Huge product recall: What is HVP?
My husband went to the grocery store last night to return a box of appetizers he had purchased. It seems they were on the huge list of products (thousands) recently recalled by the Food and Drug Administration because of possible salmonella contamination. The salmonella is feared to be in an ingredient called Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (otherwise known as HVP or acid-HVP).
As of Monday, no illnesses had been reported in connection with this recall, but the FDA is still urging people to not eat any of the recalled products to be on the safe side. To see a list of affected products, click here to view the FDA list.
Here’s what I want to know: What is HVP and why are we eating something that sounds like an STD? I went searching for a definition, which wasn’t easy to find at a reliable source. I did locate a transcript of a conference call between FDA officials and the media, but the only description of HVP in the call was:
“This hydrolyzed vegetable protein ingredient is a widely used flavor enhancer in the food industry used in items such as soups, cheese, sauces, hot dogs, frozen dinners, snack foods, dips, and dressings and so forth.”
Hmmm. OK, but WHAT IS IT? The Wikipedia definition was icky, but I don’t trust Wikipedia. Finally, after reading a half-dozen articles in publications like the Chicago Tribune and the L.A. Times that didn’t really tell me how HVP is made, I noted that a Canadian reporter had called a scientist and basically confirmed the Wikipedia definition. Here’s an excerpt from her story in the Montreal Gazette:
BEGIN EXCERPT: Additive manufacturers including Basic Food Flavors, Inc., the Nevada-based company at the centre of the HVP recall, start out with vegetable scraps or soy extracts.
They are boiled in hydrochloric acid, then neutralized with sodium hydroxide. The acid breaks down the protein into amino acids, one of which is glutamic acid, more commonly known in the form of its sodium salt, monosodium glutamate or MSG.
HVP contains all the amino acids making up the protein, but glutamic acid is the effective flavour enhancer, said Keith Warriner, food science professor at the University of Guelph.
“What used to be used is just pure glutamic acid, usually called monosodium glutamate, because that’s what gives products that sort of meaty flavour. But it’s a bit expensive to produce.”
Warriner chalked up the emergence of HVP as the go-to flavour enhancer in food processing to the drive to keep food costs down while delivering intensively flavoured items. END EXCERPT
So, call me paranoid, but it sounds like HVP is a sneaky way for companies to put MSG in their products without having to list it on the label. And when I read the conference call transcript, it indicated that the salmonella was found in the vegetable products BEFORE they were boiled in hydrochloric acid. That ought to make us all feel better.
March 16, 2010 - 10:59 AM
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Nice. I burned a hole in my college chemistry notebook with hydrochloric acid and I’ve used it to balance the pH of a bleach solution so I wouldn’t corrode stainless steel. Sodium hydroxide makes your skin feel slimy if you handle it because of the protein breakdown. Good to know I may be eating the chemicals I used to play with in the lab. Just goes to show that unless you grow it yourself you have no idea what you’re eating.
Pretty crazy stuff! What I thought was cool was that Kroger actually called my home and left us a message stating that they believed we had purchased items on recall and proceeded to name the items with serial numbers and all. It turned out we actually had one of the dips (half-eaten)and we tossed it out…score 1 for Kroger!
Keep in mind that natural products like soy sauce contain the same mix of free amino acids and sodium. The only difference is that the soy sauce brewing process uses other methods to break down the protein.
The main difference between HVP and pure MSG is that HVP preserves the balance of amino acids present in the original proteins. One hypothesis regarding MSG sensitivity is that it’s the imbalance created by all that pure, isolated glutamine that causes the symptoms.
I’m glad I’ve been making my own broth for soups, and salad dressing. If you have mayo, buttermilk,onion powder and garlic powder you can make your own ranch dressing. I’ve been trying not to buy much processed food lately. Seems like an even better idea now.
We try to scratch make most of what we eat. There’s too many processed & boxed foods that contain wheat, wheat protein, milk protein, generic ‘herbs’ or ‘spices’ or ‘flavors’, oregano, cinnamon, or something else we can’t have. The generic herb/spice/flavor label can be used to hide a lot of ingredients without iodentifiying them, and since my wife has several herb/spice allergies…we just avoid them altogether, which pretty much eliminates about 60% of the grocery store, or more.
