I have long been in the habit of buying roasted sunflower kernels from the bulk bins--usually mixing salted and unsalted--to sprinkle on salads or whatever, and we've been doing it this year as well. Sunflower kernels and salt--that's legal, right?
Turns out, it isn't. This week the label was changed slightly to:
sunflower kernels and salt (salt, tricalcium phosphate, yellow prussiate of soda)
Now I vaguely remember from chemistry that there are a whole bunch of things that can be labeled as "salt," but I rather assumed that the food industry had largely agreed that salt is sodium chloride, or perhaps calcium chloride in a bit of a stretch. Time for a bit of research.
It turns out that tricalcium phosphate is an anticaking agent used in spices, and yellow prussiate of soda is an anticaking agent used in road & food grade salt. So we've probably been consuming yellow prussiate of soda all year, and I'd guess we've had a fair bit of tricalcium phosphate as well.
Okay. By all the terms of this experiment of ours, both of those things would be "illegal" because we didn't know what they were. I think I probably sort of knew about the anticaking agent--or something--being added to table salt because when you can, recipes specifically ask for pickling salt because it is the purest, although we've had salt for so long one just really sort of thinks of it as just an ingredient--not something that might have ingredients. Now that we know, things are a bit different, so we'll be switching to pickling salt for the rest of the year to keep us "legal."
That will teach me to take anything for granted in this experiment.....
2 comments:
I went to the cupboard to check my sea salt - it has a caking agent in it too! Thanks for the heads up.
Have you thought about what you will do when this experiment is over? Will you stick with this uber healthy way of eating or will you find another experiment to keep you busy?
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