“Organic Honey Is A Scam” — 40 People Share Food Industry Secrets Big Corporations Don’t Want You To Know

Beekeeper checking in – there is no such thing as organic honey. I do not treat my bees with chemicals, but I have no idea where they get their nectar. A bee can fly up to three miles from a hive to get nectar. It is virtually impossible to guarantee they have not gotten nectar from a chemically treated source.

The American FDA takes food additive safety claims from corporations at face value. If a corporation has done internal testing and says it’s safe the FDA approves it. In the EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand etc if a corporation wants to get an additive approved, the governments have their own food labs. They will take your testing procedures/results and then do their own testing to see if they think your additives are safe, and then approve or deny accordingly. Same goes for medicines in farm animals. Canada won’t allow BGH (bovine growth hormone) as it shows up in the milk. America gets angry because they can’t sell dairy to Canada and the EU but we have rules banning widespread use of Antibiotics and hormones in farm animals. If you are ever travelling outside of America, pick up some food products off the shelf that look like the American brands and read the ingredients list. It’s probably half as long. I’ll let you work out that obesity epidemic cause for yourselves.

They’re making BANK windfall record profits right now under the guise of “inflation” and “supply issues”. 

Five Guys- not really a secret but everything was fresh as could be, we did not have a freezer at all only the fridge. Every morning the burgers were rolled into balls and weighed to make sure all were the same. Bread made fresh from local factories. Potatoes straight from Idaho or Washington. Freshly cut and washed 3 times to remove the starch before being cooked. All veggies were labled by date for freshness. Honestly probably one of the cleanest places ive worked at.

Also at the register every single person would ask why it was so expensive but proceeded to buy it anyway. As if I could change the price for them.

Cows make milk not because they are cows but because they are mothers

Chef here. It’s salt and fat. If you have a question about anything it’s salt and fat.

The reason restaurant food tastes better than what you make at home is probably because it was drowned in butter or oil.

Also MSG is in nearly everything. Totally safe and delicious. And it definitely isn’t what is giving you a migraine. The fact you ate 4000 calories and 3 times your daily salt intake is probably what gave you the headache.

Unless it’s a health conscious food joint you’re eating at, the food we serve is designed for maximum taste. It’s either dense with fat and sugar, or fat and salt . E.g. Those mashed potatoes you like? Made with cream, butter, and salt. The quiche? made on cream, not milk. Etc, etc.

At least up until the pandemic hit, there is a 100% chance that you’ve eaten at a restaurant where 1 or 2 of the people directly handling your food were legitimately sick enough that they should have stayed home, but they had to come in to work anyway because they couldn’t get their shift covered and they can’t get a doctor’s note without insurance or the money for a copay.

At least up until the pandemic hit, there is a 100% chance that you’ve eaten at a restaurant where 1 or 2 of the people directly handling your food were legitimately sick enough that they should have stayed home, but they had to come in to work anyway because they couldn’t get their shift covered and they can’t get a doctor’s note without insurance or the money for a copay.

Dragon fruit isn’t an exotic Asian fruit. It’s a cactus fruit, and as such are native to the Americas and can even be grown in the US.

Everything on the Mexican menu uses the same ingredients. Just built it different and give it a different name

Tortillas
Cheese
Salsa
Beans
Rice
Meat

Tacos, burrito, chilaquiles, tostada, chimichanga

It’s all the same thing!

* written by a Mexican cook

The trick to good fried rice is old rice. It has to dry out for a bit in the fridge.

The amount of sugar that goes into costco bakery products is absurd, especially the apple pie. That being said; Costco does not f**k around when it comes to food safety. Every area that is responsible for producing food is most likely cleaner than a white room for producing computer parts. There are virtually zero roaches, we found one in the bakery once and shut it down until the exterminator did his thing that very night. Someone returned a package of dinner rolls because their child had bit into one and a sharp piece of metal was in it, within less than 2 minutes every manager in the building was doing an investigation that led all the way up to the regional manager and his boss for several hours and determined that it had come off of a piece of machinery before it reached our location. We throw away rotisserie chickens if they have left (even for a few minutes) the shelf and someone tries to put it back.

Many of the cooks making your food are high and/or drunk.

It’s not exactly a secret, but it’s not common knowledge either.

Except for infant formula, dates are not an indicator of the product’s safety and are not required by Federal law. Phrases like “Best by [ date ]” or “Sell by” or “Use by” aren’t regulated or required, and they are not (outside of baby formula) a statement of safety.

