The Enemy, Part One: Naturally Deceiving

This is a 22 fl oz. bottle of evil and lies. I am going to post a picture of it here, and then I am going to go take a scalding hot shower.

Pinnacle Foods Group LLC, distributors of the Log Cabin brand and the manufacturers of this abomination, do not make real maple syrup. They make a maple flavored (and I will debate that claim later) table syrup by combining commodity food ingredients.

For now, I just want to take a look at what’s in this bottle, and how those ingredients stand up to the claims.

This syrup is made from rice? What is this, Budweiser?

The bottle claims “All Natural. No artificial flavors or colors. No high fructose corn syrup or preservatives.” Let’s look at that.

• Xantham Gum – sugars, likely derived from corn, fermented by a bacteria, precipitated using isopropyl alcohol (poison, by the way), dried, and then reconstituted. Not natural. Certainly artificial.
• Natural Flavor – Flavor of what, exactly? Rancid meat is a natural flavor.
• Caramel Color – The caramel color in pure maple syrup comes from the actual caramelization of the sugars in the maple sap during boiling. That’s a natural color. The caramel color in this syrup is an additive, derived from the heat treatment of sugars, usually glucose or fructose. If you have to add a color, isn’t that unnatural?
• Citric Acid – a preservative.
• Syrup – since the first ingredient of this ingredient is brown rice, it’s a good guess that this is brown rice syrup. It may not be HFCS, but the maltose in it will hit your blood stream even faster. It’s not nearly as sweet as high fructose corn syrup, though.  Hence the addition of more…
• Sugar – but what kind of sugar? Apparently they don’t have to say. It could be the fructose you thought you were avoiding.
• Maple – So, if this product already has two different kinds of sugar, caramel color and a natural flavoring… why does it even need to contain maple?

Their claims look pretty thin, right down to the claim of  ”all natural”.  I can remember when the word organic was just an adjective. Now, it’s a label – a very expensive and strictly defined and controlled label.  Natural is today what organic was back then. The FDA currently has no definition for the term “natural”. So just keep this in mind: since natural isn’t what the FDA says it is, it can conceivably be anything that Log Cabin says it is. They don’t say it because it’s true. They say it because they can.

Do you want to know what goes into the pure maple syrup I sell? Come down when we’re boiling and I’ll will actually show you. Want to know what goes into Log Cabin’s All Natural Syrup? Stop by a Pinnacle Foods facility some time and find out if they’re as accomodating, or forthcoming.

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