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Guide to Food Ingredients

INTRODUCTION

This dictionary is excerpted from a longer Vegetarian Resource Group project. The major objective of this version is to provide readers with a quick guide to the sources of common food and beverage ingredients. We will also be producing a more technical guide with further information about each ingredient.

Classification of Commercial Ingredients

At the end of each of the following definitions, a classification of the ingredient appears. Vegetarian means that the ingredient does not contain products derived from meat, fish, or fowl. It may include sources from dairy. Insect secretions, such as honey, are also classified as vegetarian. Vegan means that this item contains no animal products what­soever. Non-vegetarian means that the ingredient (or the substance used to process the ingredient) is derived from meat, fish, or fowl. Or, non-vegetarian can apply to substances, such as proteins or amino acids, derived from animals (including insects), when the collection of those substances necessitated the intentional death of that animal.

In some cases, a few manufacturers told us that they use vegetarian sources. However, we cannot say with certainty that all manufacturers of a given ingredient produce that ingredient in the same way. This, we have classified these ingredients as typically vegetarian, typically vegan, typically non-vegetar­ian, or may be non-vegetarian. The classification depends on the degree to which we may conclude from manufacturers` information that a given ingredient may be vegetarian or vegan. Note that a vegetarian or vegan ingredient may have been tested on animals.

Commercial Source

Although an ingredient may be available from several sources, we wanted to determine the ingredient source which manufacturers typically use. That is, we wanted to know the commercial source of ingredients.

This information was obtained by contacting hundreds of chemical companies. This guide`s dis­tinguishing characteristic is its listing of the commercial sources of ingredients. Note that food and beverage companies (such as Nabisco, Inc. or the Campbell Soup Co.) purchase their ingredients from large manufacturers who may be less known by the public.

In writing the entries, it was sometimes tedious to classify the source of an ingredient. This was the case for ingredients which contain multiple parts, each one from a different source. The common preserv­ative, sodium benzoate, for example, contains mineral and synthetic components. Thus, its commercial source is listed as mineral-synthetic.

Sometimes ingredients may be easy to classify yet their processing aids (substances used during the commercial processing of the ingredients) may not be. Often the processing aids are of different origins. Each manufacturer may use a different processing aid to perform the same function. An example is the processing of table sugar derived from sugar cane. Although the substance itself is of vegetable origin, the sugar may have been decolorized through a cow bone filter. The consumer has no way to know about processing aids when manufacturers decline to provide information about company-owned methods of production.

The word "synthetic" has a specific meaning in this dictionary. This word refers to something which has been created in the laboratory by a chemical process. There may be animal, vegetable, or mineral (i.e., substances derived from the earth) components involved in the synthesis. Note that many synthetic ingredients have petrochemicals at their base Since petroleum consists of decayed plant and animal matter, technically, then, these synthetic substances should be classified as being of plant and animal origin. Here they will be referred to simply as `synthetic." They will be categorized as vegan."

Background

In trying to discover the major commercial ways by which food ingredients are currently manufactured, we contacted hundreds of chemical manufacturers and suppliers by phone and letter. Sometimes, technical service or sales representatives were extremely helpful in providing us with information. Unfortunately, this was not always the case. As a result, some definitions are not as precise as others. The lack of precision occurs especially in the case of amino acids and vitamins.

We found that many technical service represent­atives did not know about the sources of the raw materials which were used to make their products. Or, the representatives were unwilling to disclose company-owned information. Thus, we remain partially uninformed about many things related to common food ingredients.

We have made efforts to search out information regarding manufacturing processes. We suspect that there are several cases where "hidden ingredients" are employed. Because these substances are usually removed from the final product, remain in minute amounts, or are rendered "inactive" by some chemical or physical process, federal regulations do not require that the manufacturer includes it as an "ingredient." One notable example is the use of enzymes of any source. Federal regulations permit the unlabelled use of enzymes as long as the enzymes are present in a deactivated form in the final product. These and similar