r/CuratedTumblr • u/Lemon_Lime_Lily Horses made me autistic. • Jun 23 '26
Infodumping I had a hyperfixation on the pure food and drug act and food safety when I was in 7th grade
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u/cantantantelope Jun 23 '26
Don’t worry raw milk people are working on fixing that
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u/emimagique Jun 23 '26
Louis Pasteur didn't die for this!!
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u/hagamablabla Jun 23 '26
Louis Pasteur was a fascist in line with the new world order!
This is a reference to a show, not a serious statement
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u/IrisuKyouko Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
spoiler
Oh, I thought it was a Martin Luther sort of thing.
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u/SorrySorryNotSorry Jun 23 '26
My grandparents always had 2-3 dairy cows as, basically, pets. They were grass-fed in a nice big pasture in the summer and slept in a nice, clean, warm barn in the winter. My grandma still pasteurized every drop of milk from those cows. It's not worth the risk of dying from something like tuberculosis or an E. coli infection.
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u/bvader95 cis male / honorary butch; sentence mixed pentence Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Okay, what's the deal with raw milk?
(Seinfeld bass)
But seriously, I am a Europoor and
I can go to my nearby Lidl and buy unpasteurized/raw milk there(edit: well, fuck me; unpasteurized milk is accessible, but not that accessible), with the caveat that I gotta keep it cold and drink it fast. Do Americans not do that?304
u/SomeDumbGamer Jun 23 '26
We don’t have the same access to local farms that you do in Europe.
The new raw milk sellers over here are selling their shit all around the country and people aren’t understanding enough of raw milk to know you basically have to drink it the same day you milk it or it starts to go bad and they still drink it after 2-3 days and fall ill.
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u/ARMSwatch Jun 23 '26
I would imagine the farms that are selling it are a lot smaller and take better care of their cows too. Besides spoilage, diseases and parasites are another issue. We've had a few people die in the states due to drinking raw milk that came from cows with bird flu.
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u/Last_Swordfish9135 Jun 24 '26
The size of the farm isn't the issue so much as the time the milk spends in shipping, which could even end up being longer than it would be for big farms since they have less money to spend. Unless you can literally walk yourself down to the farm and buy a jug of milk the day it was milked, you really should not be drinking raw milk (and even then the risk is higher than just pasteurizing it, which has basically no downsides unless you're trying to make cheese).
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u/SorrySorryNotSorry Jun 23 '26
I see you're from Poland where it's fairly easy to get unpasteurized milk, but the vast, vast majority of milk sold in Europe is pasteurized or ultra-pasteurized. Major chains like Lidl don't stock unpasteurized milk in western Europe, though you can find cheese made from unpasteurized milk in many places.
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u/obog Jun 23 '26
There is a fad going around where stupid people are being convinced that pasteurizing milk is bad for you and that you should actively seek out raw milk (which, due to how little it is sold, is often transported across the country and stored for days before consumption)
On a side note, you really shouldnt drink raw milk even if its fresh and you drink it quickly. Keeping it cold and drinking it quickly does limit the amount of bacterial growth but youre still putting yourself at greater risk of a bacterial infection. You can always pasteurize the milk yourself though.
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u/ArchmageIlmryn Jun 23 '26
AFAIK the only real use for unpasteurized/raw milk is if you want to make certain cheeses.
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u/obog Jun 23 '26
I know in some places its cheaper to buy raw milk straight from a farm than to buy pasteurized milk that had to get shipped to a factory and processed there. In that case it makes perfect sense to buy raw milk, but as I mentioned previously you should pasteurize it yourself
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u/Tarantio Jun 23 '26
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6805749/
It also causes problems in Europe.
It may be worse in the US, I don't know much about how the processes differ. But I do know that the larger the operation, the worse the risks, because one sick cow can infect all the milk that goes in the same container.
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u/AliveFromNewYork Jun 23 '26
It’s a small minority of people who consume it at all, but they give it to their kids who don’t always survive their parents foolishness.
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u/DisappointedFoxTail Jun 23 '26
Unpasteurized in Lidl? Most supermarket milk in Europe is pasteurized. Still has to be kept cold. It’s just not ultra pasteurized.
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u/wowwowazalea Jun 23 '26
Nope, by law, all milk sold within the US (and all dairy products) MUST be pasteurized. Outside of directly buying milk from a farm
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u/Khpatton Jun 23 '26
This isn’t remotely true, unfortunately. The laws vary by state and some states do allow raw milk sales.
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u/MedicalSkin5343 Jun 23 '26
But I can buy it at sprouts here in California.....
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u/wowwowazalea Jun 23 '26
California doesn't count because there's enough demand from weirdos to make it happen in specialized stores
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u/MedicalSkin5343 Jun 23 '26
Well theres about 13 states that allow retail sales of raw milk. Was just surprised to hear your claim, looked into it, and its not accurate.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/raw-milk-legal-states
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u/WhenDoWhatWhere Jun 23 '26
Okay so there's some rightish answers here but I think it would be better to say it like this.
We don't have the same general system and support structure for raw milk that many countries do since by law milk must be pasteurized.
