FDA Considers Redefining Chocolate

shewfig writes "The US Food and Drug Administration is considering redefining 'chocolate' to allow substitution of vegetable oil ($0.70/lb.) for cocoa butter ($2.30/lb.), and whey protein for dry whole milk. There are already standard terms to differentiate these products from chocolate, such as 'chocolatey' and 'chocolate-flavored.' The change was requested by the industry group Chocolate Manufacturers of America. Leading the resistance to this change is high-end chocolate maker Guittard, with significant grass-roots support from the Candyblog. The FDA is taking consumer comments until April 25. Here is the FDA page on the proposed change, which oddly enough does not say what the proposed change is."

Oh, great

As if American chocolate wasn't bad enough as it is...

Re:Oh, great

As if American chocolate wasn't bad enough as it is...

Nonsense!

The quality of American chocolate is every bit fine as American cheese, American Pizza, American Wine, American beer... oh wait!

Re:Oh, great

Um, Northern California is one of the world's most-renowned wine regions. And the American microbrew explosion has been producing international-awards-earning beers for well over a decade. And pizza IS American food (as in, it is not the same as the original Italian food from which it is derived). And there is a growing number of excellent cheese companies in America. I'd be the first to admit that American-made chocolate (as in, they MADE the chocolate, from scratch, instead of just buying it from France and repackaging it--cough No-Ka cough) is nothing to write home about (unless the text of the missive was "It sucks."), but seriously, American gourmet has come a very long way in recent decades. Just, you know, to be clear... I know it was a joke and all, but... You know.

Re:Oh, great

California is renowned mostly because it's pretty much the only area in the USA that produces acceptable wine, not because that wine is particularly good in comparison to the rest of the world, just because it's the best the USA can produce.

Not to kill too many sacred cows here, but the French disagree [wikipedia.org] with you rather soundly. According to them, California wines are the finest in the world. I'm partial to Australian wines myself, but then I've got family down under, which does influence me a bit.

Personally, I think that most "wine experts" are overblown windbags who engage in the worst overuse of metaphors in modern language. However, I do happen to agree with them now and again: every single time I've had anything from Stag's Leap, it's been incredible. Wines, like many other issues of taste, are difficult to come to any lasting consensus. You would do well to continue to trust your own taste over anyone else's.

(If you're in the mood for advice, you would do yourself a favor to lose the bit about California wines not being world class. You just come across as uninformed.)

Regards,
Ross

most corner stores in the UK sell decent stuff...

Definitely there is crap here as well, lots of it, shelves of it, can you say "snickers" or "mars bar", lots of cloying candy crap, but pretty well every corner store has a couple of bars of decent chocolate, pretty well every half sized supermarket sells 70% cocoa content bars. And this is the UK, laughed at for its crap food across the rest of Europe.

We had the same battle here if you remember about 10 years ago with European Union food people trying to get huge numbers of British "chocolate" bars relabelled as not-chocolate, The Sun newspaper and the other red tops threw a wobbly. Shortly after that an American friend of discerning taste introduced me to proper chocolate (higher cocoa content) in France and then I realised yup, now I see why these food guys in Belgium and France wouldn't feed their dog on the stuff I've been eating.

US chocolate is pretty poor generally though in my experience, I think over there you have to go to expensive boutiques to find what you get in an average ASDA/Walmart or Tescos here.

Re:Oh, great

Twinkies don't have a shelf-life, they have a half-life.

Re:Oh, great

I live in Wisconsin. We make good cheese.

http://www.wisdairy.com/AllAboutCheese/Cheesemakin g/WisconsinCheeseAwards.aspx [wisdairy.com]

Carr Valley makes some of the best stuff out there. Try some Cave Aged Cardona and have your opinion of American cheese forever changed.

Re:Oh, great

Isn't Ghiradelli really just re branded Nestlé though?

No, it's a 150 year old chocolate company in SF that was bought by Lindt in 1998.

Weird how 3 of the best American chocolate companies are in the Bay Area... Ghiradelli, Guittard, and my personal favorite, Scharffen Berger (which really is one of the world's best, even if it was just bought by Hershey's last year :)

Re:Oh, great

I don't know why parent is marked troll. Ghirardelli isn't bad, but several years ago it was better. These days Scharffen Berger is good, though we'll see how long that lasts now that Hershey owns them. Distribution is a little messed up, but the quality is still there. Vosges is also good, if a bit strange. There are also many American chocolatiers that do not have wide distribution (and probably never will) that make very good chocolates. Still, this is rather sad. Already there are things sold as chocolate in the United States that cannot even be sold as food in Europe.