We also try to avoid HFCS, and since we can’t eat wheat, we actually eliminated most of it anyway since it’s added to cakes, breads, crackers, cookies, and pretty much most of any bread or bread-like product as the sweetener rather than sugar or honey. I’ve long felt that food ingredients that you can’t easily pronounce are probably not good for eating, and instances such as this do nothing to dispell my feelings.
Kroger also left a message on my machine but it was over the time limit so most of it was cut off. We had already eaten the dip over a week earlier and my husband had suffered stomach problems for several days afterward. Probably unrelated but we don’t really have any way to tell after the fact.
Would be REALLY scary if salmonella survived being boiled in hydrochloric acid and doused with lye (sodium hydroxide).
HVP/Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein, “autolyzed yeast extract,” modified food proteins: these and many more are names for the same thing: Monosodium Glutamate/MSG.
So how do the food processors get away with putting “No MSG Added!” on the label and then have HVP or autolyzed yeast extract in the ingredients? Seems like something illegal, right?
No, perfectly legal. The disclaimer is in the word “added.”
And the information is all in the words, like “autolyzed yeast extract.”
What the manufacturers are counting on is that the USA education system has failed, (it has), and you, the consumer, have been indoctrinated, not educated, (you are.)
If you had a real education you would be able to dissect the words and see what actually is being said:
Autolyzed = destroyed
Yeast = culture
Extract = the product they take out of the yeast culture after they destroy it.
Now did you think; “what can possibly be grown in yeast and why put it in things like, (one example), soup?”
Answer: MSG.
MSG is no longer exclusively extracted from sugar beets: although some still is and is parent of HVP, but most is made by GMO bacteria (they call it yeast because they legally can) in giant vats and then they grind up the entire vat, organisms and all (autolyzed) and chemically extract the MSG (extract!)
So: they are counting on the consumer never, ever questioning this or at the most questioning it at the store but then forgetting it by the time they are near a computer & the internet.
And they are right.
Btw: the headache you get from MSG is a result of brain cells being over-stimulated by the glutamate which your body needs but needs it in tiny tiny amounts. The brain chemical responses, firing over and over again thanks to the MSG, burn out, die, and that’s where the headaches come from.
And the next day, you have allot less brain cells and even less chance you will figure out what the “code” on the labels means.
Parmesan, tomatoes, mother’s milk and mushrooms are all high in naturally occuring MSG. Same people who avoid “chinese” food will hit the all-you-can-eat spaghetti nights at the local eatery while breast feeding their babies. Just saying.
Mark and chickpeas are absolutely right. Still, I try to avoid foods with ingredients like HVP…not because they’re unhealthy, but because they’re usually used to disguise mediocre food!
I read this blog off and on and I have to say I rarely care for the recipes (sorry), but this is one topic near and dear to me (food safety).
DrLasker hit the nail on the head in breaking down what this coded substance is and he even threw in my favorite word(to hate): GMO!
It would be sweet if this blog would go more into the food politics in this region with all the obesity and fast food joints in town. GMO’s all over your plates and people dont know or dont care. But we have organic and pasture based farms within a 45 min drive that are so underutilized.
Lindsey, Id love to see your blog go non-GMO for your next 10 posts. You’d put that blasted canola (rapeseed) oil down in a heartbeat.
For eye opening news about the state of our food I highly recommend 2 websites; organic consumers.org and responsible technology.org (no space between words!). I agree with nll that people don’t know or don’t care but I’ll add -don’t want to know. Because if you know you should do something about it like change your mindset or eating habits and allot of people just don’t want to. It’s the old saying Ignorance is Bliss. But if you care, visit those websites.
Well, let’s talk a bit about what would be necessary in order to make one’s diet GMO-free.
For starters, you would have to avoid any corn, soy, canola, cottonseed or sugar beet-based product that does not specify “organic” on the label. Safer would be to buy nothing BUT organic products. Also, check food labels for “contains GMOs.” Oh, WAIT, I don’t think they are required to say that, so it’d be a little difficult to know for sure!