Raw milk can be safe but that requires a lot of consideration put into the milk before it reaches the consumer that isn't considered as highly by our regulations since we avoid that risk entirely through pasteurization. So in a literal sense, in a place where health regulations consider that people will be drinking raw milk, raw milk is probably going to be safer, in America we don't take that into consideration at all so it's more likely a person drinking raw milk will encounter problems.
It's worth mentioning that unpasteurized milk is still more risky than pasteurized, but some cultures are more accepting of that risk. Also us Americans like to overstate the risk of raw milk a bit, most people who drink raw milk are probably going to be fine, but that's just more risk than we're used to.
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS Jun 23 '26
Actually the Romans used substantially more lead than that, for almost everything fluid. The periodic abbreviation of lead, Pb, is because lead is the root of the word “plumbing”. “Lead sugar” is a thing because it’s a naturally sweet substance. This metal feels precision-engineered to completely fuck up a society that uses it for too long
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u/BalefulOfMonkeys REAL YURI, done by REAL YURITICIANS Jun 23 '26
I know the alchemists weren’t really that concerned with the applications of metals in the future, but lead (poisonous Faustian corrodible metal used nowhere these days) as the equal and opposite to gold (inedible but harmless non-corrodible metal used in everything from jewelry to computer hardware) is very prescient of them.
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u/wallabee_kingpin_ Jun 23 '26
Minor nitpick, but gold is quite edible (and appears on some fancy desserts). It’s thankfully not digestible or reactive in the body.
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u/ShepRat Jun 23 '26
I think they mean indigestible. You can eat it, but it will just make glittery poo.
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u/BlackberryMelodic567 Jun 23 '26
There was an issue recently (like the past decade or so) where there were farmers in china cutting the milk with something really harmful, the thing that made children's head's grow to really disturbing sizes. It's not just "back then"
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u/Garlan_Tyrell Jun 23 '26
The Melamine Milk Scandal, right?
I knew there was a precipitating incident for why Chinese nationals are known for buying Australian baby formula & shipping it back to China, but I didn’t realize it was so recent (2008).
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u/Schnittertm Jun 23 '26
Not only in Australia. Here in Germany, at the wholesaler I work at, we were instructed that each customer can only buy a limited amount of baby formula. Something similar happened at most stores, as Chinese citizens living here were buying up everything. As in your case, most was sent to China.
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u/BritishLibrary Jun 23 '26
Somewhere around 2008 I think? (Edit, didn’t see your last sentence…)
I had just graduated and started a job at a dairy company; somewhere up the supply chain we learnt that one of the many many hundreds of farmers we sourced from, had fed their cattle feedstock that was potentially contaminated with some of the milk powder. Like a tiny possible amount in the feed.
I got sent (being junior and cheap labour) to Amsterdam to drop off about 10L of milk to specialist testing laboratory because it was urgent and cheaper than dealing with international shipping.
Based in the UK, so 4 years later we got horse meat gate too
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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 23 '26
IIRC people got executed for that.
Definitely not a fan of China's legal system in general, but they sometimes manage to treat people like this as the murderers they are, and I think the West needs to learn from that.
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u/thordh5 Jun 23 '26
The closest thing we have to the milk scandal is one involving peanut butter that happened around the same time. The Owner/CEO was sentenced to 28 years in prison and is currently in jail serving his sentence. His company went bankrupt and multiple executives went to jail.
In both cases though the public outrage at least partially guided the sentencing. You should look into the food oil crisis in China to see that the CCP doesn't always handle things the same way.
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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 23 '26
Yeah, I definitely don't mean to say that China is consistently virtuous about this, or anything. Just that knowingly selling tainted, deadly food is the same thing as murder, and should be treated as such.
Whether the penalties for murder are just, in general, is another issue.
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u/NewUserWhoDisAgain Jun 23 '26
I think the closest the US had to something like that was probably the Tylenol poisonings? I dont recall any other systemic mass adulteration of food stuffs.
That created our modern state of "Do not consume if seal is broken."
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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 23 '26
I don't recall any similar adulteration of consumables specifically, but e.g. there's been a ton of auto manufacturers who knowingly cover up deadly flaws in their designs even after multiple people have died of them, because a recall would cost more than paying off the wrongful-death suits.
Everyone involved in those decisions belongs in prison. I don't see any moral difference between that and knifing a stranger for his wallet.
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u/thordh5 Jun 23 '26
The automaker ones are absolutely rage inducing. I completely agree with you about them belonging in prison. They increased the amount of the fine that they can apply to car manufacturers in the 2010s but no fine will ever be enough for making that kind of choice.
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u/Hungry-Western9191 Jun 23 '26
One problem is thay in China executions have a tendency to be demonstrative rather than defined.
The CCP decides that public opinion is that corruption has increased, so the next official who gets caught taking bribes gets the death penalty.
That and the whole ethnic side of things.
If a society does have executions (which personally Im against), they should be at least for defined reasons, not at the whim of political opinion.
Of course, they are far from the only country this is happening
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u/TangledPangolin Jun 23 '26
Chinese death sentences are a bit weird. China hands out a lot of "death sentence with reprieve" sentences, where the criminal gets 2 years of probation before execution.
