I want cheese with a taste of cheese and good chocolate... Well, or at least sausages... A modern person will understand me, since half of the products on our counters are fake.
Who, how and why is counterfeiting our food? Let's figure it out in more detail.
Milk without cows, sausages without meat, and honey that has never been met by bees. Finding out how to recognize a food fake and avoid buying it.
Milk products
Most often, high-fat dairy products are counterfeited. The most common is replacing milk fat with vegetable fat (palm, coconut, etc.) oil). So, there is a spread for butter in beautiful packs for a long time.
Dry milk can be added to this list, instead of natural milk. And starch so that sour cream or cottage cheese is thicker. By the way, farm milk from a familiar milkmaid seems to be from her own cow, too, is not an option for naturalness. When milk starts to deteriorate, it is reanimated by adding baking soda.
Why is this dangerous for our health? Soda or milk powder is not very harmful. But if you use milk with antibiotics, the body will get used to them and, if necessary, their treatment will not be effective. And yet, improperly prepared vegetable fats that replace milk fat contain trans fats. The very ones that destroy our blood vessels and heart.
Chocolate
A quarter of all the chocolate on our shelves is an unnatural product. This is confectionery or, more simply, a bar with the taste of something like chocolate. They contain cocoa butter equivalents such as palm kernel, coconut, and confectionery fats.
Such chocolate does not make you feel bad. But an attack of allergies or exacerbation with digestion may occur.
Honey
There are many ways to make honey without bees. However, most often there are only four methods of honey falsification.
The first is chemical. This is when flavoring and aromatic substances similar to honey are added to molasses. Sometimes this information is indicated by the manufacturer on the packaging, albeit in small letters.
The second method is popularly known as "bodyaga". Craftsmen take some natural honey and heat it up to 70 degrees. Then diluted with sugar syrup and... boil. Natural honey cannot be heated, it loses all its beneficial properties. And here it was not only boiled, but also diluted with syrup. One word is badyaga.
The third is unripe honey. Sometimes beekeepers are in a hurry to recover expenses and make a profit, as a result, they put on sale early pumped out nectar, in which there is a lot of water. Such honey is not quite similar to real, mature honey. It does not store well and can ferment.
And finally, the fourth way to counterfeit honey is sugar. There is already a whole science and almost laboratory conditions will be needed. Since the output is a mixture similar to honey. It is made by acidic hydrolysis of cane sugar with citric or other acid.
Is fake honey dangerous? No, you won't get sick with it, and even allergies may not happen. But here's the money down the drain, here it is definitely a shame. Honey is expensive. And if it's also fake?
Bread
And it is also faked!
Manufacturers of "fancy" bread are most often engaged in deception. For example, yeast-free yeast actually contains ordinary cheap yeast, but gluten-free yeast is found... gluten.
In mini-bakeries and in bakery departments of supermarkets, bread is baked from ready-made mixtures, where fermentation accelerators are used. Here they are just very harmful to the human digestive tract. Surely you have already noticed that after a delicious loaf with a crispy crust, your stomach suddenly hurts or even a digestive upset happens. These are all those accelerators.
Such bread does not give a person the required amount of gluten (protein), for which bread is eaten.
In addition, there are studies that a number of flour improvers used to make buns contain calcium salt, which causes headaches and high blood pressure attacks.
Meat products
Well, in fake sausages and sausages, we have been aware of everything since the times of the USSR. Remember the stories about toilet paper-flavored sausages and semolina sausages?
Now, it seems, with meat we have better, which means that sausages still have it. However, even here they manage to forge.
The most popular method of falsifying sausages is replacing one type of meat with another, cheaper one. For example, we have long ceased to read the compositions on the sausage, and after all, instead of the declared beef or pork, the manufacturer most likely uses chicken.
Alas, instead of animal protein, soybeans can also be used. Do not even hesitate to replace spices with chemicals with flavors of nutmeg or coriander.
Why is such a sausage dangerous? Firstly, we pay for meat, we get, at best, skin, cartilage with soy and a set of chemical table. Secondly, it is worth not eating such products out of harm's way. So much chemistry in one piece already sounds scary.
So why not eat sausage at all? Why?! Of course, you can indulge in sausage. Sometimes.
And in order to surely eat meat sausages, you should opt for dry-cured or uncooked smoked sausages. Yes, it's expensive. But, uncooked smoked and dry-cured sausages are rarely counterfeited. It is very difficult to falsify it. The experts checked.
Take note!
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This material belongs to the author of the "Culinary Notes on Everything" channel, that is, to me, and it was previously published by me personally in my blog channel on the platform Pulse.
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