Frankenfood Friday:: Sodium Tripolyphosphate

This is our first official Frankenfood Friday! Each Friday, I will pick a complex, weird-sounding/unnatural food additive and explain what it is and where it comes from. This week’s topic will be Sodium Tripolyphosphate, also known as STPP. I found this particular ingredient when I was looking at ingredients list of one of my favorite foods, Macaroni and Cheese; the one with the packet of powdered cheese instead of the pouch of cheese goop. If you didn't notice if before, it's at the very bottom of the list. (They snuck it in there!) 

According to chemical vendor CCNT, Sodium Tripolyphosphate is “one of the main auxiliaries for synthetic detergent, synergist for soap; water softener, tanning agent for leather making, auxiliary for dyeing.” The last sentence of the description of uses mentions food applications, and is exceptionally brief, saying that STPP is used in processed foods as a “quality preserver”, tenderizing horse beans (whatever those are), and canned meats, also serving as a “softener or densifier” in the food industry.

Interestingly enough, Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group whose goal is to watching the safety of our food and water sources, has named Sodium Tripolyphosphate, “Another Chemical to Avoid”. In this report, it explains that Sodium Tripolyphosphate is used to treat seafood, making “expired [fish] appear firmer and glossier, and could dupe you into buying old or spoiled fish.” Unfortunately, the FDA doesn’t require food producers to label foods treated with this product, as it is “generally recognized to be safe.” I am not sure whether this is interesting or absolutely off-putting, considering that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which is part of the CDC, a government agency, is suspicious that Sodium Tripolyphosphate is a neurotoxin. It is also listed as a known pesticide with the Environmental Protection Agency and an air contaminant under California’s Occupational and Safety Health Act. (You can find all this information in a pamphlet I found here.

So, let’s get back to my Macaroni and Cheese. I eat it, along with countless thousands of families across the world. It comes from a familiar blue box, which is manufactured by a megacorporation. This one ingredient, which is a suspected neurotoxin, identified as a pesticide, and an environmental contaminant, a thing that is definitely not a naturally occurring substance, is something that children eat. It is something that you may feed to yourself and your family at least once a week without even knowing it.