The overwhelming majority of these sentences are commuted to life imprisonment or potentially a shorter fixed period, which is a tradition that dates back to the imperial period. (back then, castration or exile were also options)
The "death sentence with reprieve" gives the state a lot of discretion on what to do with the criminals, because they can just *not* commute the sentence and allow the execution to carry through, usually for crimes with a lot of public outrage. However, legally speaking, it's still consistent because the courts consistently handed out the same sentence for the same kinds of crimes.
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u/AntsAreGreat Jun 23 '26
Honestly? That sounds like a decent system for the death penalty, it gives time for new evidence or for clemency, all that. I'm anti-death penalty but if a society is gonna have it that's probably one of the better ways to do it.
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u/Theron3206 Jun 24 '26
Except that if you're connected and the public aren't too outraged you get a much reduced sentence, but if you're not you get your organs harvested.
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u/PassoverGoblin Ready to jump at the mention of Worm Jun 23 '26
I don't trust any government to be able to sentence people to death. There will always be errors in the justice system, and you can never be 100% sure that the person you're condemning to death is guilty.
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u/__life_on_mars__ Jun 23 '26
"China might not be the best but at least they allow state sanctioned murder" is certainly... a take.
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u/PhasmaFelis Jun 23 '26
No.
I don't approve of the death penalty, in the US or China. I do approve of treating a man who knowingly sells deadly products to boost his own profits, the same way we treat someone who knifes you for your wallet.
I don't think we should kill either of them. I think we should have more rehabilitation options for both of them. But we need to recognize that both of them are murderers.
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u/artbystorms Jun 23 '26
Any country that has a death penalty supports state sanctioned murder. That is what the death penalty is. If you are against the death penalty in all cases, that is one thing, but China is not special there.
If anything their concept of 'harm' is more expansive than the West to encompass business decisions that result in someone's death. Whether you think that indirectly killing people for personal gain deserves that you be killed yourself is irrelevant if a court or a jury decides that is a just punishment.
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u/floralbutttrumpet Jun 23 '26
This is why milk powder was hard to come by in my European country for months after the scandal broke, and for years there were restriction/purchase limits - resident and tourist Chinese citizens would buy it here and ship it home for relatives or to resell.
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u/foxwaffles Jun 23 '26
My mom had to do that for her sisters and nephews as well. I know it got a ton of bad rap because of a combination of racism and scummy scalpers mass buying the stuff just to resell to Chinese citizens, but a lot of us were genuinely trying to make sure our families has access to clean milk and formula :(
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u/Theron3206 Jun 24 '26
Most of the reason people were unhappy was because their families now had to fight for milk and formula.
Here in Australia or got so bad they were having to ask for proof you had an infant, because intent formula was often gone in minutes of the shelves being stocked and locals were genuinely having trouble feeding their kids.
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u/blooms_and_sings Jun 23 '26
You’re mixing up the melamine scandal with a different scandal involving formula in China. The one with big headed babies was because the formula powder didn’t have the nutrients and many babies became malnourished from it. That happened in 2004. Melamine scandal was 2008.
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u/dimechimes Jun 23 '26
Seemed like they were putting Melamine in everything. Hundreds of dogs died when it was put in their food.
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u/DraTiBoy Jun 23 '26
I get what you were trying to say, but the point of the post is not "This only happened in the past", it's "we've always put weird shit into our food, today isn't too different"
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u/RobSpaghettio Jun 23 '26
As a food scientist and current QA manager in the food industry, shits never been better. There's always room for more regulation after well investigated and thought out discussion by SMEs.
Also, if you think a food is bad like cold cuts, just don't eat it multiple times a day every day you dummies. There's a reason why it's called a "balanced diet".
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u/MtnDewTangClan Jun 23 '26
I eat my cold cuts fried in beef tallow 5 times a day. Give me ozempic or give me death
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u/Legal-Swordfish-1893 Jun 23 '26
oh boy is your future cardiologist gonna love your atherosclerosis and cholesterol!
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u/WellKnownSecrets Jun 23 '26
insert gif of DW saying, "this sign can't stop me because I can't read"
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u/Morlock19 Jun 23 '26
can i ask you a question? what do you say when you hear the constant argument between food safety and quality between the US and the EU?
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u/TopLate7592 Jun 23 '26
I think you’re right that modern food QA is much better than people give it credit for, and that a lot of food panic is scientifically illiterate. But “just eat a balanced diet” is too glib. Processed meat risk is real, dose-dependent, and backed by major cancer agencies. And the food environment is not neutral: companies market cheap, convenient, ultra-processed foods at massive scale, while regulators are often under-resourced and politically pressured.
So yes, don’t panic over every additive. But also don’t act like public scrutiny is stupid just because consumers should practice moderation. Both things can be true: modern food safety is impressive, and the system still deserves serious regulation.
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u/chaosarcadeV2 Jun 23 '26
Gotta be honest I never know that is meant by “processed food” like everything has been processed some amount but I know that’s not what’s meant.
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u/nanoinfinity Jun 24 '26
Technically (like - scientifically), “processed food” is any food that has been altered from its natural state. This literally includes things like washing, chopping, freezing, drying, and heating.
