Pinkberry's "natural" desserts are made of toxic labratory gunk

Pinkberry, the fast-growing US chain of "all-natural" desserts, just got busted in a class-action suit for packing their food with additives and crap:

The ingredients list for Original Pinkberry has 23 items. Skim milk and nonfat yogurt are listed first, then three kinds of sugar: sucrose, fructose and dextrose. Fructose and maltodextrin, another ingredient, are both laboratory-produced ingredients extracted from corn syrup.
The list includes at least five additives defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as emulsifiers (propylene glycol esters, lactoglycerides, sodium acid pyrophosphate, mono- and diglycerides); four acidifiers (magnesium oxide, calcium fumarate, citric acid, sodium citrate); tocopherol, a natural preservative; and two ingredients – starch and maltodextrin – that were characterized as fillers by Dr. Gary A. Reineccius, a professor in the department of food science and nutrition at the University of Minnesota and an expert in food additives.
Some of them can be characterized as natural, while others are clearly not, he said.
“Isn’t it amazing how many additives it takes to make something taste natural?” Dr. Reineccius said.

Link (Thanks, Mr Jalopy!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Anonymous

wow obviously pinkberry must have hired people to come on to this site and create a defense in the argument of content in it’s product. are you folks certified nutritionists? i doubt it…you sound more like scientists. sugar and the immune system are large factors in the decline of healthy lifestyle choices/eating. the reason you like all those processed foods is because your taste buds have been changed/modified to be more palatable/favorable of those items. but at the end of the day i guess i could care less if you want to fill up your body with unhealthy contents, it’s not my life…it’s yours. toxic chemicals in such small doses that cannot harm the human body is an oxymoronic statement.
WatchfulBabbler

Suggesting that it might be healthier to eat food than unfood is not luddism.

Okay, that’s a valid point. But I take issue that the idea of adding emulsifiers and starch systems to milk and yogurt creates “unfood.”

Case in point: with the advent of spring, my wife and I decided that we wanted to create a seasonal dish. She came up with the idea of a sweet pea gnocchi with a cream sauce, Parmesan and prosciutto (or maybe a serrano ham). Sounds very food-ish, right?

But we’re not going to get there without science. For example, consider gnocchi: it’s basically a formulation of wheat gluten and gelatinized potato starch. The lower gluten content of gnocchi means that it’s lighter and fluffier than normal pastas, and the potato starch helps hold everything together. Now, it turns out that peas are going to be a pretty good vegetable to try this with, because they have an exceptionally high amylose content, and amylose is positively correlated in the literature with good organoleptic properties in pasta. However, pea starch is also resistant to gelatinization at lower temperatures, so it’ll be important to heat it to around 90 deg C. It’s also a fairly high-setback starch, so it’ll be important to heat it to gelatinize it, then chill it to create a gel.

So at this point, we’ll have a pea-based gel, but that alone won’t be sufficient to create gnocchi. I need to add either gluten or a starch system, such as a guar-xanthan system. Of course, then we get into the traditional problem of dispersal, which is where a neutral dispersal agent is usually helpful.

As for the sauce, rather than using a cream-thickened sauce, I’ll simply use a reduced-fat milk with another starch system — arrowroot, which I got off the shelf of my local Penzy’s. So there’s another bit of science in our food.

The ham and cheese will be off the shelf, but my wife (who grew up making artisanal cheeses before trading it in for software development) can quote chapter and verse on the science of curing and cheesemaking.

With dinner, I may have a handcraft beer that we make in our neighborhood. Luckily, three of our neighbors are also (or have been) lab chemists, which is helpful in beermaking. After all, beer is simply a colloidal suspension of fermentable and nonfermentable sugars along with isomerized acids from the hops, fermented under controlled conditions.

Food *is* science. I don’t think it’s easy to draw a line and say that one side is food and another “unfood.”
WatchfulBabbler

By the way, let me just say that I *do* find dangerous the fact that industrial food formulations are cheaper, dollar-per-calorie, than healthier food. If you’re poor in America, then the food you can most easily afford will absolutely not be good for you, whereas the wealthier can buy expensive ingredients and dabble in molecular gastronomy with them.

