The Hidden Ingredients In Food

on March 30, 2012 at 1:45 pm

** This weeks post was the winning submission from a Kitchen Heat Blog Contest, held at Humber College. This article was written by Tawnee VandenBroek **

As the food industry continues to grow, menus continue to develop and ingredients in the products continue to increase. Health conscious customers analyse menus in search for a healthy meal choice with the assumption all the ingredients involved are displayed within the food description. This unfortunately is not the case in many situations.

When gazing the menu you will notice the description includes how the dish is prepared; steamed, grilled, fried, and so on, but leaves out the other ingredients involved in the creation process. This is an issue in the fast food industry. In order to continue producing tasteful products for customers, fast food restaurants incorporate ingredients to which customers indeed enjoy and will return without mentioning the unhealthy ingredients in the food selections. For the health conscious customer a Wendy’s Mandarin Chicken Salad at first glance sounds and looks like a healthy option, however; the ingredient list provided seems to leave out additional information of the overall food quality. This includes the mandarin oranges come canned in high sugar syrup rather than freshly peeled, the almond slices are salted rather than lightly roasted, and the crispy noodles are not a whole wheat product. The chicken ingredient list then finishes it off with the common list, “spices, natural flavours, and artificial flavours”, (Andrews, 2007) which sounds like a mystery that really no one would want to know.

By secretly adding extra high levels of sodium, fat and sugars to foods, customers are developing a false interpretation of the foods nutritional taste and value. The menu is displaying what is appealing to the consumer’s eye rather than what is actually incorporated into the final product. If the menu was to display the products individual ingredients in the meal, customers would classify the ‘healthy salad’ to be not as healthy as it’s made to seem. Unfortunately this is an issue that will continue to develop until either consumer’s recognize and consider the hidden ingredients involved in fast food production or the companies confess their false advertisement and benefit the customer rather than the company.