When you buy produce from local farmers, you could ask them if they used heirloom seeds. Or you could just grow all of your own food and can or cellar it every summer so it would hold you over the winter.
How easy is this sounding? Unfortunately, not very easy and not very affordable for people who can barely afford to buy food to eat as it is.
I’m not saying it isn’t worth doing– it absolutely is worth trying anything within reason. And big changes have been spurred in the past by a small number of people starting a wave.
Nll, maybe you could share a recipe of which you approve that is GMO-free to get the ball rolling? Deborah, thanks for the Web addresses. This in particular is a good page: http://www.organicconsumers.org/gelink.cfm
Maybe I’m not fully in the know on this, but theoretically, wouldn’t any crop be some form of a GMO, even some organics, if they had ever been cross-bred or manipulated through pollination or other ‘natural’ methods that gardeners and researchers use…even if actual DNA-level geneitc manipulations in the lab were not performed?
OJ, it is my understanding that there are basically three types of vegetable seed: heirloom, hybrid and genetically modified. Here is an excerpt from a story I did a while back about heirloom tomatoes. I quoted Dr. Richard Lasker, who left the lengthy blog comment on this entry. I will ask Dr. Lasker if he can respond to your question more in depth, because he knows his stuff and I only know a sliver of the stuff
“Many [tomato varieties] are referred to as “heirloom” tomatoes, but those that are not heirloom are not necessarily of a lower quality. As researcher and grower Richard Lasker of Bent Mountain points out, the word just means “old.”
Some tomato varieties have been around for 100 years and some have been around for 10,000 years, Lasker said.
Another oft-heard term is “hybrid,” which simply means that one tomato has been crossed with another — not a bad thing until they have been cross-bred so many times that they lose their original qualities.
Genetically modified vegetables are what most foodies have begun to avoid. That’s what happens when scientists start messing with DNA to create a whole new, laboratory-engineered product.”
You can view the whole story here, but it otherwise just talks about specific heirloom tomato varieties: http://www.roanoke.com/columnists/nair/wb/172506
Lindsey, thanks for the clarification and additional information. THat makes sense to me. I remember something similar with golf course turfgrass research. They engineered a Bermuda grass that was resistent to Round-Up, which at first sounds like a great idea to create a weed-free golf turf, because you can spray the herbicide on the turf when it’s growing and only kill the non-Bermuda turf as a result, whereas the only thing you could do before was wait for the Bermuda to go dormant in winter and then kill anything that was still there. But, this has proved problematic because now there’s not much that can kill this strain of turfgrass, and since it creeps and spreads naturally through its risomes, it makes it harder to contain and control once it starts spreading to where you don’t want it.
Have you seen “Food, Inc.”? PBS is going to start airing it April 21.
I haven’t, but that would be quite interesting.
As a side note, a few years back chef Jamie Oliver did a short series on food in schools in Britain and how bad it was and how much the kids were negatively impacted by it. I think it was title the School Lunch Project or something similar. It appears that a US version is getting ready to air this spring (I think) but the name escapes me. I saw a preview a short while ago, but also forget the channel it’s supposed to air on. When we watched the UK version, I wondered how long it would be before he hopped across the pond to our side of the Atlantic for something similar.
GMO: 3 little letters: sooo much confusion, so many words, (for and against), and reams of information and misinformation.
You read recently that Bill Gates is touting how GMOs will feed the poor in Africa and in the next story its Frankenfoods. Briefly:
GMO means artificial manipulation of the genes of some organism, can be a plant, bacteria, virus, or whatever. It is used to signify a gene manipulation that would not occur naturally in nature. For example: to make a soybean resistant to a particular herbicide scientists crossed it with a plant that had developed resistance to that very same herbicide. Sounds ok, right? 2 plants coming together for the good of all mankind. (FYI: the term “shotgun genetics” referred to the use of a bullet shell being used to “shoot” the plant material from one plant to another and then tissue culture was used to produce plants from that mess which is how it was done years ago.)