One thing that we can do as citizens is try to change our purblind food subsidy policies. Subsidizing fruit and vegetable production could help increase supply, driving down prices and bringing healthy, fresh vegetables into lower income brackets. This doesn’t solve every issue (for example, cheaper foods are frequently faster to prepare, which is a key issue for many people, especially in lower income levels), but it’s one example of policies that could help bring down our national obesity rates.
James Ashenhurst

51 : it’s pretty clear you can’t put a finger on a single ingredient on that list as being toxic. You’d rather deal in generalities than specifics. As for your “food vs. unfood” spiel, a great number of scientists SPECIALIZE in taking food ingredients in “unnatural concentrations” (your phrase) and feeding them to animals, looking for signs of toxicity. In order for food additives to be approved, they have to pass rigorous standards for toxicity from the FDA. Propylene glycol, to take one example, has been fed to rats at up to 5% of total feed weight without adverse effects, and has been generally recognized as safe. Furthermore, any producer of food is under extreme regulatory, legal, and – yes – moral pressure to provide products that do not produce adverse effects when consumed in reasonable quantities. So when you say something like “it’s extremely hard to overdose on these basic nutrients as they exist in food. It’s extremely easy when they’ve been extracted from food and put in unnatural concentrations into unfood”, I say: I think your “food vs. unfood” argument is totally full of crap.
GuidoDavid

“Maybe” this is an irony. Sanctimonious and expensive “organic” (aren’t the others made of carbon?) products getting caught red handed using the devil’s chemical products for its holy products, putting it in the same language that a lot of people uses to describe modern chemistry (which has allowed us to reach never seen before life expectancy).

James Ashenhurst’s comment should be displayed on the front page, anyway.
Antinous

Toxicity is the degree to which something is able to produce illness or damage to an exposed organism. Toxicity can refer to the effect on a whole organism, such as a human or a bacterium or a plant, or to a substructure, such as a cell (cytotoxicity) or an organ (organotoxicity such as the liver (hepatotoxicity). Wikipedia

Sugars, fats and salt are toxic in sufficient quantities as are any micronutrient. It’s extremely hard to overdose on these basic nutrients as they exist in food. It’s extremely easy when they’ve been extracted from food and put in unnatural concentrations into unfood. When people eat nothing but unfood, which is now the norm in the US, all of these substances function as toxins. Have you not seen Supersize Me? A couple of weeks of unfood and Morgan Spurlock was seriously ill, poisoned by what he was eating. If eating it kills you or makes you ill, it’s a toxin.
Antinous

Food *is* science.

Absolutely. And any good cookbook is a science text in its way. It’s the decontextualization of components that creates unfood. It’s part of the whole movement to reduce food to a list of micro and macronutrients. But food components interact in ways that we don’t even dimly understand. Where they exist in food, they seem to work. When removed from food and turned into additives, they sometimes have unpredictable effects. And conversely, trying to remove ‘bad’ components from food got us the fat-is-bad movement which is a public health disaster. Adding ‘good’ components and subtracting ‘bad’ components creates something which looks like food, but doesn’t necessarily act like food when ingested.
James Ashenhurst

Since you mentioned it, exactly which substances did you have in mind as being toxic? And in which quantities?
m2key

Neat! If I eat it will I glow in the dark as my internal organs melt?
Takuan

YAYYY!

Edible cotton breakthrough may help feed the world

* 17:30 20 November 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Catherine Brahic

What started in a Petri dish like this one could ultimately provide protein for 500 million people every year (Image: Kathleen Phillips / Texas Agricultural Experiment Station)
Enlarge image
What started in a Petri dish like this one could ultimately provide protein for 500 million people every year (

*
*
* Gossypol
* Gossypol as a male contraceptive

Cotton that has been genetically engineered so its seed is no longer toxic could provide protein-rich food for poor countries. The researchers say the technology used could make other toxic plants safe to eat.

Cottonseed contains about 22% protein, and the cotton already produced worldwide has enough protein to meet the requirements of 500 million people. But it also contains the toxin gossypol, making it poisonous to animals, including humans.

