On 21 Aug 2003 10:11:40 GMT, (bogus address)
posted:


A question that's long been in the back of my mind: I understand
sodium benzoate and methyl benzoate are (or were) used as mould
retardants in bread, but are now banned, at least in NZ, if not
more widely.
What is the perceived harm here, and is it greater than the potential
ill-effects of eating mouldy bread?

Moulds that grow on wheat aren't generally very toxic. Benzoate has
next to no toxicity, but a pretty high allergenicity risk. The main
reason for the preservative is that customers won't buy mouldy bread
rather than because it might harm them if they did.

As other people have pointed out, bread is also a problem for people
with some common food intolerances. If you have an allergy to benzoate,
your diet will already be somewhat restricted and having such a common
food as bread ruled out will be seriously inconvenient. Conversely, if
you don't have a problem with benzoate but do have one with wheat, the
fact that wheat is increasingly being added to the most bizarre things
(*potato crisps*, for crying out loud) makes for restrictions you
wouldn't have had to make five years ago. Increasingly, what capitalist
food processing leads to is feeding people on what amounts to pigswill
in gratuitously variable physical forms - every meal contains traces of
almost every category of basic foodstuffs. For people with serious
food intolerances this makes life far more difficult than it would be
under more traditional and physiologically rational systems of production.
(GM is just taking this one stage further, breeding food organisms to
*be* pigswill in their protein makeup).


Can you give some examples of foods that cause troubles, and are
essential to eat?

Potato crisps are not what I would regard as sound nutrition.