Danger! Dark Chocolate!

I continue to discover the most interesting things when I check the labels on food packaging. For instance, the following disclaimer was just above the ingredient list on a bar of Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate:



I had to wonder why the warning was there. I immediately thought lawsuit, and went lurking about the internet to see what I could find. I expected something between the McDonald‘s coffee case and a Seinfeld episode. What I did find was even funnier. Parody newspaper, The Onion, ran an article that was exactly what I thought I would find when I started looking for an explanation for the disclaimer. The only difference is that I expected to find an actual lawsuit. The lawsuit reported in The Onion was, obviously, a joke.


Of course, just when I thought fiction was strange, the truth jumps in with something stranger. A Fortune Magazine article, which was published more than 2 years after The Onion's article, talks about a lawsuit filed by New York City attorney Sam Hirsch on behalf of a group of obese teens. I think I knew about this case, which was dismissed, but I wasn't aware that any serious discussion came out of it. Apparently a few people were concerned about the impact of the case on the food industry. Impressive for a lawsuit that was referred to as a "laughingstock".

I never did discover why there was a disclaimer on my chocolate bar. Maybe Hershey's has put it there as a public service, although after reading the Fortune article I'm inclined to think that it's more about covering their assets.

UPDATE: November 6, 2008

After writing about the warning on my chocolate bar, references to Hershey’s chocolate keep cropping up. First there was the reappearance of chocolate bars that had been recalled two years ago for possible salmonella contamination. The bars were stolen from a disposal site. Makes me wonder how recalled items are disposed of. Somehow I thought they’d no longer resemble a saleable product.

Then I found a cute little Hershey bar in the basket of Halloween candy at work. I thought it would be too small for a warning, but when I turned it over there was a shorter caution. This one reminded consumers to “make sure you read the label every time”. Given the current concerns with Hershey products I don’t think reading the label is going to help. Unless you’ve memorized the barcodes affected by the recall, and if you have you probably have other more pressing concerns.

Loaves and Labels

I’m learning all kinds of new things as I research the mysterious ingredients I find on food packaging. Just trying to identify the components in a loaf of bread has been most enlightening. I've discovered that the breads from my supermarket’s bakery contain an ingredient also used in the production of rubber and plastics (azodicarbonamide - used in the food industry as a wheat flour improver). I’ve discovered that all-purpose flour can be bleached with benzoyl peroxide. Yep, the same stuff I used to zap zits 20 years ago is also in my store-bought bread.

On the plus side, I’ve learned that suspicious-sounding biga is actually a starter used to make traditional Italian bread. It’s a type of pre-fermentation that seems rather complicated and makes me appreciate the work that goes into a local bakery’s Italian Country bread.

I also appreciate that the local bakery lists ingredients clearly on the front of the package. Not so with the supermarket bakery. I had to look up their bread ingredients online. Easy enough to find on their website, but because the information wasn’t on the package, I didn’t realize their bread contained unidentifiable and unpronounceable ingredients until after I purchased it. Lesson learned. Just because a product has a wholesome name doesn’t make it wholesome. Who would have thought that something as simple as whole wheat bread would contain an ingredient also found in Silly Putty and breast implants (Dimethylpolysiloxane - an anti-foaming agent. Because no one wants foamy bread, or putty, or boobs.)

I wonder how these ingredients make their way into such a variety of products. What sane person would try putting the active ingredient of acne medication into flour? Of course, they may have decided to use the bleaching agent from flour to make acne medication. I have no way of knowing which application came first. Either way, I marvel at the imagination it takes to make such a connection, even though I’m not sure I agree with the wisdom of the choice.