In people, gossypol lowers blood potassium to dangerous levels, resulting in fatigue and even paralysis. A surprising side effect is that gossypol is an effective male contraceptive, but research on this aspect was abandoned in the late 1990s. Attempts to eliminate gossypol from cotton plants in the 1960s and 1970s failed: insects that had previously been kept at bay by the toxin happily ate the modified plant.
Lars Haeh

I think I should point out that fructose is just the kind of sugar that comes from fruit. It can be extracted from corn syrup as well, but this does not mean that it has been.
WatchfulBabbler

[F]ood components interact in ways that we don’t even dimly understand. Where they exist in food, they seem to work. When removed from food and turned into additives, they sometimes have unpredictable effects.

Now that I can’t argue against: fruits and vegetables should be the primary staple on anyone’s table. And there’s a lot of stuff in commercial food products that folks just shouldn’t even consider eating more than a few tablespoons of per month (another poster mentioned Twinkies upthread; I actually don’t know what does into them, but I’m assuming that the cream is a fat plus an eulsifier plus flavorings, aerated. Now, I’ve made a whipped flavored oil foam for poached sablefish, so it’s not like I’d never use the technique, but it’s a terrible thing for anyone to ingest in quantity).

The key, I think, is to make decent food affordable. There’s a tradeoff in cost and nutrition in American food that reminds me too much of that “Haitians forced to eat mud pies” post from last week.
Takuan

all moot, look at the news, the food price hysteria and hoarding is turning into a self-fulfilling prophesy and soon enough we’ll all be fighting over butter and dirt cakes
Kennric

WatchfulBabbler – I think Antinous gives quite a reasonable definition of unfood, and it isn’t “contains science”:

“Unfood requires stabilizing. Unfood doesn’t exist for your health and convenience. It exists to maximize profits for the company. It exists to ship. It exists to sit on a shelf. It exists to do everything except nourish you.”

Edible products meeting these criteria may reasonably be called “unfood”. The addition of emulsifiers doesn’t necessarily meet those criteria, but I think a case can be made for frowning upon the use of synthetic and/or highly processed sugars, starches and other ingredients where less processed (more “natural”) alternatives exist. Especially where there -are- health and toxicity issues (see NutraSweet, high fructose corn syrup, etc).

I think you’ll find that the profit margin in using these highly processed ingredients is their one and only pro, not the overall flavor, consistency or health of the produced food-like substances. Food is science, but it is also greed and politics.
SciencePunk

Whoa there Cory!

While I accept that Pinkberry may have been caught mis-selling their wares, how did you get from there to ‘toxic’???

The idea that a food additive is somehow ‘crap’ is just plain silly. E300? Vitamin C. E260? Vinegar.

Shame on Pinkberry for their dishonesty, but please don’t further the stereotype that all additives are inherently dangerous.
pollyannacowgirl

I have to ask about good/nutritious food being affordable. There may be the argument that poor people only have convenience stores in their neighborhood, and access to fresh fruits and vegetables may be limited.

Well. I think it’s more a matter of people not wanting to eat healthier foods.

We were POOR when I was growing up, but my mother always managed to make healthy meals from whole foods (bought with food stamps). Whole wheat bread she made from scratch, beans and rice, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, frozen vegetables, fruit that was in season(and therefore cheaper). We ate organ meats like liver which were cheap and nutritious. Lots of soups and stews with leftovers.

I argue that poor people are not educated about nutrition and they have developed a palate for processed foods. I guarantee that I spend less on groceries than a “poor” person because I don’t buy many packaged foods at all.
aenematron

If it exists, then it is natural. That quote is found all around the net and I could not track down proper attribution. But it’s true. “Natural” means nothing in a marketing context. If you’re eating fat-free fro-yo and you think it’s all fruit and dairy, you do not deserve damages when you find out it’s not.
Takuan

when I took money as a professional organism murderer, I used “LD-50″ as the measure: Lethal dose in fifty percent of test population – so and so many milligrams to so many kilos body weight.