Re:Oh, great

a dairy milk bar is fine

I might be a snob, but while I used to like Dairy Milk as a child, these days I think it's horrible.

The quality of chocolate varies enormously. I've tried Hershey chocolate, it reminds me of the description of the Nutri-Matic tea from the Hitch Hikers Guide - almost, but not quite, entirely unlike chocolate. I can fully understand why Americans taste Dairy Milk and rave about how good it is, if this is what they have for comparison.

Dairy Milk is many times better than Hershey but I now find it to be excessively sweet and greasy.

The bare minimum standard for me has become Green & Blacks milk. G&B milk contains 37% cocoa solids, whereas Dairy Milk is 22%. I tend to prefer darker chocolate now. The G&B dark with sour cherries can make my eyelids flutter, it's that good.

A small bag of fresh chocolates from the local chocolatier (shipped from Belgium) was a weekly treat until my wife developed a conscience about child slavery on cocoa plantations. They beat out any boxed chocolate that I'd tasted before. I'm spoiled for the mass-manufactured brands now, I can really taste the difference in flavour, which I attribute to nasty synthetic ingredients and preservatives.

The absolute best chocolate I've ever had was sourced from a chocolatier in Purbeck, UK [chococo.co.uk]. Never mind that they claim to be ethically sound, their chocolates are inspiringly good. Alas, the price is a little prohibitive - I think I shall be restricting my custom to less than once every two months.

My wife can still enjoy Dairy Milk, even if she does appreciate the finer stuff, but I shall never buy it again.

Re:Oh, great

There is a lot of american cuisine.

Spinach Salad
Waldorf Salad
Apple Pie
Brownies
Fudge
Crabcake
Garbage Plate (yay Rochester)
TexMex
on and on and on...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_cuisine#The_ origins_of_American_cuisine [wikipedia.org]

Come on, we might be a country full of people from everywhere else, but we have our own style and cuisine.

Re:Oh, great

Come on, we might be a country full of people from everywhere else, but we have our own style and cuisine.

Not a lot of it, it seems - not in my opinion anyway.

Let's try someone who knows food, then. The entire Cajun cuisine, for example, is essentially new. Chowder (there's more to chowder than clam and corn) is an entirely American practice, as are Burgoo, Chioppino and Bouillabase. We invented recirculated roasting (no, it's not the same as a dutch oven.) The number two prepared food on earth is an American invention, despite its foreign name - whereas China beat us to rice with egg, we invented the Hamburger. We're responsible for nachos, hard tacos, chili con queso and chili con carne (look it up [amazon.com].) We're why Mexico loves cumin now. Basically anything you eat that you think is mexican food that has yellow cheese on it instead of white is America's fault.

The current state of Barbeque is entirely an American thing, though the Dutch independently reinvented it in South Africa later under the name "braai." (This is unfair to foreigners, as we use the word "barbeque" very differently than they do; a Briton hearing that word will think of the situation we think of as "grilled," and when they hear grill, they think of what we think of as stove-top burners. I do not know what foreigners call what we call Barbeque, though I know Australia uses the word the way we do.) We also invented Pit Barbeque (yes, we mean something different by that phrase too, sorry.) There's also Saint Louis Barbeque, Kentucky Barbeque and Louisiana Barbeque, all of which are substantially different (one's stewed in sauce, one's over a grill range open fire and one's surrounded by coal heat in a brick pit.)

We invented Chop Suey and General Tso's Chicken. Indeed, anything you see on a purportedly Chinese menu involving cheese, mango, brown/whole rice or tomato is our fault. Rangoon puffs (not crab rangoon) are our fault. What we call Egg Foo Yung is nothing like what the Cantonese call Fu Yung Egg. Spring rolls are Chinese; egg rolls are not. What we call beef with broccoli is supposed to use a relative of broccoli called gailan; however, the leafy parts are used, not the stalks and not the clubs, so it might as well be asparagus, it's so different. We invented Jibaritos and Jigaritos.

We invented the tri-tip steak. "You can't invent a steak, it grew in the cow that way!" Actually, no it didn't. We also invented cheesed steaks. (No, not Philly cheese-steaks; we didn't invent those, we just perfected them.) If you don't know what a cheesed steak is, look up what "new york strip" actually means; it's not a cut, like sirloin or delmonico. They're aged and molded. There's a reason they're that tender.