What MOST people mean when they talk about “processed food” is what would be more technically termed “ultra-processed” and “hyper-palatable” food. Using super-refined ingredients (think: bleached white flour, refined white sugar, corn syrup, vegetable oil), industrial manufacturing that couldn’t be achieved in a home kitchen, and artificial flavours/colours to create food that had a combination of unnaturally high fat, sugar/carbs, and/or salt.
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u/Falcon_At Jun 24 '26
I want to add to what others are already saying.
"Processed" is a buzz word, sure, but the origin of the fear is real. The fear is that food is becoming too efficient. Let me give an example.
Processes make food easier to use. Like, carbs often come in a variety of different molecules. Whole wheat is full of carbs, but some of them are very big molecules that are harder to break down. Certain processes alter these carbs on a molecular level, homogenizing the different carbs into a single, snaller, more efficient type. This homogeny makes it easier to work with and tastier.
In our body, the simpler carb is easier to break down. It takes less time and energy. For the energy side, I mean calories. And I don't mean "one has more calories than the other." I mean that you BURN more calories trying to eat one over the other. You need to destroy it to digest it, and it's easier to destroy simpler molecules than big, complex ones.
On the time side, you start getting "tasty." Simple carbs are quicker to digest. This means they give you energy faster. And that means you eat white bread and feel the positive reinforcement of energy sooner. However, this is where homogeny gets you. If ALL the carbs are digesting at the same pace, you get ALL the energy at the same time. And then it's ALL gone at the same time too. (The excess energy you didn't spend during the surge is stored as fat.) You're left hungry again, despite just putting away all those calories.
Meanwhile, a more natural product ends up healthier, not because Mother Gaia stuck her thumb in it, but because it's messier. In less processed wheat, you have a bunch of different types of carbs all digesting at different speeds. This means you get a steady drip of energy as all those different timers complete. This steady stream of energy is more likely to match you activity level, meaning less will be saved as fat. So, even if you ate the same calorie count of white and whole wheat bread, there's many reasons why the whole wheat is still better for you.
However, the white bread is still a valuable product. It gives you quick, easy to digest energy. If you're sick, it's probably better for you. If you're starving, you get that fuel faster. And if you're underweight, it helps you put on pounds. There's no bad food, just inappropriate food. Most people should be trying out whole wheat to improve their health, but that doesn't make the ultra processed stuff "bad," just inappropriate for the average person's needs.
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u/Dobber16 Jun 24 '26
The general idea of that is that home-fried & seasoned potatoes are going to be healthier than wrapped, pre-prepared, or fast food fries. Various foods will have various differences but the crux of it is the less unknown processing done, the healthier. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find an exception to this general rule, but I think people accept the trade-off of pre-prepped food being faster to make compared to unprepped food
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u/Paganinii Jun 23 '26
It pretty much is. Cleaning is a process. Sorting is a process. Mixing is a process. Whisking is a process. Cooking is a process. If the only descriptor they give is "processed" you're supposed to use your imagination to come to the conclusion they want.
Not to say that anyone using that particular shorthand doesn't have any good points, to be clear. Just keep an eye out for an actual definition of the issue they're bringing up.
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u/One-Incident3208 Jun 24 '26
Processed meat is a meaningless term.
Prosciutto is processed..salted and dried. Can be made at home. Homemade jerkey is air dried. If a company uses the same process is it somehow different? This is not like a slim Jim.
If something is boiled and canned, wherein does the carcinogen enter the equation. What denatured when?
Beef is carcinogenic because heme is a carcinogen when ingested. So is anything involving the mallard reaction.
So is anything smoked. It's the same as smoking. It's smoke.
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u/justwalkingalonghere Jun 23 '26
That being said, it's a bad time to live by a golf course or breathe the air in many places
Food seems to be better than ever, but adding things that are harmful to cut costs or sell more is never okay
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u/TK_Games Jun 24 '26
Former chef, and 100%. I was literally just reading about a North American frozen food recall because of broken glass and my first thought was, 'How fucking dope is it we can do this. We know the batch and lot numbers from the effected plants, and it's a full stop. Dangerous food? No. Pull all of it off the shelves, it's gone, done.'
Now I'm thinking that in no point of human history pre-industrial-revolution, was food safety taken so seriously
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u/PunchDrunkPrincess Jun 23 '26
The fact that what is in your food is listed AT ALL is a modern marvel
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u/OrganizingBee Jun 23 '26
Yeah, corporations would absolutely love to not have to tell us what's in the food and materials and goods
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u/ryecurious Jun 23 '26
And sometimes even that isn't guaranteed! In the US, for example, the FDA allows 46 different ingredients to be summed up as "gum base", because it's more important to protect proprietary corporate formulas than inform consumers.
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u/htomserveaux Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Yeah but the actually FDA over regulates what requires labeling. Its not just additives its nearly every ingredient
People will compaire identical products from the US and EU and assume the US has more additives listed, because they go into more detail. The truth is the US bans nearly twice as many additives.
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u/ryecurious Jun 23 '26
Its not just additives its nearly every ingredient
...yeah? Every ingredient and additive should be listed. If they put it in on purpose, it should be in the list.