Funny, they always print the LD50 on pesticides but never food labels….
Antinous

#3,

propylene glycol esters?
mullingitover

There might be some merit to the post, but it lost all credibility when it tried to tell me that fructose is ‘laboratory-produced.’ Might qualify as actionable libel if Pinkberry is using regular old fruit fructose and the NYT article hurts their sales.
buttseks

Food additives = molecular gastronomy. It’s all about marketing.
Crunchbird

Right, and Spurlock’s health decline had absolutely nothing to do with the outrageously high fat and sugar content of the particular foods he chose to eat, or the enormous quantity of those foods he chose to inflict on himself . . .

Also, where did you get the idea that apples are the cheapest fruit? At every supermarket I’ve ever visited, both by weight and by unit cost bananas are always cheaper than apples. How they got that way is another whole sordid story, but the prices are what they are.
Xopher

WatchfulBabbler 21: You probably know, but did not mention, that ascorbic acid is also known as “vitamin C” and that some of the tocopherols are “vitamin E.”

The word ‘laboratory’ is misspelled in the headline.
Halloween Jack

Conclusion: the only unnatural ingredient possible would be plutonium. Right. Moving along now…
Sister Y

Takuan, I guarantee that if LD-50s were printed on food and drink labels, that information would almost instantaneously find its way into fraternity hazing rituals.
MitchT

Where have I heard this before? Oh, yes, now I remember:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Non-Fat_Yogurt
Kyle Armbruster

I ate some of this food and died. It’s toxic.

Really. I’m posting this from beyond the grave. No scaremongering in this idiotic title whatsoever. Who would ever accuse Cory Doctorow, of all people, of harebrained self-righteous scaremongering and dimly-understood economic evangelizing???

But here’s the thing: Food is important. Make it yourself, from things you recognize. It won’t be as pretty or abstain from rotting as long as what comes in a box, but it will probably taste better and be better for you.

That doesn’t mean you can’t dip into the lab from time to time, but come on. It’s food, people. It’s the most important thing in the world. It’s the most basic. Spend a little time and effort on it, for chrissakes. It’s fun, and it’s good for you.

I am at my ideal weight and don’t really exercise that much (save walking around a lot). I am healthy and pretty happy. I don’t worry about food that much, I just make dinner and then eat it. Chomp. The end.
Thebes

WOW, this explains a few things to me. I am allergic to corn syrup, its derivatives and items naturally containing it- like corn and corn meal, unless they have been heated so much that the sugar breaks down.

Occasionally I have hived out when having items containing fructose or maltodextrin, and I never knew that these were (sometimes) corn syrup derived.

It really ticks me off though, I never had this problem until corn syrup and round-up ready corn were so pervasive in the US. Now I can’t eat 80% of the packaged foods at the grocery store… even most bread has corn syrup now.
Bionicrat2

Go Red Mango!
Paul Maurice Martin

My guess is that the Pinkberry folks are just good old fashioned John Stuart Mill aficionados. Mill was the great rational thinker and essayist of Victorian England. His famous essay – “On Nature” I think was the title – basically establishes the meaninglessness of the concept of “natural.”

I mean, there was the Big Bang… What hasn’t been natural since? Here I, uh, simplify and misrepresent Mill’s actual argument, but I think it would be good enough for Pinkberry.
NBraccia

What? No “Extract of Sanrio Character”?
ill lich

“Natural” meaning “exists in the universe”– in other words none of these additives are “supernatural” from some other dimension.

(At least that’s what I thought when I was a child and people talked about “all natural” foods).
crumpledfarm

oh noes! chemicals! maybe some fact-checking before re-posting reactionary nonsense? the ascorbic acid will crush us all! and don’t get me started on that most sinister of commie plots, emulsification!
Antinous

We were discussing some months back the notion that you have to be pretty well off to be able to eat five fruits and vegetables per day. It’s one of the most depressing economic facts. Even in the produce aisle at the supermarket, the cheapest fruit, apples, is also the least nutritious one, where nutrition-rich fruits like berries are the most expensive. Same principle if you compare iceberg to arugula. Meat, even good quality meat, is frequently cheaper than good quality produce. That’s a big change from food prices of several decades ago.
Antinous

crumpledfarm,

If you have an argument, make it.
SciencePunk

#5 ANTINOUS

OMG chemicals!