America includes several areas whose cuisines developed on their own before they were called America, such as Hawaii, Alaska, the Texarcana area and the pan-Florida area (Florribean food is awesome.) We're the country that merged Burmese and Oaxacan cuisine. We're about the only country to grill frog legs (the french batter them, the chinese boil them and the italians and thai fry them.) Chicken Vesuvio is ours.

We have a spectacular history of invention in the field of alcohol. I probably don't need to beleaguer this.

Americans use the phrase "fried chicken" differently than other countries, so when I say "fried chicken is ours," please understand that I mean something more specific than chicken which has been fried. We mean bone-in chicken ribcage halves and drumsticks which are larded, spiced, battered, breaded, deep fat fried and re-spiced, in that order. Furthermore, it involves a specific set of spices; it's a little like talking to the British about Shephard's Pie. You just have to know.

There are a lot of people who believe that the current popularity of the sandwich is largely due to their upsurge in use in America during the l

Re:Oh, great

> What you don't seem to realize is you can only have food invented once...and then built on.
>
> Anything I listed there might have been of influence from elsewhere, but it has a different spin.
> If that makes it "bad" in your mind, then fine. Pizza, as we know it, is based on an italian dish,
> it's still American. You can say we didn't invent the concept of dough baked with toppings, but neither did the
> italians.

Indeed, as my (Chinese) wife keeps reminding me :)

I'm not sure of the validity of your claim though - how far back do you go? Can you really 'invent' something like food? Like I said, how different does it need to be before it becomes original?

I haven't noticed any difference between American Apple Pie and that I know from England. Predictably, it's somewhat more sugary, and a little different 'style' on the top, but it's too simple to be very different. Similarly with pizza - how different can it be?

Re:Oh, great

Tex-Mex, Cajun, Creole, various styles of southern barbecue, and various native american regional cuisines are just a few types of "American" food.

Also, there are some of the world's best chocolatiers in America, imo, such as:

http://www.moonstruckchocolate.com/ [moonstruckchocolate.com]
http://www.johnandkiras.com/site/Welcome_business. htm [johnandkiras.com]
http://www.vosgeschocolate.com/ [vosgeschocolate.com]

Of course, some of the world's worst chocolatiers are in the US also. We like to be the best at everything, including being the worst.

Re:Oh, great

Have some SunnyD fruit cocktail! Made with real fruit juice*!

*5% fruit juice from concentrates

SunnyD isn't orange juice.... ORLY? YARLY!!

Have some SunnyD fruit cocktail! Made with real fruit juice*! *5% fruit juice from concentrates

They might not be able to get away with calling Sunny Delight itself "fruit juice" in the UK (nor, I suspect from your phrasing, in the US either), but that didn't stop countless stupid parents buying it in the deluded belief that it was anyway, probably because it was sold in the chilled section.

There was a huge "scandal" about it when Sunny Delight was popular here in the late 1990s and all of a sudden it was all over the papers when someone realised "OMG!!!! IT'S NOT REAL JUICE, IT'S JUST SQUASH!!!!11111". Like, you don't say.

(Then there was even more scandal when there were reports of kids turning yellow through drinking the stuff. I know it's crap, but how much of the damn stuff were these parents feeding their kids?)

I hate all those crappy "juice drinks" that come in fruit-juice like packaging, but contain (at best) 25-50% fruit juice, with the rest made up from citric acid, sugar and God-knows-what. For what it is, it's fine, but I'm willing to bet that they're designed to fool countless morons into thinking they're fruit juice (and that they succeed).

Re:SunnyD isn't orange juice.... ORLY? YARLY!!

The um.. stuff available UK shops fooled me once with the packaging, with them oranges on the package and some fake 'pure' and 'natural' phrases, then the smack in the face when drinking it learned me Skinner-style to avoid that sort of packages forever. Later I had to learn it again in the Czech republic.

In the early 20th century Dutch government passed a law to forbid calling margarine butter (even the Dutch word for peanutbutter translates to 'peanutcheese' because of that law!). So why not keeping 'chocolate' real and invent something new for these industrial bullies. Like we can buy have 'Cocoa fantasy' flakes for on the bread.

Re:SunnyD isn't orange juice.... ORLY? YARLY!!

Here in the US, Minute Maid Light Lemonade, Mango Tropical and Raspberry Passion "juices" all contain 3% fruit juice. In some other countries, you're not allowed to call it juice unless it's 100% juice, and not allowed to put the name of the fruit first unless it's the main ingredient.
One thing the US totally lacks is consumer protection.

