Originally Posted by
BamaVol
In general, I like things natural. Sometimes natural flavors are prohibitively expensive or won't work in a product and there are good substitutes.
Not sure I agree. If the natural flavouring is "too expensive" then you are trying to make a mass market product out of something that shouldn't be.
Most of these artificial flavours would be a lot less appealing if people understood that they are just cheap chemicals, only inserted in your food to make more profit for a company that actually cares nothing about food or their customer.
Vanilla beans are "too expensive"? Well maybe everything doesnt need to be flavoured with it - which, its seems is the way it is, eing probably the most common flavouring in the western world.
So what about this artifiical vanilla flavour? Here is an extract from Wikipedia on how artifical vanillin is made:
Vanillin was commercially produced from eugenol until the 1920s.[22] Later, it was synthesized from lignin-containing "brown liquor", a byproduct of the sulfite process for making wood pulp.[23] Counter-intuitively, even though it uses waste materials, the lignin process is no longer popular because of environmental concerns. today most vanillin is produced from the petrochemical raw material guaiacol.[24] Several routes exist for synthesizing vanillin from guaiacol.[25] At present, the most significant of these is the two-step process practiced by Rhodia since the 1970s, in which guaiacol reacts with glyoxylic acid by electrophilic aromatic substitution. The resulting vanilmandelic acid is then converted to vanillin by oxidative decarboxylation.[26] In October 2007 Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan won an Ig Nobel prize for developing a way to extract vanillin from cow dung.
If it wasnt bad enough that your cheap food flavouring was coming from fermented logging waste, they moved it to your local Exxon refinery - even cheaper! And next, it will now come from cow doo doo.
Mmmm mmmm - that sure sounds yummy doesn't it? Thanks, but I'll stick to my routine of avoiding artificial flavours at all costs.