(Like you don’t seek out a solution of 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione every morning)

Everything substance on Earth is a chemical, with associated nomenclature. It doesn’t indicate toxicity…
Takuan

antifreeze?
Takuan

how many here have given deep fat samples for chemical assay tests to see just what pesticides have lodged in their systems?
Antinous

I drink water, thanks. Maybe you didn’t get the memo, but it’s looking like food is a better bet than lab products for long term health. We’ve tried substituting lab gunk for food and now we’re a society of obese diabetics. For example:

A Cochrane Collaboration meta-analysis of 47 studies found a net harm from taking vitamins A, C, and E.

Taking only the 47 low-bias trials, involving 180,938 people, they found that supplements as a whole increased the death rate by 5 per cent. When the supplements were taken separately, beta carotene increased death rates by 7 per cent, vitamin A by 16 per cent, and vitamin E by 4 per cent. Vitamin C gave contradictory results, but when given singly or in combination with other vitamins in good-quality trials, increased the death rate by 6 per cent.

If vitamin supplements are killing us, I’ll definitely opt out of propylene glycol esters. And god have mercy on Ray Kurzweil.
Adam Rakunas

I think we’re all missing the most important point here: that Pinkberry is overpriced crap not worth getting worked up over in the first place.
Antinous

I think your “food vs. unfood” argument is totally full of crap.

Well, enjoy your long slide into ill health then. Food science has been a complete failure to date, and we are in far worse health than we were fifty years ago when people still ate real food. Maybe you should get your head out of the test tube and look around you. You think that you represent science, but frankly, you sound more like a phrenologist desperately clinging to an outdated vision of how things work.
Spinobobot

One of my pet peeves is the misuse of the term “natural”. Many people use it unthinkingly to falsely vault across the fact/value divide.

I’m not going to pretend “natural” has only one correct meaning–I’m not a language policeman. However, I am wary when it’s used simultaneously to mean: part of the physical world (something that exists, an entity) AND something good or desirable (an ideal or value). This is a dangerous conflation that has been used to justify the demonization of many things, from homosexuality and miscegenation to stem cell research and food additives.

The problem is that calling something “unnatural” is not an argument. In one sense of the word–the sense that physicists use, let’s say–everything that exists is natural. (This is also how Spinoza, my favorite philosopher, uses the term.) There are many other uses that divide existing things into “natural” and “unnatural”, but unless you simply equate “immoral” and “unnatural” (begging the question, in other words), you can’t give a single definition of “unnatural” that consistently justifies moral disapprobation.

For instance, if by “unnatural” one means “artificial”, that is, directly produced by humans, then it makes the entirety of culture and civilization immoral, from clothing and agriculture to writing and art.

If “unnatural” is used in the sense of something that only humans do (i.e., animals always act “naturally”), then many activities commonly regarded that way are falsified by studies in primatology and other sciences. (Nonhuman primates and other animals use simple tools, have social bonds, communicate in proto-languages, kill each other for supposedly no reason, have sex for pleasure rather than reproduction, are homosexual, etc.)

I could go on, but I’m already exhausting the narrow attention spans of Boing Boing readers. But let me just say this: the knee-jerk reaction against the products of food science, including such (usually) relatively harmless things as genetically-modified organisms, is a regrettable manifestation of Luddism, and is especially surprising coming from someone who seems otherwise to be a technoprogressive.

I happen to prefer processed foods and think the hype over “organic” and “natural” is a bunch of hooey. I don’t much care for big agrobusiness, but aside from that factor, I think it quite an accomplishment to be able to make food that tastes and looks the same way every time, and to create chemicals in the lab that help to preserve food, mimic “natural” flavors and colors, and so forth.

There are indeed arguments (safety and environmental sustainability concerns, for instance) that might compel opposition, but they don’t apply to “unnatural” substances generally. Show me some empirical evidence that these chemicals are damaging to human health or the ecosystem before just denigrating them as “toxic”.
WatchfulBabbler

Xopher — yeah, but I figured that it might be disingenuous if I didn’t describe their functionality. :)

Pollyanna — the key tradeoff for good food is cost and time. The problem is that too many of the poor have neither, which I admit a better farm policy won’t fix.