Chocolate here is waxy and a far cry from what Europeans think of as chocolate to begin with. Even the horrible Cadbury chocolates are miles from the wax tablets that Hershey and other US companies foist on US consumers. And even if you try to buy a European brand, it's most likely remade to an American recipe, presumably to save money because Americans can't tell the difference anyhow. US produced Godiva, for example, is (like almost all US chocolate) mostly made with corn syrup instead of sugar.
It's quite telling that Americans consider "Lindt" a gourmet brand, when it's one of the worst commercial produced chocolates in Europe.

Re:Oh, great

Not only do they deceive consumers, they ignore w3c recommendations too!

Headings should reflect the logical structure of the document; they should not be used simply to add emphasis, or to change the font size.

Re:Oh, great

Yes, but this move will allow the government to increase the chocolate ration to 20 grams per week.

Re:Oh, great

I hope this doesn't fly ...

You got your peanut butter in my chocolate-y flavoured vegetable oil!
You got your chocolate-y flavoured vegetable oil in my peanut butter!
F*ing gross, dude! I ain't eating that sh*t ...

Not to mention the "anal leakage" you'll get from eating too much "vegetable oil chocolatey junk".

Way too Late...

Unfortunatly, that peanut butter has been changed too. Peanut oil is expensive, so it is removed from peanut butter and replaced with soy/corn/canola/motor oil (oops motor oil is too expensive.)

so try and replace peanut butter with Peanut-Vegetable Margarine and then try to stomach it..double points if both use olestra.

Storm

How Chocolate is made:

From the CMA's How Chocolate is Made [chocolateusa.org] page:

The main ingredient used to make chocolate is cocoa beans.

Wonder if they're planning on changing that?

chocolate, chocolatey,...chocolateyeyeyeyey

For chocolate thayt is true. Chocolatey only needs to somehow resemble chocolate. Add a few more -ey and you probably have something is vaguely brown. Perhaps recycled Zunes.

There is already crud in the chocolate.

My name is Harmonious Botch and I'm a chocoholic. A fucking serious chocoholic. I figure I spend about 200 per month on it. Were I this hooked on booze or heroin, I'd be dead by now.

There is already crud in the chocolate. Any serious consumer of chocolate already knows to read the ingredients.
To write this post, I went to the trash can, pulled out a package of inferior quality candy that my wonderful but misguided wife had bought. I had thrown it away because of the crud in it. Under "ingredients", it says: "palm, shea, sunflower, and/or safflower oil". There is already whey protein in it also.

A little vegetable oil is not going to make a big difference. Over the last decade or two they have snuck palm oil in, and sometimes even wax, and most consumers didn't notice. Most of you won't notice the vegtable oil either, and those of us who do already read the labels.

Re:There is already crud in the chocolate.

Over the last decade or two they have snuck palm oil in, and sometimes even wax, and most consumers didn't notice.

I noticed the wax. It's called Hershey's.

Re:There is already crud in the chocolate.

Some of us refuse to go lower than Valrhona, usually in the 60-70% cocoa, with Dark Chocolate Noir Orange 64% Cocoa being our favorite (purchased in 1/2 lb bars.)

Why eat shitty chocolate when you can have good stuff? My SO finds that if we buy crappy chocolate, she just eats more of it and isn't satisfied. Good chocolate like the above satisfies her in an ounce or two (or three) serving size, so she eats less and enjoys more.

Re: There is already crud in the chocolate.

Also, among the already mentioned items, there is a lot of pesticides in it:

News Flash! Source: AllAfrica News (West Africa Business)

"Cocoa Production, Employment, Shot Up By Mass Spraying - Jun 12 2003 Available data convincingly proves that Ghana's Cocoa Diseases and Pests Control project (CODAPEC), commonly known as the Mass Spraying Exercise, has tremendously improved the yield of cocoa, which remains one of the most important foreign exchange earners."1

[P]esticide residues routinely turn up in chocolate products sold in the USA5 and Europe.6 For as long as the leaders in the chocolate industry refuse to acknowledge that a pesticide problem exists, we have no hope of finding (or even looking for) a realistic solution to that problem.

see: http://www.tava.com.au/article_chemicals.html [tava.com.au]

I first ran into this in the book Diet for a Poisoned Planet. Peanuts and Chocolate were among the most contaminated foods in the American diet. Chocolate was high because it is imported from a lot of countries that do not have as tough of laws as we do (and ironically, they buy a lot of the chemicals from us!).

transporter_ii

I'm Like A Chocoholic, But For Booze

Did you ever know a "chocoholic"? One of those folks who just can't get enough chocolate? I bet there's at least one in your home or workplace. At my house, it's my wife Emily. She's got to have her little bowl of Hershey's Kisses in the living room. She can't go shopping without bringing home some chocolate ice cream or a chocolate-cake mix. She's even got a funny little sweatshirt that says, "My Name Is Emily, And I'm A Chocoholic."

