6. Shredded Cheese
If you’ve ever used pre-shredded cheese as a convenience, you may have noticed that it has a distinctly different texture than cheese you shred yourself. That’s because bagged shredded cheese contains a significant amount of wood pulp.
To be fair, natural shredded cheese would absolutely clump back together during shipping if not for some sort of desiccant material. But really, it might be worth investing the time to shred some cheese fresh at home when you need it.
7. Salad Dressing
We get it, eating dry lettuce is not very appetizing. You need a little something to make it palatable. Unfortunately, most commercial salad dressings use a nanoparticle called titanium dioxide to add a pleasing white hue.
Titanium dioxide is also a chief ingredient in sunscreen and consuming too much of it has been shown to lead to stomach cancer. You don’t have to eat your salads bare, though. Salad dressing is a surprisingly easy thing to make from scratch.
8. Beer
Sometimes there’s nothing better than a tall frosty glass of beer. There are all different types and textures of beer, but the beautiful see-though amber versions are hiding a yucky secret.
As if the fermentation process isn’t gross enough when you really think about it, beer includes an ingredient called isinglass to help make the product more clear and bright. Isinglass comes from fish – it’s a type of gelatin made from dried fish bladders.
9. Vanilla Ice Cream
Made fresh and home, true ice cream contains milk, sugar, cream, eggs, and flavoring. Of course, mass-produced ice cream has got to be done differently, so grocery store ice cream may contain a stabilizer called castoreum.
No big deal, but you probably want to know that castoreum is secreted from the anal glands of beavers. Not to worry, though, this product is unsurprisingly difficult to harvest, so it is not used very widely.
10. Frozen Meals
Frozen meals are a handy go-to if you’re in a hurry but need a little fuel. They come in a huge variety of meals, both with side dishes and without. Some even contain desserts.
However, these meals are often chock full of salt and artificial preservatives designed to make the food edible when it finally comes out of deep freeze. By the time you heat and eat your meal, it has likely been frozen for several years, and it never looks anything like the picture on the box.
11. Jello and Marshmallows
Jello and marshmallows are both products made using gelatin (and a lot of sugar). Plain gelatin seems like an innocent translucent powder, but it is made by boiling down the skin, bones, and hooves of cows and pigs.
All sorts of scrap from slaughtered animals can be used, so once you get over the yuck factor, it is kind of good that very little is wasted of animals who give their lives for ours.
Conclusion
We warned you! If you ever feel like eating again, you’ll probably steer clear of these ten things.
Even though some of the grossest sounding items are perfectly fine to eat, humans have a kind of gut check revulsion that makes it really hard to knowingly drink a powdered fish bladder or happily slurp beaver anal juice from a cone. At least the more beer you drink, the less you’ll be concerned about what’s in it.