Kennric — I see the point. But I’d argue that the two main requirements of commercial food is (A) price, and (B) flavor. (With (C) health in certain applications.) But this is true of restaurants as well; any chef will tell you that they have two secret ingredients: salt and butter, and salt and butter. And shallots.
Antinous

Show me some empirical evidence that these chemicals are damaging to human health

Spend a day at the mall. Processed foods have given us the ability to be simultaneously obese and malnourished.
SciencePunk

# 41 Antinous

If it causes ill health in the doses supplied, it’s toxic. Diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome. These substances in these quantities meet the definition for toxicity

I think you’re confusing public health with toxicity. Diabetes is a complex illness with many factors, and I don’t think you can say that by virtue of being cheap, something is toxic.

I’m not getting into the complexities of public health, but Cory calling Pinkberry ‘toxic gunk’ is just plain wrong.
Xopher

Thebes: I’m sure I’m not the first to encourage you to bake your own bread. It’s really not difficult, and while it’s a bit time-consuming most of the time is waiting (i.e. you can do something else), and the bread that results (once you’ve baked the requisite number of doorstops) will be the best you’ve ever tasted!

Particularly nice bread results from the “brown bowl, white board” principle: all the flour you add in the bowl should be whole wheat, and all the flour you knead in should be white. Fabulous bread.
Tim

A great, easy read about all the crap that is in food:

Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats

by Steve Ettlinger

(http://www.amazon.com/Twinkie-Deconstructed-Ingredients-Processed-Manipulated/dp/1594630186)
James Ashenhurst

The main objection I have to this post is that the chemicals described in the post as “toxic labratory (sic) junk” are not only non-toxic, but the ingredients listed – with the possible exception of propylene glycol esters, which closely mimic endogenous triglycerides – are found in the human body, or are metabolized to components commonly found in the human body (e.g. lactoglycerides, which break down to glycerol and lactic acid).
To call fructose and maltodextrin “laboratory produced” is a red herring. Fructose is fructose: it doesn’t matter whether it comes from corn syrup, your next-door neighbour’s organically grown apples, or was synthesized in a lab. It is chemically identical either way. Same with maltodextrin. Furthermore, how is fructose produced from corn syrup not “natural”? The structures are EXACTLY the same either way.
None of the ingredients listed are toxic. Although open to interpretation, none of them are “junk” IMO. Citrate and fumarate salts are intermediates found in the cellular citric acid cycle, for example. Watchfulbabbler did a good job of translating the chemical-ese of the other ingredients. The only preservative added is Vitamin E (tocopherol) for Pete’s sakes.
There is good reason to be concerned about food additives and the effect that they have on metabolism and health. This example, however, is not one of them. The concern is misplaced, and the otherwise fine stream of interesting articles on BoingBoing was interrupted in this instance by an unfortunate example of knee-jerk chemophobia to a perfectly healthy (albeit misleadingly advertised) food product.
anthropomorphictoast

If you want natural and organic, go outside and eat grass. I don’t expect my ice cream or frozen yogurt to be additive-free because it’s a FRIKKIN DESERT. IT’S BAD FOR YOU ANYWAY.

… *Caps Lock off*

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat a fudgesicle smothered in nuclear waste.
foobar

I’m reasonably certain none of those things are in fact supernatural.
WatchfulBabbler

Here’s a quick trip through some of the ingredients, given my layman’s knowledge of industrial food chemistry.

Sucrose, Fructose, Dextrose: Ice cream manufacturers usually have a mixture of sweeteners, since different starch-derived sweeteners have different thermal properties. Contributes flavor and body, affects thermal meltdown of the food system. Almost certainly derived from corn starch.

Maltodextrin: Adds body to low-fat frozen concoctions and limits formation of large ice crystals.

Magnesium Oxide: Used in organic acid-containing materials (like anything with lactic acid) to form a thickened wet slurry. Also a good source of, well, magnesium.

