Trap Jesus

Hot Tamales have no cinnamon in them. The box says cinnamon flavored, and the heat is artificial flavor. The label reads sugar, corn syrup and modified food starch. Everything after that is under 0.5%, starting with artificial flavors, dextrin, confectioners glaze, artificial color, medium chain triglycerides, carnauba wax, sodium citrate, pectin, 3 acids and 5 dyes. Cinnamon isn't anywhere, not as a spice, an oil or an extract. What burns in cinnamon is a molecule called cinnamaldehyde. FDA lists it as a synthetic flavoring substance, which means flavor houses make it without the bark, and it goes in by the drop. The red is Red 40 and Red 3. FDA revoked Red 3 in January 2025 and gave food makers until January 15, 2027 to take it out, so a box bought next Halloween should read differently.

The citric acid in your food is grown on a black mold. Pfizer figured out how to mass produce it and it's how Pfizer learned to make penicillin. Nearly all of it, about 2 million tons a year, comes from a fungus called Aspergillus niger fed sugar in steel tanks. The mold eats the sugar and gives off citric acid. The acid gets filtered off, crystallized and sold as a white powder. A Pfizer chemist named James Currie got it running at scale in 1919, and by 1939 a pound had gone from $1.25 to 20 cents. The deep tanks Pfizer built for citric acid are the ones it used for penicillin in 1941, when it was the only company making it by fermentation. About 60% of it is made in China, and the US has had tariffs on Chinese citric acid since 2009 at the request of ADM, Cargill and Tate & Lyle. Sprite, Gatorade, Hunt's tomatoes, Kraft mac and cheese, Pillsbury frosting and the liquid eggs on a hotel line all have it. It's the most used acid in food because it's cheap, it's sour, it keeps cut fruit from browning, and it holds pH where bacteria don't grow. A 2018 paper described 4 people who reported joint pain and swelling after eating foods with manufactured citric acid, but the authors wrote that nothing had been proven. No large scale controlled study has been run since.

Great Value frozen shrimp has 3 ingredients. Shrimp, salt and sodium tripolyphosphate. Sodium tripolyphosphate is a phosphate salt. The shrimp get soaked in a tank of it before they're frozen, and the phosphate loosens the muscle proteins, so they hold on to water. The shrimp come out of the tank heavier than they went in, and the bag is sold by weight, so part of what you pay for is tank water. It also keeps them from drying out in the freezer. Soaked shrimp sit in a puddle, steam instead of sear, and feel slick and a little rubbery. Untreated shrimp brown in the pan. Costco's Kirkland raw shrimp says no chemicals added and no preservatives on the bag. The FDA allows the phosphate, so the check is the ingredient list on the back of the bag, under the net weight.

The made-from-scratch crust on a Marie Callender's pot pie has no butter in it. It's soybean oil, and the gold color is caramel color. The front of the box says golden, flaky, made-from-scratch crust. The back lists the crust as enriched wheat flour, interesterified soybean oil, water, salt, modified whey and caramel color. There's no butter, lard or egg anywhere on the box. The chicken is white meat chicken, water and soy protein. The filling has methylcellulose in it. Interesterified oil is what replaced partially hydrogenated shortening after trans fat was banned. The plant heats liquid soybean oil with a fully hardened fat and a catalyst, and the fatty acids swap places between the two until the blend is solid at room temperature. It works like shortening in a crust and the label gets to say 0 g trans fat. The caramel color is there because a crust with no butter and no egg wash comes out of the oven pale. Methylcellulose is plant cellulose, usually from wood pulp, treated so it dissolves in water. It does the opposite of most thickeners. It's thin when cold and sets into a gel when it gets hot, so the filling stays put in the oven instead of boiling out through the crust, then loosens back up as the pie cools on the plate. Same ingredient that holds an Impossible Burger together.