Soy Sauce Rant

My husband makes an incredibly yummy Asian treat that I call Taiwanese mashed potatoes (inside joke) and that most Asian folks call Taro cake.  I am helpless around this stuff - it may not look or sound that good (I was tremendously skeptical the first time he made it for me) but trust me, this stuff is irresistible when lightly pan fried and dipped in soy sauce.  Which brings me to the point of today's post...

Ken made a batch of taro cake at the end of December and of course I totally indulged on New Year's Eve and ate several pieces.  Yuh-huh-hummmmm.  As usual I drenched it in lots of soy sauce.  New Year's Day I woke up with a crushing headache, and since I only had one beer the day before I couldn't fathom why.  Until it hit me - was there MSG in the soy sauce?  I'm pretty sensitive to the stuff.  We had just purchased a new bottle from an untried brand, but since most foods are MSG-free these days I don't normally check labels.  I padded downstairs, grabbed the bottle and...lo and behold, MSG was on the list.  Along with Insinate Disodium Guanylate, whatever the hell that is. And yeast extract.  And sodium benzoate.  Seriously?  I thought soy sauce was supposed to be water, soy beans and wheat.  What's the point of all that other stuff?

Fast forward to last night - my awesome hubby made more taro cake while I was in Indiana and I had some for dinner, forgetting about the stupid soy sauce.  This morning I woke up with ANOTHER headache!  Grrr.  I stopped at the store on my way home from work and tried to find some without any added ingredients.  The best I could do was Kikkoman: water, wheat, soybeans, salt, and sodium benzoate (which is apparently a preservative). 

I started to wonder about the rest of the food in my pantry - what else is lurking?  Here are some alarming results:

Progresso 45% Less Sodium Chicken and Wild Rice Soup - low sodium is good, right?  Nuh-uh, not when there are things like hydrolzyed corn protein, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate (sounding familiar?), chicken powder (WHAT THE HECK IS THAT???), soy protein isolate, and calcium chloride.  What is all this stuff?

Here's another one: Campbells Pork and Beans - High fructose corn syrup, modified food starch, caramel color and...wait for it...paprika oleoresin.  Seriously?  Is this some uber-flavorful variety of paprika extracted from the oleo tree?

What the heck is this stuff doing in our food???  It turns out that calcium chloride is used to maintain firmness in canned vegetables.  And contrary to what you'd expect, paprika oleoresin is a coloring, not a flavoring.  Disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate are both flavor enhancers, closely related in structure to MSG.  Hydrolyzed corn protein is also an MSG-related flavor enhancer.  Oh yeah - it's also made by boiling the corn in hydrochloric acid and then neutralizing it in sodium hydroxide.  That sounds like something you want to put in your mouth, right?

It seems that MSG is lurking everywhere!  Especially in foods that don't list it as an ingredient.  Over the years I've had many, many unexplained headaches - how many have been related to this pervasive chemical?  Have I been doing this to myself the whole time?

I honestly expected these ingredients to be preservatives of some sort - not flavor or texture enhancers.  Do these products taste that bad without chemical help?  Are these chemicals intended to trigger the addictive areas of our brain to keep us coming back for more?  What's wrong with just making products from real ingredients?  David Kessler (The End of Overeating) and Michael Pollen (In Defense of Food) have both written extensively about the dangers of food additives and the need for us to eat real food.  I think they are definitely onto something.

As for me, I'm going to start reading labels.  Closely.  It may take me a lot longer to get the grocery shopping done, but after my little research project tonight I don't think I'll ever shop the same way again.

Update on 07Jan10: This morning I went on a wild frenzy and pulled everything out of the pantry that had any kind of freaky chemical in it.  Buh-bye Gatorade powder, Kraft mac-n-cheese, Rice-a-Roni, random generic brand corn taco shells, Progresso soup, pumpkin pie filling, and so much more.  I filled an enormous shopping bag with everything and left it up for grabs in the cafeteria at work.  I feel a lot better about my kitchen now!