fear mongering by “eco” will not be tolerated!

Pavlina — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:11:44 +0000

This make me so mad!!!

The page at Super Eco is naked fear mongering. I lurk at Super Eco mostly to see the other side and know thy enemy. Not like I am all for the raping of the environment and eating plastic, but I realize in a modern society a balance must be sought. I am a chemist and I fully believe in “better living through Chemistry.” I don’t need to present a dissertation of how and why chemistry has helped out humanity, but please realize you would not be reading this blog right now without Chemistry!

If you visit the link above, you will read the offending post and you can also read my comment (response). The Eco-nazis need to decide which is worse, the artificial additives or the “natural” additives. I have some good friends that are natural products organic chemists, and they will tell you that sometimes, “artificial” is better than “natural”.

Post from: Pavlina: Life is Not For the Living

fear mongering by “eco” will not be tolerated!

Food colors

Pavlina — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:23:22 +0000

I was “flipping” through the latest issue of Chemical and Engineering News, known as C&E news. This is the weekly publication of the American Chemical Society, of which I have been a member of since I decided on Chemistry as a major back in the 90s. For many, many years I received C&E news as a small periodical, mailed out to me. As of a few months ago, I went digital and now I browse the pages in a reader that I can get to using a link in an email they send me or by logging onto my account at the ACS website. At first, I found this method of reading C&E news cumbersome. I was “chained” to my screen and I couldn’t take it into lab and look through it while I collected data. I now much prefer the digital edition. I’ll take a photo sometime of the box in my cubicle where I store about 4 years of C&E news sometime and post it. It is full and I could not stuff another volume in it. I much prefer this digital way of receiving this information, and I rather look forward to getting the new edition and having a look. For the past year or so I was getting many of the stories in my reader from the RSS feed so I found that I had read may of the articles before the paper edition ever arrived. Now I find the digital edition and the RSS feed are pretty much synced.

Oops, there I go rambling away again. I’ll have to put a post out about concise writing. It’s a learned skill. The point of this post was food colors, and not my new love of the digital format.

Let’s talk food colors. They are all around us. I got a bag of specialty potatoes and it it were yellow, pink and purple potatoes. Purple! They taste like regular potatoes, but my family looked at them oddly. Martin refused them outright, Jason ate them but he was not happy and Emma loved them. They didn’t bother me one bit. Jason claims they can’t be natural, and I did a small Google search and found they grow in Hawaii, but don’t hold me to that. I also read an article about food safety and it mentioned that Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) was such a hot commodity nowadays that some irreputable Italian distributors were taking low grade olive oil and adding Chlorophyll to it to give it the green color. If you read the below article, taken from my beloved C&E News, you’ll learn that chlorophyll is not food safe for the US, but is for Europe.

I found the article to be very illuminating and while there is a bot of chemical terminology there, I think you’ll find it understandable for the most part. Now you’ll know exactly what the powdered beet powder in your favorite food is doing there.

December 15, 2008

Post from: Pavlina: Life is Not For the Living

Food colors

Pavlina: Life is Not For the Living » chemistry food

fear mongering by “eco” will not be tolerated!

Food colors