Soy Lecithin: Emulsifier and foam stabilizer. Try liquid lecithin when making a salad dressing, or granular lecithin in any sauce you’re heating to around 120-125 deg F. Great for binding fat into sauces, and it’s available at health food stores.

Propylene Glycol Esters: Another emulsifier, commonly used in commercial baking. A lot of small-batch European breadmakers use PGE for the same reason you’d use it in a whipped frozen good — foam stability.

Lactoglycerides: Also an emulsifier used for aeration and foam stability. Getting the idea of just how much engineering goes into any kind of commercial frozen product?

Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate: Give you a hint: it starts with emul- and ends with -sifier. Also adjusts pH levels, protects color, and makes an effective leavening agent. Found in the baking powder sitting on your shelf.

Guar Gum: Starch for product thickening. Commonly used in gluten-free baking. Use in small amounts.

Ascorbic Acid: Commonly-used antioxidant for protection of organoleptic properties.

Tocopherol: Probably used as an antioxidant for the fat component of the product.

Calcium Fumarate: Increases the calcium of the product without significantly affecting pH. Extensively used because of its strong bioavailability.

Look, you can find this stuff in all sorts of “organic” products, especially when you start getting into specialized markets like gluten-free. None of this stuff is going to kill you, and trust me — the product would be either inedible or crazy expensive without them. So let’s hear a little love for the scientists who make this stuff work, mmkay? For a tech-centered blog, this is a bit of luddism that I find disappointing.
Jeff

Cory Doctorow used the word Toxic because he is a provocateur. I don’t eat anything called Pink Berry, and I don’t give a shit if they have an American Express Plum card either! Just what American needs, another kind of “food” to get fatter with.
Antinous

If it causes ill health in the doses supplied, it’s toxic. Diabetes, heart disease, metabolic syndrome. These substances in these quantities meet the definition for toxicity, particularly when you consider the idea that most westerners will consume a majority of foods containing these additives.
Binaryloop

You can have your Pinkberrys. I’ll stick with good old Stonyfield Farm frozen yogurt. It’s a lot cheaper and I know what’s in it:

CULTURED PASTEURIZED ORGANIC NONFAT MILK, NATURALLY MILLED ORGANIC SUGAR,
ORGANIC RICE SYRUP,
WHEY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE,
ORGANIC VANILLA FLAVOR,
CAROB BEAN GUM,
GUAR GUM,
ORGANIC VANILLA BEAN SPECKS,
ANNATTO EXTRACT(FOR COLOR)

http://www.stonyfield.com/
morehumanthanhuman

OH NOES! DANGEROUS CHEMICALS IN MY FOOD!

There may in fact be dangerous chemicals in your food, but these dangerous chemicals usually are in very small amounts and not able to harm you.

Take for instance, almonds, they’re all natural so they must not contain ANY toxic chemicals, right?

WRONG! Almonds, surprisingly, naturally contain a bit of cyanide(not enough to harm you!) which gives them their “almondy” smell.
Rick.

Is this why I crave it like a pregnant woman? The nearest Pinkberry is too far from me. So I’ve taken to going to one of the many clones around town with exactly the same product and sometimes even better. I call them all Fakeberry.
Antinous

Interesting about bananas. We can grow them here, so you can get whatever type you can find at the nursery. Lemons have the same story. In California, you can’t buy anything other than Meyer Improved. And don’t even ask about planting Phoenix robelinii, Phoenix reclinata or anything that might crosspollinate with Phoenix dactylifera, the date palm. There are no date farms left, but the date laws live on.
Antinous

For a tech-centered blog, this is a bit of luddism that I find disappointing.

Suggesting that it might be healthier to eat food than unfood is not luddism. Food doesn’t require stabilizing. Unfood requires stabilizing. Unfood doesn’t exist for your health and convenience. It exists to maximize profits for the company. It exists to ship. It exists to sit on a shelf. It exists to do everything except nourish you.
lia

i eat pinkberry as a special treat, and when i do i heap a mound of cap’n crunch on top, so even if pinkberry’s ingredients were actually “toxic labratory gunk” (which as WatchfulBabbler points out, they’re actually not), i still wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it. most everything is okay in moderation, especially things that taste really good!