To be honest, I'm a bit of a chocoholic myself. Except for one small detail. You see, instead of being addicted to chocolate, I'm addicted to booze. Yep, from dawn to dusk, there's one thing on my mind: booze! Beer, liquor, wine, all that stuff!

When my wife gets one of her cravings, she reaches for a Baby Ruth or Mars bar. With me, it's Icehouse beer. My refrigerator is always stocked with plenty of it. I also have a little flask of whiskey in my desk drawer at work. In fact, if you can keep a secret, I even keep some booze in my car in case of traffic jams. I just can't stand to be without booze for too long!

I'm a lot like that Cookie Monster on Sesame Street. Only it's more like the Booze Monster. When I walk into a party and see that they have booze of any kind, it's like, "Whoa-hoa! All bets are off! Lemme at that booze!"

I remember this one time, there was no chocolate in the house. Emily was going out of her mind, trying to scrape up some sort of chocolate fix. In the end, she resorted to drinking a cup of hot cocoa. It was so cute! Sort of like the time I drank all her hairspray because there was no booze in the house. Or that other time with the rubbing alcohol. Or the Nyquil. Or the Aqua-Velva.

Another time, I was completely out of booze, and all the stores and bars were closed, so I drove 45 minutes to find a place that would sell me some beer or something. I was kind of embarrassed, because here it was late Monday night, and I had to work the next day, and I'm driving around looking for booze. But, hey, that's just how things are when you're a "booze-oholic" like me! I finally found a huge all-night liquor store. You should have seen how I loaded up! Cases of this, fifths of that. It was 5 a.m. when I finally got home, so I just said, "To heck with work!" and had my own little improvised holiday. I called it Booze Day! I'd been working hard, getting to work on time almost every day for two weeks, so I figured I'd earned what wound up being the rest of the week off.

Sometimes Emily and I think we should cut down a little-you know, health concerns and all. But there's always some special occasion that gives us an excuse to go off our "diets." Halloween was Emily's last big bender. We only got three trick-or-treaters the entire night, so the whole big bowl of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups went straight to her. (Or straight to her thighs, as she said!)

My most recent bender was today. There was a good movie on TV, and I figured, hey, I'll need steady hands to change the volume. Of course, it all went straight to my liver, but what are you gonna do?

For my birthday, Emily gave me the funniest coffee mug, perfect for Irish coffee. It has a little teddy bear on it with a "don't mess with me" look on his face, and it says, "Hand Over The Booze And Nobody Gets Hurt." I laughed so hard! That bear was just like me when I robbed the party store earlier this year! Also, the mug is really big, so it can hold a lot of booze... another plus!

Yes, those chocoholics are a funny sort. But they won't hurt you-as long as they have their chocolate, that is. Or, in my case, booze!

- lifted from The Onion

FDA "accepting" comments

The FDA is taking consumer comments until April 25.

After which time they will toss them out and make a re$pon$ible deci$ion.

As long as the Swiss and the Belgians

Dont follow this path I dont care what the US does, M&Ms were about the only edible chocolate there anyway.

Damn you Slashdot and your chocolate stories, I now have a huge craving for a big box of Leonidas.

Real Chocolate: Scharffen Berger Bittersweet Dark

I absolutely stay away from the Big Corporate chocolate: Hershey's, Cadbery's, etc. It's all shit. High Fructose Corn Syrup and other crap in there. Ever had fine, European chocolate? The taste and texture is so much better.

There is a healthy and damn tasteful alternative to "corporate chocolate": Scharffen Berger [scharffenberger.com] Bittersweet Fine Artisan Dark Chocolate. I buy the 70% and 100% Cacao bars. You can really taste the cacao beans in the 70% but it's not completely bitter. The 100% takes a bit getting used to but once you've enjoyed these high quality chocolates, the "corporate chocolate" tastes like the shit that it is. I buy these bars at Whole Foods Market [wholefoodsmarket.com].

Re:Real Chocolate: Scharffen Berger Bittersweet Da

Hershey owns both Scharffen Berger and Joseph Schmidt chocolates, but has thankfully let them continue their good work.

http://www.thehersheycompany.com/news/release.asp? releaseID=743393 [thehersheycompany.com]

Re:Real Chocolate: Scharffen Berger Bittersweet Da

I buy the 70% and 100% Cacao bars. You can really taste the cacao beans in the 70% but it's not completely bitter. The 100% takes a bit getting used to...