First problem: you do not eat that other plant. In fact some are deadly dangerous. So a cross between a soybean and other plants produces some compounds in the soybean plant that are not for human consumption, not scientifically known compounds, some unrecognized, some undiscovered but the chemical composition is different than the non-GMO version of that same soybean. (Aside: in an effort to “hide” this, it is rare today to find the non-GMO versions of any of these varieties available for sale; most seed producers no longer offer them. They say it is because no one wants them. We say its to keep the comparisons impossible to make.)
Tiny minute amounts of those “weird” chemicals in the GMO soybean do not kill you on the spot. But what happens when you put soybeans, in one form or another, into virtually every food, (modified proteins), you consume and instead of a tiny amount, you are now consuming significant amounts? No one did that research prior to the FDA release of the GMO variety because back then, 15-20 years ago, soybeans went into animal feeds, not directly into humans. 20 years later: uh-oh.
Now 20 years later, (and 1000 GMO changes later), soybeans are a quagmire of herbicides and genes that humans would never ever have consumed.
Finally, the growers unfortunately don’t always follow the rules when it comes to the timing of herbicide applications and where the original samples analyzed for FDA approval were sprayed by scientists, exactly as their research indicated the soybean should be sprayed for minimal herbicide residue, today’s soybeans are sprayed by field-workers most of whom can’t read the herbicide label. As much as the professional grower associations argue that mis-use of chemicals is not “cost effective” and therefore growers do not do it; analyzing of random soybean samples proves us correct: extremely high levels of herbicide residues, many of which are also found in the processed foods.
And that is just soybeans. There’s GMO corn, vegetables, bacteria, yeasts and more coming everyday. In fact, China’s government mandated food production policy officially embraced the GMO a few years ago as totally acceptable, in any plant, and many varieties of GMO grains, fruits and vegetables not allowed in USA field production are coming to us via China and a “don’t ask, don’t tell” trade policy we have with them. No one in the USA is testing.
So: GMO; friend or foe? My opinion: foe.
Lindsay,
Any recipe can be adapted to be GMO free. There is a shopping guide here http://www.nongmoshoppingguide.com/SG/Home/index.cfm
Basically, if you can cook without soy, corn, rice, cotton or wheat and their derivatives you can be majority gmo-free, cut out sugars and your a god. This is not difficult to do considering it leaves meat, most veggies and fruit and animal fat or nut oils/olive oil and buckwheat and real maple syrup (if you want pancakes). You’re not seriously saying that this is difficult or expensive. My food bills are the same as they were when I bought processed food stuffs and now I have a half cow stored and fresh veggies, nut butters, tallow, etc…much more nutritious too.
Im not trying to give you a hard time and I believe a good chunk of your readers are hip and are aware but lets be progressive here in Roanoke when it comes to our food, cuz we all love us some food but we should be particular, we should care about the food we eat.
Since your the Fridge Magnet, Im asking you to create a dish from scratch or recipe and avoid GMO’s. Ive given you the shopping guide and Ill keep checking back to see what you came up with, I know you can do it.
Thank you for the wonderful resource, nll. I hope anyone who is interested in avoiding foods that contain genetically modified organisms will peruse it heavily.
Re: Caring about the food we eat. I’ve written up one side and down the other about local farmers, farmers markets, particular products, and the struggles farmers face, along with offering all kinds of ideas for consumers who want to buy conscientiously produced foods for a number of reasons. We’ve talked the importance of heirloom vegetables, inspection requirements for local meat, meeting the needs of special diets, whether different soy products are healthy for women, the dangers of high fructose corn syrup, growing your own gardens, and I could go on – and I will as I keep covering those stories.
I think the GMO topic is a great one, and that’s why I continue to follow this thread with great interest (hope others do, too). But I am also careful to write for the many different types of people who read this blog and my column, and I’m saying not everyone wants to read 10 non-GMO posts in a row. I’ll give you one, though, when I get back to you with the one non-GMO creation you challenged me to.
Ill keep tabs on ya