This company also owns the leading maker of various chicken broths and stocks. Until recently, that subsidiary spiked its tasteless products with monosodium glutamate (MSG), a flavor enhancer. But MSG is well documented as a cause of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.
I'm not joking. Every Chinese restaurant used to boost the flavor of its meals by adding MSG. But a fair number of customers complained of neck and muscle aches afterwards, the result of MSG. So now, a lot of Chinese restaurants don't use MSG anymore.
But I digress.
The company recently introduced organic chicken, beef, and vegetable broths. Sounds like a great idea, right?
Well, the company's website admits that the broths contain 550 mg of sodium for each one-cup serving. If you like to use a lot of broth, that could add up to 1,100 mg of sodium per real-world serving. And maybe one blood-pressure cuff.
But nowhere on the company's website is a full listing of the products' other ingredients found. This is more than just peculiar, because all of the junk food and fast food companies you can think of list their product ingredients on their websites.
So that left me wondering what the soup and broth company might be hiding.
So I clicked to contact customer service and wrote a brief email asking for a complete list of ingredients for their organic products. Sounds simple enough, right?
A few days later, some anonymous person emailed me back:
"All of our products have nutritional labels that include the calorie, sodium, fat, cholesterol and carbohydrate content for a single serving. However, it is important to note that product recipes change frequently and ingredients are periodically added or replaced. Therefore, we suggest that you check each package for the most current nutritional information..."So I wrote back and said that they had NOT answered my question. And I also wondered, adding a list of full ingredients to the website can't be all that difficult, could it? After all, it's got to be easier to update a web page compared with...say, reformulating the ingredients in an industrial-size soup and broth manufacturing facility.
Finally I went to both my local supermarket and health food store, but did not find any of the company's organic broths on the shelf. So their ingredients remain a mystery to me.
After all this, I can't help but wonder: Why couldn't the world's biggest soup company just be more up front about its ingredients and list them on its website?
Unless, they really want to hide what's in them, that is.
With our current global market, no one can be sure what they are eating is truly safe or even if the ingredients are correct. Numerous DNA test have been performed on packaged fish products and the results were startling. The test revealed many of the fish products contained a different species than specified and in some cases endangered species of fish. It's no wonder the health of the public is in decline with all the harmful chemicals, hormones and drugs in our food supply. If you really want to be sure what you are eating is safe, grow it yourself...