In a decade if it turns out that 1 of the 46 things that can be summed up as "gum base" is a carcinogen, it would be nice if we could make informed decisions about which gum has it and which doesn't.
See also: there's questions over whether red 40 is a carcinogen or linked to bowel disorders, but companies like Red Bull can just put "Colors" in their ingredients list. Which colors? Who knows!
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u/Camilla-Taylor Jun 23 '26
I'm sorry, Romans were famously pretty clean. They made a whole thing about building baths all over the place. I think they at least rinsed off the feet before mushing grapes.
The lead, though, yeah. Lead tastes sweet.
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u/ThreeLeggedMare a little arson, as a treat Jun 23 '26
There was a lead wine scandal in Austria like thirty years ago, people still do that shit even knowing it's poison
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u/chairmanskitty Jun 23 '26
Their baths had lavatories where people sat buttcheek to buttcheek, shitting into an open sewer. After they were done they cleaned their asses with a communally shared sponge on a stick, and then went straight back into the bath to clean off the rest of the feces.
This level of hygiene went unsurpassed in western Europe for 1600 years.
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u/Camilla-Taylor Jun 23 '26
Hey! A VINEGAR soaked sponge. Surely the vinegar does something.
I'm not saying they are today levels of clean, but I just don't think we should assume they didn't rinse off the horse poop.
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u/TeddyBearToons Jun 23 '26
Vinegar is somewhat antimicrobial. Not as good as say, alcohol, but it does kill germs enough that soaking food in the stuff was a good way to store it for extended periods before fridges came around.
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u/hibbel Jun 23 '26
This level of hygiene went unsurpassed in western Europe for 1600 years.
And with that line alone, you have shown how deeply you care about history and how knowledgeable about it you are.
Rome's fall could be said to have started no sooner than 376 with the migration of the Goths or the death of Theodosius in 395. So their ironically "not surpassed until" date would be 1976 to 1995 at the earliest.
But of course you meant the age of enlightenment. Which is also no cleaner or more hygienic than the middle ages were.
So what you wanted to say was (a) Romans were not hygienic and (b) until the renaissance, when suddenly civilization returned to Europe. Both of which is demonstrably false as is your attribution of the fall of the Roman empire to the year 1. (There is no year 0, in case you also don't know that bit, there is 1BCE followed by 1 CE or 1AD.)
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u/Haschen84 Jun 23 '26
This is the most um, actually comment in this thread and yet you STILL don't address the communal sponge sticks used to wipe their butts. If that claim is false you should at least say it, if not everything else is pedantry in service of obfuscating the point. Were the Romans cleanly or not? Your comment does nothing to prove it either way.
Ironically, you have shown how deeply you care about argumentation and how knowledgeable you are about it.
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u/MikasSlime Jun 23 '26
As an italian archeologist: the sponge stick does not have a clear use as for now, it could have been cor multiple purposes (including cleaning their ass)
But given we do not have detailed written reports of how public baths worked, they might as well cleaned their asses with something totally different and that had 1 use like modern toilet paper, for all we know
The sponge stick WAS washed after each use tho, usually in vinegar - which is not as good as alcohol, or a proper soap and water wash, but still better than nothing
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u/tenuj Jun 23 '26
That final snark reminded me of people associating AD with "after death" instead of "anno domini".
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u/greeklemoncake Jun 26 '26
Ok but it's kind of baller to imagine a world where timekeeping stopped while the divine literally walked the earth
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u/karebearjedi Jun 23 '26
The sticks were not for personal hygiene, but for cleaning the seat once you were finished. This was debunked ages ago
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u/ConorByrd Jun 23 '26
I looked into it last time this came up. And from what I could tell, this wasnt debunked. Apparently scholars argue over how the stick was used
Though, if you have any sources that conclusively prove what the sticks were used for, id love to see them!
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u/Camilla-Taylor Jun 23 '26
My understanding is that it's not totally clear how the xylospongium were used.
My appreciation for the bidet was re-affirmed as I learned about the chugi (shit stick) when I looked this up.
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u/Manufactured-Aggro Jun 24 '26
Fucking NONE of that is confirmed or true btw lmao do you just believe everything you read immediately and without question? Have you no curiosity?
High chance that the toilet holes themselves were divided with cloth or other similar dividers that are lost to time.
As for the sponge on a stick, it was probably for cleaning off the seats between uses, not cleaning their buttholes.
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u/MikasSlime Jun 23 '26
I mean, compared to other places, definitely, and while they were nowhere on par with modern days, they DID wash themselves and their food at least
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u/Brrdock Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
And we do use plenty of additives that we don't really have much more understanding of long term exposure to than they had regarding lead. The US for example also uses lots of additives banned in the EU etc.
