients aren't accurate, then how can we as vegetarians be sure that our tofurkey is really just tofu? 

2 comments:

  1. Okay, now that's disturbing. I recently went to a Buddhist restaurant trying to encourage vegetarian living. But it made me wonder if they were putting meat into it. I mean, that would make so much sense. Convince people that they aren't missing anything being vegetarian and more of them will do it. But not so nice for the rest of us. Also creepy.

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  2. Strangely enough, I feel "safer" at restruants that are clearly religious organizations, preaching through food. There's a vegetarian restruant downtown that I frequent, thats run by what I think is a cult. But I trust their food is vegetarian, since it has their religious beliefs motivating their food quality, than simply just trying to make a buck. (Note that this is different than picking food that is Kosher or Hallal.)

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