Manufacturers would rather have you throw out product, wasting it, and buying more, than stockpiling. So they put “best by” or “use by” dates even on non-perishible items like *salt*.

the organic industry is a f*****g scam.

there are levels to this s**t, and yes, you can purchase food that is grown and/or sourced more ethically than other options, but don’t kid yourself. it was most likely still grown on a factory farm, and chemicals were used, etc. etc. just different chemicals.

and a lot of it comes from china. no s**t.v

The “natural flavors” are just big jugs of glycerin with hyper concentrated flavoring in it. Banana flavoring is fairly flammable.

Source: Worked in food manufacturing

I’m a trucker who hauls mostly refrigerated freight. I pick up at a lot of slaughterhouses. You really, really don’t want to know what those places are like; let alone the conditions at feedlots or CAFOs.

When you give back a pack of ketchup to the restaurant because you didn’t use it, they thank you and smile and then they throw it out because you’re probably a weirdo who injected bleach into the ketchup pack.

I used to work in a sliced bread factory. The amount of bread that gets thrown in the trash for being just a little overcooked after a mechanical failure is astonishing. I always thought they should give it to homeless shelters something like that

King crab and Maine lobster prices that restaurants pay are cheaper than they have been since even before the pandemic, yet we still charge more than ever before

A lot of the processed cheese and cream cheese is all the same recipe we just switch the labels and packaging for the different brands we run. Source: I work in a cheese factory in a company that services 75% of America’s domestic market

Pringles (and baked Lays/similar) are made of rehydrated and compressed rejected/excess parts of potatoes that go into regular chips. I learned that from my dietician at work and thought that was odd. I still like them over regular chips.

Well – I work at Dominos, and we are kept afloat by the people who don’t coupon and pay full menu price. You people are the unsung heroes of labor.

the inside of ice machines are covered in mold unless cleaned regularly. in the many different restaurants I worked in, exactly 1 cleaned the inside of their ice machine on a regular basis.

Diet, not exercise, is the main factor in determining weight gain/loss

That all vodka is nothing more than pure grain alcohol cut to proof with water. Source: was lab tech in an alcohol plant. We made everything from Walgreens vodka to Smirnoff vodka. The only difference was the bottle and label.

Buffalo wings are not made of buffalo, they’re made of chicken.

Buffalo don’t even have wings.

The secret is that they can tell us all their secrets and we still eat it because we are lazy, short-term-thinking f***s.

Shrimps is bugs.

When you order “Shrimp fried rice” there isn’t actually a shrimp frying the rice.

The reason orange juice tastes consistently the same year-round, even though it’s a crop harvested once a year, is because citrus oils and citrus flavor are added back to different batches and blended all together. Similar to how whiskey is blended from multiple barrels to make it consistent.

The difference is that even though extra stuff is added back into the OJ, it doesn’t need to be labeled because the flavors contain all ingredients from oranges (FTNF-from the named fruit) so the FDA doesn’t mandate labeling additional ingredients.

Alot of cooking is just the reheating of prep and Chef Mike (the microwave) gets used alot more than you think.

When I worked at a mass production bakery the chocolate for the chocolate covered doughnuts came in giant frozen blocks of 4×4 peices and contained no actual chocolate what so over. When unfrozen it was like some sort of nasty smelling paraffin wax that I would break up with a hammer and place into a melter that would then pour over the doughnuts.

Olive Garden makes all their necessary pastas for the whole day from 8-10am every morning. Partially cooked. So when an order comes through, they grab a serving of the needed pasta style and flash cook them in hot water. Also, it’s just the brand, Barilla.

Ooh I got one. Lots of manufacturing places nowadays are trying to push for “less than daily” sanitation. You heard that right. They want to use these machines all day long, not clean them overnight, and start up like normal the next day.

Currently working in a place that just started this practice. USDA is on board with it, they only care that the product tests well for culture counts before it’s shipped off.

So when you have stuff in your fridge and it seems to expire faster than it used to it’s probably because you got some 2-day-old room-temperature product mixed in with the fresh stuff.

Farm animals lead absolutely terrible lives.

You technically can’t get addicted to sugar, but sugar dependence is very real and can give you similar withdrawal symptoms to caffiene withdrawal. Your brain gets dopamine when you eat sugar, which means that most companies put as much sugar in their products as they can get away with so you feel good by eating them.

most meat you buy in stores is packed with water and additives that add taste so you won’t notice that it’s all water. most meat shrinks when you fry it, the more shrinkage the more water was in the product in the beginning.

Fancy restaurants’ regular food tastes so good because it’s DROWNED in butter and MSG. I dishwashed at a fancy seafood/steakhouse on the water and an average serving of asparagus had about a quarter stick of butter in it. People always asked what their “trick” with the asparagus was.