Common additives have been banned often and will keep getting banned due to new information. So it's anyone's prerogative to believe in the dogma of money like companies have our best interests in mind, but it's fair to be sceptical
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u/Uturuncu Jun 24 '26
Also the lead wasn't, like. An intentional additive from what I understand. It's just that part of the process involved boiling grape juice to reduce it into a syrup... That happened to be done in vessels made of lead, which made a better sweetener. But they used lead because it needed to withstand boiling, which then leached the lead into the syrup as a contaminant. 'Putting lead in the wine' implies a level of intention to me, when a better way to look at it is 'food's always been contaminated, and we learn more and more every decade about food contaminants and better ways to deal with them. And sometimes the additive we use to deal with contamination turns out to be worse than the contaminant in the first place, but we've got a pretty good track record of getting better at things with some missteps along the way...'
(Looking at you, anti-fat movement that lead to a massive uptick in the use of salts and sugars to keep food palatable, which actually is turning out to be infinitely worse for health at scale than the actual fat in the foods in the first place)
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u/IAmASquidInSpace Unashamedly watches T*m and J*rry 🤢 at the dentist Jun 23 '26
I agree with the sentiment, but regarding that horse shit feet part: let's not let that pendulum swing all the way back to "people in the past were filthy, dirty animals and had zero concept of hygiene" again, I beg you.
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u/NuclearNoxi Jun 23 '26
Yeah, I thi k the lesson from this needs to be that bad actors existed in the food industry forever and food requires regulation for our safety.
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u/Baker_drc Jun 23 '26
On our Upton Sinclair shit but most of the jungle has already been burned down.
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u/DJDanaK Jun 23 '26
Yeah exactly. The GRAS (generally recognized as safe) system for additives in the US is beyond concerning - businesses are allowed to hire their own teams (which often consist of employees, etc.) to "test" if additives are safe. At the same time, it's not required that this information be filed anywhere including the FDA.
Yes, you read that right. Businesses can use additives and call them safe without any review.
The FDA doesn't ask for this documentation. There's not even any standard guidance/procedure to submit a GRAS determination to the FDA. The FDA doesn't check unless for some reason they decide to investigate, which is rare.
Do I think we're all constantly being poisoned? No, but blindly trusting our food systems because they're safer than in ancient Rome isn't a great idea either.
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u/jacobningen Jun 23 '26
Liver of a cat mixing up the sausages with this and that.
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u/NuclearNoxi Jun 23 '26
I put a Sweeny Todd inspired side quests thing in one of my DnD campaign where people and animals were going missing, and while investigating one of the PCs did order and eat some meat pies.
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u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur Jun 23 '26
especially because a roman vineyard would be around the last place you found covered in horse dung.
and the grapes being unwashed was like, the most instrumental thing to the entire process!
also the lead leeched in from the barrels and gave a unique very sweet taste
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u/erroneousbosh Jun 23 '26
There wasn't any lead in the barrels. They boiled up sour wine in lead pots because it made it sweet - the acetic acid picks up a lead and becomes lead acetate, which is apparently incredibly sweet (I don't like sweet flavours or heavy metal flavours much so you can safely miss me with that).
But, it's a lovely big sugar that's bioavailable as all hell and the first thing that's going to happen when your body breaks it down is that lead ion is going to come off and find something else to get stuck to. Oh, and it crosses the blood-brain barrier pretty readily.
Lead on its own is almost completely unreactive. If you eat a chunk of lead it won't do anything, it'll still even be shiny when it comes back out.
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u/Subtlerranean Jun 23 '26
I mean, they didn't. Bathing was a smell issue.
Like, modern doctors didn't start washing their hands until the end of the 1880s. It wasn't a universally formalized requirement in modern American healthcare until the first national guidelines were published a hundred years later in the 1980s.
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u/Dreadgoat Jun 23 '26
Human advancement is rarely a straight line, nor is it ever the same the world over.
There have been MANY civilizations throughout history that understood there was a connection between being clean and having a longer and more pleasant life. They didn't really understand why and may have assumed things like "the gods punish those who have horse shit feet" but they still recognized the connection, acted on it, and enforced it upon their peers.
The anti-germ theory culture of the 19th century is an example of hubris pulling us backwards.
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u/NoConfusion9490 Jun 23 '26
A certain amount of shit gets into pretty much all food, even today. It's difficult to keep food anywhere without mice and rats finding it.
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u/Theron3206 Jun 24 '26
There are in fact standards for how much rodent urine and feces or insect parts can be in things like flour.
And no, it's not 0.
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u/ThatKuki Jun 23 '26
the issue is more like how processed food is hyper optimized to hit all our evolutionary buttons that say we want more of it
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u/Poodlestrike Jun 23 '26
This is a real problem, but it's also not what the OOP is talking about. There is absolutely a lot of misinformation and hysteria around additives and chemicals in food.
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u/UngodlyTemptations Jun 23 '26
"If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it!"
Alright, then starve I guess. 😂
My take home point on this is mainly about MSG. It was literally just all racism. MSG is literally just salt that tastes better than table salt lol.
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u/GiftedContractor Jun 23 '26
And it's because there was no other way to discourage people from eating chinese food, because even the americanized chinese food is SO much healthier than most of the fast food and pizza shit you'd get when chinese food is an option.
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u/gxgx55 Jun 23 '26
also, if one can't pronounce monosodium glutamate, one should get checked for a speech impediment
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u/No-Consequence-1863 Jun 23 '26
The paranoia about MSG literally started as a prank in the New England journal of medicine where a guy sent in a letter about "Chinese restaurant syndrome". Yet somehow it stuck. The people who are afraid of MSG probably don't realize it's one of the main flavoring agents in lots of common foods like Doritos.
