“Do you know what you’re eating?” an informed consumer asked as I approached his table with a strawberry shake in hand. “Do you know what’s in that?”

Informed consumers annoy me. They act like they have this whole formula figured out. They pretend to have some authority on this subject after reading some information on some click-bait site, and they can’t wait to share it with the world. Do they pursue primary information from some top notch health advisory board that has decades of research to back up their claims? No, they often rely on one of those “Know what you’re eating,” click-bait articles. The thing of it is, these purveyors of click-bait info then drop contradictory click-bait articles in the next two days, weeks, months, or however long it takes to make it feel fresh. “There might be some medicinal properties to coffee,” “It turns out eggs are good for you, depending on how you prepare them,” and “there is such thing as too much water.” These contradictions don’t make it into informed consumers’ presentations, however, because they don’t stimulate their need to demonize our diet.

If their sole goal in life was to attain and retain information for their diet, or if they shared it exclusively with their close friends and family, I would have no problem with them. The thing that fries my ham is that they’re not afraid to intrude on an associate’s meal. They’re not afraid to make that face when those of us they hardly know sink our teeth and gums into a greasy cheeseburgers. “I just hate to see you put that into your body,” they say to associates who associate with them.

“That’s fine,” we say, “don’t watch.”

If we were preparing to down a plain salmon sandwich with a side of sautéed yellow squash, would they applaud us? “Good, feed, feed!” Are they concerned that if we don’t change our diet, we might not make it to sixty? I don’t think they care. They barely know us. No, their interruption of our meal is a small, insignificant power play. That “How can you eat that?” is not born of concern, it’s disgust, and displaying disgust for another’s dietary choices is one of the last socially acceptable avenues for displaying disgust for our fellow man. It’s a repository for the disgust we have for all of mankind that comes billowing out on us when they see us eating a chili and cheese dog.

What happened to all of our lines? You remember those lines, those imaginary lines we erected to keep associates we hardly know from invading our privacy. Those lines defined our relationships with those around us, and we knew not to cross them to violate the unspoken tenants of those relationships. We might be genuinely concerned about the diet of a family member, and others with whom we’ve developed a substantial bond, but we should have abide by the unspoken rules that suggest we probably shouldn’t say the same things to those who casually and infrequently associate with us. Our fathers and grandfathers went to great lengths to establish those lines and teach them to us. Those lines are gone, and I for one, miss them. 

There may have been a time when we considered what informed consumers said and adjusted accordingly. We thought their lectures came from a good place, because we joined them in their concerns for our good health. We know you-are-what-you-eat, but somewhere along the line it reached a tipping point. Somewhere along the line, it felt like too much information and too much knowledge. Somewhere along the line, it felt like informed consumers stepped over the line with too much knowledge.  

Yet, we know better than to complain about too much knowledge, because we know they’ll hit us with a “What are you talking about? Too much knowledge regarding quality food, good health, and ways for us to live longer? That knowledge? I’ll take too much knowledge over too little.” Game, set, match they win. Yet, every time we leave our home, someone hits us with their knowledge, until we’re drowning in it.  

“Let’s put it this way,” my informed consumer continued. “What would you say if I asked you to tell me the difference between the strawberry flavoring in your shake and a beaver’s anal secretion?”

“I’d say I can tell the difference,” I managed to say without yawning.

“You’d think that wouldn’t you?” asked my informed consumer, “but people confuse the two every day. Those of you who enjoy eating strawberry, raspberry, and vanilla flavorings are, in essence, big fans of beaver anal secretion. It’s true. If they’re willing to pay a little more for products that use ‘natural flavorings,’ they’re probably eating a number of secretions from animals, insects, and a wide array of repulsive animal byproducts. The natural assumption is that the opposite of natural flavorings involves manmade, chemical enhancements, but does the average consumer know the true extent of the ‘natural flavorings’ in the products they purchase? Chances are, anyone who prefers natural flavoring in their strawberry shakes has actually been devouring this yellowish, mucus-colored secretion from the dried perineal glands of the beaver, in a most gratuitous manner, for years.”