And here I thought chocolate was a candy, an indulgence, a culinary luxury to be enjoyed for it's own smooth deliciousness. Who knew that I should be conditioning myself to tolerate only pure "Cacau" bars, just as I might do with fish oil, so I can rest smugly in my chocolate snobishness.

But wait, processing the bean discards much of the natural taste and benefit. Better to eat the beans whole, directly from the tree, than to pollute them by the touch of man or machine. This is truly the way of the chocolate elite.

And I hear that chewing the leaves is enjoyable, too. I especially like the leaves!

FDA summary report

There is a reason the FDA's summary is so vague---the proposal isn't about chocolate. Well, not just about chocolate. The proposal is supported by a substantial range of food manufacturer's and distributors, touching on chocolate, meat, poultry, frozen food, and more.

The proposed changes affect divergences from standard labeling guidelines for a lot of reasons, including things like "improvements in nutritional properties", "use of safe suitable flavors and flavor enhancers", "alternate manufacturing processes", etc.

You can read the whole thing yourself (pdf warning) here [fda.gov]. See especially the last 4 pages or so.

Is the change in guidelines a good thing for consumers? I don't know. I don't know enough about food manufacturing to judge.

OK, that does it!

REVOLUTION!!!!!!

First they came for my fats, and I said nothing. Then they came for my carbs, and I said nothing. Then they came for my sugars, and I said nothing.

But NOT MY FUCKING CHOCOLATE!

(insert Star Spangled Banner here)

One nation. One struggle. One destiny.

I had a dream! A chocolatey dream!

Vegetetable frickin' oil

"Vegetable oil" is a synonym for "heavily processed, hydrogenated oil which will kill you but makes good financial sense to the corporatised US food production industry"

It is poisonous bloody stuff. If you want to know why America (in particular) and western nations (in general) are all suffering out of control obesity and diabetes epidemics you need to look no further than the replacement of natural oils (peanut, coconut and butter), with so-called "healthy" polyunsaturates. Countries like India uses huge amounts of butter (ghee) and coconut oil and you don't see them with rampaging blood sugar levels, heart disease and all of the other side effects of eating crap like "Crisco" and margarines.

Ask yourself why these types of oils never spoil? If you leave margarine out of the refridgerator for a week, does it go off? Why? It doesn't go off because it is not bio-degradeable. If it is not biodegradable, then how is your body meant to metabolise it? Of course it can't, so what it does is "put it aside" and get on with the job of digesting everything else. After sufficient time of course your body will have put enough fat aside that you become fat. Fat builds up around the pancreas and voila, you've got diabetes.

So why do we eat this crap? Because US food interests want you to. The problem for US business interests is that most natural oils such as peanut, olive and coconut/palm oil are not produced in the US. The US does produce gobs of corn and soy however, not to mention that canola rubbish. The problem is that these crops do not produce much edible oil naturally, it has to be processed out of them. Another problem is that the resulting oils are quite unstable, meaning they react to oxygen (oxidize) quickly and spoil. This is a problem for the manufacturing, distribution and retail industries however, who really like long shelf lives and cheap storage (non-refrigerated). So what the industry does is to hydrogenate their oils, which means superheating the oil and passing it through hydrogen to fuse hydrogen molecules to the receptors that would normally fuse with the oxygen. This makes for an oil that is extremely stable but an unfortunate side effect is that it also becomes virtually undigestable. Sure you can eat it and you won't turn blue and die in a week, but then the same can be said for smoking too. Remember how corporate interests insisted that smoking couldn't hurt you until only a few years ago? Well the edible oil industry is no better than those criminals. They too use bogus science and massive amounts of money to produce a steady stream of lies and bullshit regarding the health benefits of eating processed vegetable oils. This began during the thirties and over time it has worked so well that the US is now the most overweight and unhealthy nation on earth, with other western nations scrambling to follow suit.

Now they want to stick that crap in chocolate. It's getting to the point that you wont be able to buy anything that isn't filled with this rubbish.

Essential reading:

The Oiling of America
http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/oiling.ht ml [westonaprice.org]

Other good sites;
http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?id=73 471-trans-fat-interesterified-fat-cvd [foodnavigator-usa.com]

http://www.thescreamonline.com/essays/essays5-1/ve goil.html [thescreamonline.com]
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/DiabetesDece ption.html [nexusmagazine.com]
http://www.jctonic.com/include/healingcrisis/12Hyd rogenatedoil.htm [jctonic.com]

Hydrogenated oil nonsense

It doesn't go off because it is not bio-degradeable. If it is not biodegradable [...] most natural oils such as peanut, olive and coconut/palm oil are not produced in the US [...] fuse hydrogen molecules to the receptors that would normally fuse with the oxygen.