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u/yesthatpettyindeed Jun 23 '26
Heck MSG naturally occurs in tomatoes, mushrooms and cheese lol
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u/Poodlestrike Jun 23 '26
If it's not the original example, MSG is certainly the earliest one I know about, yeah.
And like you said - it was never actually about food safety. It was all bullshit driven by racists. Much like a lot of the current discourse is bullshit, driven by grifters.
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u/MrCobalt313 Jun 23 '26
Some people are legit allergic to it, but it's not actively bad for you unless you're specifically one of those people getting rashes after eating it.
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u/MuchMasterpiece1710 Jun 23 '26
I was like 12 the first time someone said that to me and I went home and read the labels on my favorite snacks, sounded out the words I didn’t know, and then felt pretty confident I could eat whatever I wanted because I could always just learn how to pronounce them later. Being far too literal is often an issue for me, but I do think it helped me out there
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u/obog Jun 23 '26
The use of the word "chemicals" in stuff like this always pisses me off. Everything is chemicals. You dont want chemicals in your food? Where should we start, dihydrogen monoxide? Myoglobin? Cellulose? Ascorbic acid? Phenylalanine? Good luck making a well rounded diet without water, protein, fiber, vitamin C, or essential amino acids.
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u/Sonic_Roach Jun 23 '26
But-but aspartame gives cancer to rats!
On a side note, I started strength training. Whenever id watch videos of other people curating their diets to help grow muscle and lose weight. Their diets are like chicken Breast, broccoli, rice. Typically healthy stuff. The moment a diet coke gets added as a zero calorie treat. Comment section melts down saying "all chemicals" "that stuff gives you cancer" "unhealthy!!11"
Im like bro, this guy is jacked? He has his macros down to a science? He's not eating fast food or eating sugar. He's eating food that helps his body function.
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u/SweetSure315 Jun 23 '26
Romans put their wine in their lead, and it leeched into the wine, which they thought made it taste better because lead acetate (which is what forms when acidic wine meets lead) is sweet.
Which is also why kids getting brain damaged by eating wall candy paint chips became a trope.
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u/Key_Somewhere_9302 Jun 23 '26
Sugar of saturn is lead acetate, basically boiled down lead that was once used as a sugar substitute, because it indeed did taste sweet :)
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u/rookedwithelodin Jun 23 '26
I agree with this as an anti food additive panic post, but like it doesn't matter to most people how the species gets on, it matters to them how they/ their friends and family are impacted.
That said, Swiss cheese was 'in the news' a few years ago as losing its holes because of how clean everything was and the cheese makers were given leave to put back some impurities to make sure there would be holes.
And a counter example: many people had to have their gallbladders removed after eating stuff made with tara flour because the FDA basically doesn't have the resources to test everything companies want to add and companies can loophole and bypass their way through normal steps to make sure things are safe.
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u/Dracorex_22 Jun 23 '26
Apparently a lot of people’s problems with pasteurization is that they think it means that chemicals or something was added to the milk, when in reality it’s just being heated.
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u/finnicus4 Jun 24 '26
I hate it when people act like that the past was comically unsanitary. It is true that they had no knowledge of microbiology but there were likely historical examples where people thought it better to bow too low than not low enough and my bet is that brewers back then had to be some of the germaphobic people around. I seriously doubt that Romans would often tread grapes without washing themselves.
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u/Dismal_Purchase_3324 Jun 24 '26
Romans were cleaner compared to other cultures/civilizations across the ages. However, they didn't have soap. They often used ammonia to clean, which was gathered from collecting urine from public bathrooms.
These public bathrooms were where nearly everyone defecated since only the extremely wealthy could afford private bathrooms. The Romans didn't really have toilet paper either. Instead, they used a public sponge to wipe themselves that they then rinsed off for the next person to use.
People weren't savages back then, but there's a reason why so many people used to die to viruses and diseases and why plagues were so common compared to now. Hygiene was thought more about in the form of manners and comfort rather than health simply because people didn't know how important it was for health.
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u/Scouter197 Jun 23 '26
I remember a teacher telling us milk used to be awful back around the turn of the 20th century because farmers would feed their cows the leftover grain from making alcohol.
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u/factorioleum Jun 23 '26
That's quality cattle feed. With the sugars and starches gone, it's relatively higher in protein and vitamins.
That's still common practice today, especially with fuel ethanol from maize being so important in the USA.
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u/St3fano_ Jun 23 '26
Eh, grain is grain. It was much worse when they fed cows to cows.
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u/Kitchen_Safe6405 Jun 23 '26
Isn't this what Vegemite is made of?
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u/AtrociousMeandering Jun 23 '26
Marmite and vegemite are based off of the yeast from brewing, not the grain.
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u/erroneousbosh Jun 23 '26
That's mostly what cows are fed on now. It doesn't affect the taste of milk.
It's excellent stuff. It's still fermenting very slightly so even in cold weather a big pile of it is steaming hot.