The Castoreum Connection

Castoreum is the exudate from the castor sacs of the mature North American Beaver. Consumers state that they prefer this natural flavoring augment to other natural flavorings in blind, taste tests. The internet offers no details regarding whether this market-tested preference is due to the scent of the secretion, or if the flavor has been determined to be more delicious than any of the other alternatives flavorists have tried over the years. Whatever the case, the beaver doesn’t produce this exudate from its castor sacs to tweak our senses. Rather, they release this natural product as a territory marker. The procedure involved in extracting the exudate is such that the beaver doesn’t have to give up his life to provide this flavoring. Rather, enterprising young hands milk it from the castor sacs located in the beaver’s anal glands. One warning to those curious enough to pursue too much knowledge on this subject, entering the search term “milking the beaver” in a search engine may not pull up the information videos they seek.

It’s important to note that research scientists in this field, called flavorists, have developed synthetic substitutes for castoreum and almost all of the natural additives listed herein. Yet, informed consumers tell us that synthetic substitutes fall under the artificial flavorings umbrella, and artificial flavorings fall under the manmade umbrella, and that we should all consider these two terms unacceptable. When informed consumers read the words “synthetic substitute,” “chemical additive,” or “artificial flavorings,” they may make the leap to animal testing or to the unintended consequences of man messing with nature, because some anecdotal bits of information stick in our minds regarding chemical synthetics leading to cancer and other health concerns. As a result, we prefer the natural flavorings such as the beaver’s anal secretion.

Natural and Artificial Flavoring

So, what is the difference between artificial and natural flavorings? Gary Reineccus, a professor in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota, writes that finding the difference between the two requires one to look at the original source of the chemicals used.

“Natural flavorings just mean that before the source went through many chemical processes, that it came from an organic, natural source as opposed to an artificial one that has no natural origin.”

“I used to be a vegetarian,” a friend of mine told me. “I grew up on a farm, and I saw what they did to the chickens and the ducks to prepare them for our meals. I decided that I would no longer eat them. I felt bad for them. When I was a little girl, I had no idea I was eating the chickens from the pen. I never associated the chickens from the pen with the chicken I enjoyed eating. The question of why they had the same name just never occurred to me. When they explained it all to me, and I saw how they prepared all of my friends for consumption, I couldn’t eat chickens or any other meat for years.”

How much do you enjoy M&M’s and jelly beans? Informed consumers might ask us if we enjoy their shiny appearance. “How do you think they get so shiny?” they might ask with something similar to a smug smile. “Have you ever heard of shellac? Yes, the substance they/we lay on wood furniture to give it that extra, little shimmer. What’s the problem with that, though, if it passes the rigorous standards of our Food and Drug Administration (FDA).”

“Nothing,” writes Daisy Luther, for the Organic Prepper, as long as consumers know the shellac “is a resinous secretion from bugs during their mating cycles, the female lac beetle in particular. Glazed donuts and glossy candy shells owe their shininess to her secretions.”

If we listen to and abide by the informed consumers’ findings, we might not be able to eat shiny candy again, much less the strawberry Frappuccino from Starbucks.

“You’re seeking visual appeal,” informed consumers ask with a snicker. “That’s all right. We all are. What we see and smell adds to our enjoyment of flavor. Even I admit that.”

They inform us that Starbucks once had a difficult time keeping their strawberry Frappuccino a visually appealing vibrant red. The struggle for Starbucks was that most of the red flavorings they tested couldn’t offer us a delightful hue, so they turned to Natural Red #4 dye, otherwise known as carmine. This proved more successful in holding the color, but informed consumers discovered that it is actually a cochineal extract, a color additive derived from the cochina beetle’s shell. The process involves drying the insects and grinding them up to give their strawberry Frappuccino a more sustainable red flavoring. Informed consumer groups forced Starbucks to end the practice and caterwauled them into transitioning to lycopene, a pigment found in tomatoes.

As usual, all this caterwauling is much ado about nothing, as studies performed over the last sixty years by independent researchers and the FDA’s research arm conclude that while most of these additives land high on our yuck list, there are no discernible health concerns or anything life threatening about them. Our culture once laid out a perfectly acceptable joke for such matters, “If you want to enjoy sausage, do not watch how it is made.” No more. We will not abide. We substitute that joke with “Do you know what you’re drinking?” questions that informed consumers end up saying so loudly that corporations hear them and adapt.

