What Are You Eating?

A. C. Applebee and A. D. Masters

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What this is

This is not an academic paper. The academic version exists — it's (Applebee & Combe, 2026, "The Inverted Burden") in this series, with 78 references and cross-cultural epidemiological analyses spanning four traditional populations. This is the kitchen table version. This is the one you can read while you're eating dinner.

Which, given the subject matter, might put you off your dinner. Sorry about that.

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You don't know what's in your food

Pick something up from your kitchen. Anything in a packet. Turn it over. Read the ingredients.

You can't pronounce half of them.

Sodium tripolyphosphate. Butylated hydroxyanisole. Carboxymethylcellulose. Tertiary butylhydroquinone. Polysorbate 80.

You just put those in your body. Yesterday. The day before. Every day since you were a child.

You didn't choose to eat them. You didn't consent to eat them. You probably didn't even know they were there until just now, holding the packet and squinting at the tiny text. The text is tiny on purpose. If it were printed in the same font size as the brand name on the front, you'd have questions. They don't want you to have questions.

So you eat on faith. You trust that someone, somewhere — a government agency, a regulator, a scientist — has checked all of this and determined it's safe.

The faith is misplaced.

In the United States, a food manufacturer can declare an additive "Generally Recognized As Safe" — GRAS — without notifying the FDA, without independent testing, without publishing the determination, and without any regulatory review whatsoever (Neltner et al., 2011). The company decides its own ingredient is safe, files nothing, tells no one, and puts it in your food. Between 1997 and 2012, of the nearly 1,000 GRAS notifications the FDA did receive, zero were rejected. Not one. The system