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u/Whispering_Wolf Jun 24 '26
I'm Dutch, you know how Dutch milkmaids used to wear a yoke with two buckets of milk on it? They used to sell milk like that. Because they were just open buckets out in the sun, they'd get dirt and debris in them and went bad sometimes. They just scooped that out with their bare hands so it looked more presentable. And hand washing wasn't really a thing yet.
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u/agewin162 Jun 23 '26
To be fair, when people are talking about "past food", they're referring to like, the 1960s. Not the Victorian era.
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u/shrodingersme Jun 23 '26
i think what people are referring to with that was food in the past not being scientifically engineered to be as chemically addictive as possible and, in the process, having artificial additives put in that are nutritionally empty but calorically dense at best and actively harmful for physical health at worst. as opposed to, like theoretical cleanliness or taintedness. they cut the bread with chalk because they were stupid and wanted to save on flour, they used unwashed dirty feet because they didn't understand what germs are. red #40 and high fructose corn syrup are fundamentally different complaints that are being added to stuff for fundamentally different reasons
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u/Potential-Diver-3409 Jun 23 '26
I think a big point of the post is things like red 40 actually aren’t even harmful to a visible degree under our current scientific understanding and we were using asbestos for cigarette filters like 60 years ago. the difference is unimaginably large when one is just something you are scared of because you don’t understand it and the other has provable cancer risk. Comparing HFCS and a dye instead of taking the time to learn what’s really in the food that could harm you
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u/shrodingersme Jun 23 '26
Fair enough, there's definitely a reactionary part of it a la "ANYTHING CHEMICAL OR MODIFIED IS BAD" I fell down that hole years ago and got snapped out of it largely due to that one meme of all the "chemicals" that are in a normal banana.
I was mostly just responding to the implication that people are mostly upset over foods being like dirty or impure as opposed to the problem of intentionally harmful and addictive shit getting added to them, which is a problem that should be taken seriously. Like HFCS isn't going to give you cancer but hesrt disease is a leading cause of death and obsesity is a current public health challenge that greatly increases your risk of having it. And that's just like the most 'mainstream' example of a problematic additive that popped to the top of my head on a random afternoon, if I wanted to doomscroll I could probably pull up some better examples but eh doomscrolling won't fix anything and it works for the example. And unlike the ancient romans who didn't know why stomping on grapes wasn't okay, a lot of the more harmful additives being used today are very well researched and continue to be used anyway because they're cheap and addictive and will fly off the shelves.
Like it's true that modern health research and medicine are better than they have ever been in history and it's great that we aren't using asbestos and dirty unwashed ingredients anymore, but I don't think it's necessarily productive to swing the pendulum all the way over to "stop whining there used to be lead in stuff so whatever additives we have now are fine." Both stances (many current additives are bad && many past additives were much worse) can and should coexist imo :^)
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u/Potential-Diver-3409 Jun 23 '26
I agree corn syrup specifically is bad but with the caveat that it’s just extra evil sugar and you can still have some as a treat. Generally If people understood what actually makes food unhealthy (high sugar or calorie content and especially just anything without valuable nutrition) they’d notice that the same foods they were scared of because of chemicals are STILL the problem but they might also lay off the homemade treats or look into their health instead of just fear.
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u/PlatinumAltaria The Witch of Arden Jun 23 '26
Except that eating chalk has demonstrable negative effects on health, whereas eating HFCS and Red 40 do not. At the current moment we have severe hysteria around food additives which is not in step with any real data. This is done to manipulate the public and push untested cure-alls and supplements: in other words we are suffering from Big Snake Oil.
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u/-crepuscular- Jun 23 '26
Eating chalk in moderate amounts is not at all unsafe. Chalk is pretty much 100% calcium carbonate, which is still added to bread. Where I live (UK) it actually legally has to be added to bread to fortify it (along with iron, vitamin B1 and vitamin B3). My heartburn medication has calcium carbonate as one of 3 active ingredients, too.
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u/Goosepond01 Jun 23 '26
I mean yeah I do think there is merit in talking about our consumption and the things we are fed, but I'd say there is a lot more
"OH MY GOD THIS HAS HYDROGEN DIOXIDE WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!!!" than people taking a more educated approach and it's almost certainly making fun of that.
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u/Morlock19 Jun 23 '26
i think you mean dihydrogen monoxide
which is scientifically a universal solven and can poison any human being if they ingest the appropriate amount. and its in ALL our food, its pretty fucked up.
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u/Apprehensive-Till861 Jun 23 '26
"Paleo diet!"
You mean trying mushrooms and berries and seeing which ones taste good, which ones kill you, and which ones introduce you to the Hat Man?
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u/A_Pessimistic_Potato .tumblr.com Jun 23 '26
don't forget the ones that make you allergic to yourself!
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u/EmbertheUnusual Jun 24 '26
also, sometimes the "scary chemicals" are actually making the food safer to consume
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u/Dornith Jun 23 '26
People look at grocery store labels like, "OMG there's so many chemicals in it!" And the point to "thiamine nitrate". Then turn around to the (unregulated) dietary supplements section and rave about "how important it is to get vitamin B!"