The first statement is blatantly incorrect, the second is not relevant, and the third is clearly written by someone with no clue about chemistry. Hydrogenation has the purpose of transforming liquid oils containing unsaturated bonds, such as the peanut oil, into fats that are solid at room temperature (i.e. saturated fats). Saturated fats, which are completely natural, don't have any unsaturated bonds that can be oxidized either. A side effect of hydrogenation is that some unsaturated trans bonds are formed. How about reading a source with less bias and more scientific references? Trans fats on wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

• Increased risk for coronary heart diseases: yes.
• Cancer: no scientific consensus.
• Diabetes: no scientific consensus.
• Overweight (compared to other fats): no scientific consensus.

No scientific consensus tends to mean that there are one or two studies that show a very small effect and other studies that don't show any effect at all. Even if such na effect exists, it is likely not significant compared to other health risks many people are taking (lack of exercise, smoking, breathing polluted air, to name a few).

Re:Vegetetable frickin' oil

Ghee is just butter with the milk solids and water removed. It is really just a form of clarified butter. There is nothing rancid about it.

You can make it on a stove with very little effort. Just melt unsalted butter over low heat and cook until it is a clear golden liquid. Spoon off any of the froth that appears on top. Continue to cook until it no longer froths. The milk solids will be at the bottom and the water should have all boiled off. The golden liquid on top is ghee.

A bit of clarification

WOW - There's a lot of misinformation floating around here! Obviously this is a topic that's near and dear to many of your hearts!

I'm the technical director of a chocolate company. I've been making chocolate for many, many years.

The proposal from the GMA isn't directed just at chocolate, but would include it. It essentially calls for the use of 'all safe and suitable' sweeteners and oils. Chocolate has a standard of identity, which means that the government controls the definition of chocolate. That definition can be changed (white chocolate actually didn't legally exist until a few years go, at which time a white chocolate section was added to the CFR) - however it takes many, many years to do so (white chocolate took over a decade).

This is driven by a number of things, which include, but are not limited to:
1) the desire to be able to legally call sugar free products sugar free chocolate, when formulated to meet the other standards
2) the desire to harmonize global chocolate standards - most of the rest of the world allows the use of up to 5% CBE (cocoa butter equivilants - these are oils that are chemically the same as cocoa butter, but are usually - not always - more economical).

ANY change would be required to be labelled, so no one would pull anything over on you, same as it is today. Mfr's would be able to choose to do this or not, it would not be a requirement, so it's not that all chocolate would change overnight. My take on it is that the GMA has written this petition so broadly as to be ridiculous, hoping that the FDA allows on a portion of what was asked for. It will likely take years before the FDA even acknowledges it 8-)

Re:FDA Attempt to Regulate Vitamins, Herbs as "Dru

Chinese medicine (herbs, acupuncture, etc.) has been around for thousands of years. People have been curing themselves long before Big Pharma pushed all of their drugs on us.

Couple hundred years ago, draining blood was considered a cure for just about anything. Lets bring it back. Next time you have a headache, slit your wrists.

God, you "all natural" medicine freaks are about as bad as those Scientologist.

Re:FDA Attempt to Regulate Vitamins, Herbs as "Dru

OK I slit my wrists and you were spot on, the headache went away almost immediately. However I have been unable to stem the bloodflow and now I feel quite weak and dizzy. Can you suggest something for this? Also if you have any tips for removing blood stains from carpets and keyboards I would very much appreciate it...

You're both right!

Hello, I couldn't help but spot this argument and decided to throw my two cents in.

Firstly you are correct when you say that the world before modern medicine was a pretty shi**y place. Almost anything could kill you, like, say a broken leg which could leads to loss of blood or infection. Brain trauma, giving birth was a particularly dangerous undertaking, and a chariot accident was no picnic either. Anything like that happens to me and or someone I care about and you'll see me taking them to the hospital without delay. Western Medicine simply has no equal at this kind of thing.

