Foods that aren't Food

Apparently my last note on food wasn't so well received, which admittedly did come as a surprise. Who doesn't like food? Anyway, I've decided to beat a seemingly dead horse, in hopes that it might come back to life. We'll see how it goes.

Today's note concerns materials that people routinely put in their mouths, chew, and swallow, but as we will see, they probably shouldn't be classified as food because of nutritional reasons. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed researching for it.

1. Hot Dogs

I hate to be trite, but picking on hot dogs is the first logical choice. Most have heard the horror stories of the many inedible bits of animals that go into these much maligned ballpark snacks, but hopefully I can convince you that the accepted and reported processes of hot dog manufacturing do not provide material that should be eaten.

The practice of mechanically separating leftover soft tissue from bone began in the 1960s in the poultry industry. After common cuts of meat such as breasts in poultry and steaks in beef are removed by the typical processes, high velocity jets of air are blown over the leftovers to remove any remaining soft tissue. This soft tissue, resembling mince meat, is added to hot dogs, though there are limits on the proportion of this "mechanically separated meat" that can be used to make a hot dog. In the UK, the material costs 90% less than real meat, so its inclusion in hot dogs to the legal limit is all but guaranteed. In the US the situation in similar.

What is this mystery soft tissue substance? In short, it is all that is left over after any real meat has been removed. This includes the tendons, which connect bone to muscle; ligaments, which connect bone to bone; cartilage, which smoothens the contacts between bones to make joints; fat; and most disturbingly of all, nerve tissue. Nerve tissue is the reason that the USDA and the equivalent organization in the UK have banned the use of mechanically separated meat from cattle in food products, for fear that bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease) may be spread to humans in the spinal tissue. Disgusted yet? I surely do not need to add that hot dogs inevitably contain high proportions of salt, nitrates, and fat. In any case, hot dogs contain a variety of materials that you would throw away after eating your t-bone steak or pork chop, and other materials that you would not even have the misfortune of encountering.

2. Celery

Though it distinguishes itself from hot dogs in being healthy (or at least not detrimental to health), celery is very securely in the "not food" group. A stalk of celery contains 6 Calories. To put this number in perspective, imagine eating a stick of celery. Don't imagine any ranch dressing or ants on a log. Just regular, green celery.

Bite, chew, feel the stringy bits getting caught in the teeth, the water squeezing out and washing around the mouth. Chew more, chew 32 times, swallow, bite again, ect. Pretty boring, right?

Now imagine eating 332 more stalks of celery. Twenty-nine pounds of celery later, the few nutrients in each stalk would provide you with the recommended 2000 Calories the "average" person requires (whomever that actually is). Imagining the consumption in celery of the 2500 or 3000 Calories required by many normal people is less of an exercise in imagination and more of a nightmare.

To complicate matters, celery also contains a relatively large amount of fiber. Eating the aforementioned 333 celery stalks would provide 8.5 times the recommended daily amount of fiber. Holy enema Batman! The common belief is that attempting to digest the fiber in celery requires more energy than the small amounts of energy that the protein and sugar in celery provide, though I can't seem to find any credible reference to back this up. I would tend to believe it, though. In any case, because of its negligible dietary value, celery is clearly not a real food. Similar arguments can be made about many other vegetables, especially iceberg lettuce.

3. Cotton Candy

Did you know that my great great aunt invented the Cotten Candy machine? As often happens with my family name, the machine's name has been misspelled for decades.

Cotten candy is created in a device that heats flavored, colored sugar in a small cup. The cup also rotates rapidly, and the walls of the cup have slits that allow melted sugar to be expelled in tiny filaments. These filaments very quickly crystallize when they touch the colder air, and the solid filaments are collected and formed into the ball of cotton candy.

I wouldn't recommend this since it would totally ruin the experience of cotton candy, but compressing cotton candy can give a surprisingly small ball of sugar compared to the fluffy precursor. A typical serving has so little substance that it contains only 100 Calories! Now imagine eating 20 servings of cotton candy. Though it is truly a wonderful thought, by about the 10th piece you would most likely discover the other reason cotton candy could be outside of the classification of food. The simple sugars in cotton candy are not the best means to provide the body with the steady stream of energy that it needs throughout the day.

4. Chewing gum

If you ever started drooling while looking at car tires, or if your stomach started growling last time you saw a latex glove, then chewing gum is the thing for you! The chewy part of gum actually does contain either a type of latex or a type of butyl rubber similar to the rubber in car tires. So why would anyone put such things in the mouth? It stumps me, since I never chew gum. Gum may or may not contain a handful of calories in the form of simple sugar depending on how it is sweetened. However, the chewing of gum does consume energy, and findings recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine show that gum can burn as many as 70 Calories an hour. So chewing gum every waking hour could help you use 1000 extra Calories a day, which I may have to do during the long winters here in Wisconsin to keep the pounds off from all the extra cheese and beer. Having gum in my mouth that often sounds disgusting though, and there is a good chance such prodigious chewing would cause stomach problems. In any case, any "food" that will make you lose weight should probably not be classified as food at all.