Fish Bladders and Bitter Beer Face

“We do it for you,” informed consumer groups might say when they intimidate corporations into changing their practices. We don’t think you do. We don’t know what goes on in hearts and minds, of course, but how many of us act in such a manner to pursue purely altruistic goals. How many of us pursue goals that align with an agenda or a worldview? Some are subtle, some are not, in their calls for greater corporate social responsibility. They suggest that food producers and manufacturers are engaging in deceptive business practices because they do not list “beaver anus juice” in their ingredients, and the FDA should force them to be more transparent.

To this charge, I submit that most of these ingredients have been market tested and FDA approved, and they will bring consumers no harm. They’re gross, some of the ingredients informed consumers dredge up are so gross that they might change our opinions of said products, but that’s our choice as consumers. “Are you informed?” they ask. “Isn’t that the core issue here?”

Informed consumers might seduce us into avoiding beer, because most beer manufacturers dry swim bladders of beluga sturgeon (Isinglass) to filter sediment, but the alternative is yeast-filled beer that no consumer, informed or otherwise, would purchase. We prefer clear beer that has little-to-no sediment.

I also submit that in most areas of the food and beverage industry, profits are far slimmer than infotainment, click-bait purveyors preach. If they’re able to keep their costs down, they’re able to keep our costs down. The food and beverage industry is such a competitive industry that the need to keep costs down, and their ability pass those savings on to the consumers is often the difference between being able to sell said products and folding up shop. If an informed consumer demands more corporate responsibility, along industry lines, they should be prepared to pay more for these alternatives, because those higher costs will be passed on to consumers. Informed consumers are also fickle beings who force corporations into changing from natural flavorings to synthetic and back, nearly undermining their efforts with constant barrages from their outrage-of-the-day vault. Those of us who pay attention to such matters, long for a pushback from corporations and consumers. We long for the day when uninformed consumers will step up, en masse, and say something such as:

“I don’t enjoy hearing that my beer spends some time in a dried fish bladder. I might prefer that they find some other way to clean my favorite beer, but I’ve been drinking it and those fish bladder remnants for decades. I eat fish all the time though, and I see nothing wrong with it, and I think the idea of bullying corporations to do things another way has reached a tipping point.”

To Get Us in the Mood

Various corporations also use the beaver castoreum to cure headaches, fever, and hysteria, as it contains large amounts of salicylic acid, an active ingredient in aspirin. These anal secretions also contain around twenty-four different molecules, many of which act as natural pheromones that help us get in the mood.

Castoreum gives off a musky scent used in perfumes, much like ambergris, the solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull gray or blackish color, produced in the gastrointestinal tract of sperm whales. The whale does not have to die for ambergris extraction either. Ambergris is a bile duct secretion produced to ease the passage of hard, sharp objects the whale ingests in the sea. As such, enterprising souls often locate the ambergris floating on the surface of the ocean in whale vomit, which makes it easier to harvest and include in our favorite perfumes and colognes.

Giacomo Casanova, well-known raconteur, often sprinkled a dash of ambergris in his evening hot chocolate, in the hopes that when his lover approached its musky aroma would be permeating from his skin. If Casanova were feeling particularly insecure, while in the company of a promising damsel, he added an extra coat of it on his collar.

The theory is that our sense of smell serves a dual purpose: warning us of danger and attracting us to a prospective mate. Market research has expounded on these findings. They have it that animal materials such as civet, castoreum and musk (from cats, beaver, and deer, all located in the same region) offer a sensual fragrance, because they harbor chemical structures similar to our own sexual odors. Musk has almost identical properties to human testosterone, in other words, an enzyme that powers our sex drive.

Who Discovered It First?

The last questions that arise in discussion involving natural substitutes and additives involve their origin: “Who first discovered this, and how did they arrive at the conclusion that it could be used in the manner we now use it?”

Did someone notice that an inordinate number of women had an inordinate attraction to whalers? Did this first observer set about to try to discover why? Did whalers, after a number of successful conquests of women, realize that there was something to their success rate? Did some notice that the correlation went beyond the rugged individualism women of the era seemed to associate with whaling? Did one whaler rub some whale vomit behind his ears before he went to the tavern one night and encounter so much success that his fellow whalers followed suit? How long did it take before someone officially unlocked the alluring properties of ambergris? On that note, who was the first person to mix beaver anal juice in ice cream and decide it was such a winning proposition that they should pitch it to corporations? What did this enterprising soul say in that pitch to make it persuasive? While we’re on the topic, how did someone discover the psychedelic and psychoactive properties of the toad?