On the other side of the coin, we are living FAR longer than we ever did in the past (due mainly to proper nutrition and sanitation!) and Western Medicine has a far poorer track-record dealing with the new diseases of the affluent world; Cancers, arthritis, diabetes, joint deterioration and so on (you're getting old!). So our society is re-examining what it means to be healthy. Back in the day, the absence of disease or obvious injury was enough, now health is something that can be achieved to a greater or lesser degree. This means that no matter how healthy you are now, you can always strive to better your condition. (Stop eating all those fatty foods!) The UN now defines health something like this: The complete physical, mental, social, spiritual and (something-else-I-can't-pull-off-the-top-of-my-hea d-this-instant, Google it if you actually care) state of well being. This is where the more 'traditional' medicines are making a strong comeback along with new ideas of how to live healthy. Cheers, Socguy.

Re:FDA Attempt to Regulate Vitamins, Herbs as "Dru

This is very important. The Big Pharmaceutical corporations have been trying to get natural medicine banned for years. Instead of taking herbs, vitamins, minerals, and other natural and very inexpensive remedies, Big Pharma wants to drug everyone.

You can mix dandelions and dog spit in a jar and sell it as a cure for baldness and impotence as long as you put a tiny thing on the bottom of the screen that says it's not intended to treat or diagnose anything. 95% of the herbal medicine market is an obvious scam. Thank God they're finally trying to do something about it. It drives me crazy watching those damn commercials. If I want a placebo for my erectile dysfunction, I'll eat a bull penis like anyone sensible would.

Re:FDA Attempt to Regulate Vitamins, Herbs as "Dru

The multi-billion dollar "Big Pharmaceutical corporations" are evil, lying and care for nothing but profit, whereas the multi-billion dollar "alternative medicines" industry is love, truth and fluffy bunnies?

How about Matthias Rath? He has convinced many in the South African government that AIDS is not caused by HIV, AIDS should be treated by vitamin supplements (which he just happens to sell) and antiretroviral medicines are a worse than useless, and advocating their use is genocide. [iol.co.za]

AIDS is killing 900 people per day in South Africa. A sizable fraction of those deaths can be laid directly at the door of "alternative medicine" in general, and the South African government and Rath in particular.

Big Pharma need someone to stand over them with a big stick to try to keep them honest. So do alternative medicine peddlers. The difference is that, occasionally, the big stick gets used on Big Pharma, but the snake-oil salesmen opperate with impunity in Alternative Medicine, playing Russian Roulette with other people's lives for their own profit.

Don't ban the 'remedies' - but do ban the lies and unsupported wishful-thinking published about them.

Re:EU has much higher standards for chocolate

Just remember the next time you rinse with Listerine Citrus Burst that you're swishing crushed dead pregnant beetles in your mouth.

And every time you eat beef, that comes from cows! Those cute, fat horses!

Codex Alimentarius standards seem to match US

The Codex Alimentarius [codexalimentarius.net], the international standards body for food, has a standard for chocolate [codexalimentarius.net]. They require >35% cocoa solids for "chocolate". And they limit other fats:

"The addition of vegetable fats other than cocoa butter shall not exceed 5% of the finished product, after deduction of the total weight of any other added edible foodstuffs, without reducing the minimum contents of cocoa materials. Where required by the authorities having jurisdiction, the nature of the vegetable fats permitted for this purpose may be prescribed in applicable legislation.

What are the numbers in the FDA proposal?

Re:EU has much higher standards for chocolate

Just remember the next time you rinse with Listerine Citrus Burst that you're swishing crushed dead pregnant beetles in your mouth.

You know what's even worse... a lot of people like fruit, but don't realize fruit is basically the reproductive organs of trees. Those seeds inside are like the tree's sperm. Eating an apple is the same as chewing on a tree's balls!

Other plants aren't quite as gross as that, but even still, they all grow in dirt. Just think about that next time you're having a salad. Would you eat food off the floor? Well, everything in that salad used to be on or in the ground, and the ground is nature's filthy floor that never gets vacuumed!

Re:EU has much higher standards for chocolate

Yes, cochineal comes from beetles, the same place it has come from and been safely consumed by humans for centuries. Would you prefer to drink some synthetic petrochemical dye with possibly some unknown properties than something that has come from a harmless animal? People are always going to dye food and Cochineal extract is non-toxic, non-carcinogenic and causes extremely few allergies, why not use the stuff?

Re:This...

For those who haven't read the book, the message is: WHO FUCKING CARES? IS THIS REALLY WHAT YOU IMAGINE YOUR TAX MONEY SHOULD BE PAYING FOR?

Abso-fricking-lutely. When I buy chocolate, I want to know that if someone wraps dog feces in aluminum foil, they can't say, "No, that's what we call chocolate. No refunds, you already ate three-quarters of it." Enforced accurate labeling and definitions is absolutely what I want the government to be doing.