11 hours ago, Panaderia Canadiense said:
I always thought that if the presence of a certain ingredient is measured in fractions of a percent, it was classed as an "additive" - so in some of my recipes, that's salt, or baking soda. I see no issue with adding these things, or L-cysteine if you've got it - it's part of the quest for the best product you can make.
Now, when the majority of the ingredients in bread are listed as refined chemicals rather than the basic building blocks of bread, I'm probably not going to buy it. But I'm not going to condemn the presence of those chemicals either.
So, there are different regulatory definitions of food additive depending on your location in the world. In the U.S., the regulatory definition is given in the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA), section 201(s), as amended in 1958, which defines food additive as "any substance the intended use of which results or may reasonably be expected to result, directly or indirectly, in its becoming a component or otherwise affecting the characteristic of any food (including any substance intended for use in producing, manufacturing, packing, processing, preparing, treating, packaging, transporting, or holding food; and including any source of radiation intended for any such use)." There are exemptions from this regulatory definition, including substances that are afforded the status of GRAS (generally recognized as safe).
From a chemical point of view, just in terms of the physical properties of the substances themselves, I've always found it interesting how our food labeling conventions in some ways tend to perpetuate inaccurate conceptions of what foods actually consist of (not at all implying that you have any such inaccurate conceptions, just making a general comment!). So, for instance, I buy a loaf of bread, check the ingredients, see wheat flour listed as the first ingredient, and I naturally tend to think of it as a simple sort of thing, a single, uniform substance. But of course the physical reality is that wheat flour, like almost all biologic materials, is in fact a mind-bogglingly complex stew of hundreds or thousands of individual chemical compounds. If we represented wheat flour the same way we often represent food additives, as individual chemicals, the list would be too large to fit on any package, and the ingredient list would include hundreds of words like anthranilate synthase, ADP-glucose pyrophosphorylase, palmitic acid, isopentenyl pyrophosphate, phosphatidyl ethanolamine, myo-inositol hexaphosphate, β-tocotrienol, and so on. I'm probably veering too far off-topic (if so, please delete this Chris). I definitely understand the elegance and attraction of simplicity of composition, and of using technique rather than chemistry to achieve a result. It's just that this discussion reminded me of the astonishing chemical complexity of biological materials, and how labeling sometimes tends to obscure that complexity.