What was the trial-and-error process that led to this discovery? Did someone eat a toad and find themselves feeling a little loopy in the aftermath? Did they discover these toad venom properties after an incident, or did this enterprising individual walk around licking everything in the forest, from the trees to the various orifices of the aardvark, armadillo and the antelope, seeking a natural high that they hoped might eventually lead to fame and fortune?

We can make an educated guess that any individual who persisted in this manner probably didn’t care about money as much as they did achieving a state of mind in which they could no longer care about money.

We know the natural properties in plants and animals can provide homeopathic remedies, and these theories date back to the Native Americans, to Aristotle, and beyond. We also know that there was a great deal of trial-and-error in that research, much of it accomplished in environments that were not sterile, and they produced results were not consistent and would have a difficult time standing up to the kind of peer review such a finding would experience today. With that in mind, another question naturally arises: “How many people became ill during these trials? How many experienced short and long-term paralytic effects? How many died before they found that the 5-methoxy-N, N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), is a chemical derivative of bufotenine located in toads? This chemical, after all, is not available in all toads. It appears to be a property exclusive to the bufo alvarius. We can only guess that many people had to lick a wide variety of wild animals before they discovered the one that secretes the perfect venom for those who wish to experience the euphoric results of brain cell death.

The chemical (5-MeO-DMT) is a natural venom these toads produce to defend against attackers, and recent research indicates that the toad-licking phenomenon is dangerous, and that the hallucinogenic properties are an old wives’ tale. That research reports that human beings, whom the toad views as attackers, are susceptible to the same consequences of any attacker that runs up to lick it. The human attacker may become ill and/or paralyzed in an attempt to milk the toad in a squeezing motion or to ingest it in an oral manner. This leads to the next question, which alleged educated researcher watched their fellow researchers or test subjects fall to the ground in paralytic spasms, or to their death, and crossed out the words lick it. The researcher or the one next in line must have tried everything before they found the successful method of drying the toad and smoking it. Word then leaked that someone found the Holy Grail of brain cell-killing euphoria, and the proper use of the secretions of the Bufo alvarius soon became so ubiquitous and eventually so detrimental that Queensland, Australia, deemed toad slime as contraband, an illegal substance, the possession of which is punishable under their Drug Misuse Act?

My 

Advice to Informed Consumers

If the reader is anything like my informed consumer friend who insisted on informing me about the natural byproducts of my strawberry shake, and the reader is interested in trivial information about consumable products, that reader already knows about the number of websites that will feed the need. These websites provide tidbits and warnings about just about every product and service available to mankind, updated on a daily basis. If the informed consumer is so interested in such information that they feel an overwhelming need to share, just know that an ever-increasing segment of the population has already reached that fight-the-yawn tipping point, because most of this information proves to be little more than a conglomeration of trivial concerns, if not contradictory.

My initial fear, in publishing this particular article, was that it might contribute to what I deem a violation of social protocol, yet I offer it here under the banner “There’s no such thing as too much knowledge.” I am aware, however, that there will always be some informed consumers, like my broiled to black on too much information friend, who don’t believe that sharing such information will do any harm. I also know that the moment of sharing will arrive soon after the unsuspecting sits down to enjoy those products the informed consumer is now afraid to consume based on what they know about said product. To these people, I offer my paraphrase of one of Mark Twain’s most famous quotes: “Sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear uninformed than to open it and remove all doubt.”

The next time someone approaches your table with a strawberry shake, a bottle of beer, M&M’s, or a fried Bufo alvarius toad that they plan to consume, just swallow your bullhorn. Don’t even say something you consider relatively benign like, “Well, I wouldn’t eat it.” Just let it go, because you’re not doing it for us. You’re doing it for you. You’re doing it to solve some mysterious mess you have entangled in your innards, and the sooner you admit that the happier we’ll all be. I would also ask them if they really care about my health, “Seriously, you don’t really care, and I don’t care about your prescriptions for my greater health. The difference between the two of us is that I’m not going to pretend I do.”