These "ingredients" are commonly found in public school lunch "recipes".

I have looked in my fridge and (more productively) in my store cupboard. I recognise just one or two of the names - I have quite a sizeable amount of quite concentrated Ethanol in a bottle marked "Smirnoff" and under the sink there is a more concentrated solution of Methanol (coloured purple, in case anyone should think of drinking it), which I use for cleaning windows and for lighting the Primus stove or the Tilley lamp. There's also a weak solution of Acetic acid in the cupboard marked "Malt Vinegar". In Europe, we have saved a great deal of space on food labels by converting most of these long names into codes called 'E Numbers'. Formic Acid ("naturally present in ants, but also in many fruits, such as apples, strawberries and raspberries, honey and nettles.") is E236. There's a whole long list of them here: http://www.ukfoodguide.net/enumeric.htm The E-numbers are far more friendly and space saving than the scary chemical names and, as my mother used to say when we looked askance at some new dish she had prepared and asked what was in it, "What you don't know, can't harm you!" (You understand, I hope, that I wrote that paragraph with my tongue firmly in my cheek!) So do YOU know what all of those long names are, ParaTed? Some of them (methanol and formaldehyde, for example) I certainly wouldn't let within a mile of my food, even in small quantities; quite a few others are naturally occurring substances which you would be eating anyway, even if you bought fresh, organically grown fruit and vegetables. They are only mentioned specifically because the FDA, in their wisdom, has said that they must be tested for and listed by name. The message, to be honest, is mixed. On the one hand we SHOULD be concerned at the amount of processing and artificial additives that goes into much of the food we eat; on the other hand there is not a little scaremongering going on in some of the 'information' put about by the people who are most involved in promoting the concern. Unless we know what these things really are, what they are used for and WHY they are in our food, we are almost worse off for being presented with a list like this than we were when we were in blissful ignorance. I have no doubt that, somewhere, there is a (very long) list of all these things published by the FDA but it is NOT going to tell us the full story and what it does tell us may be notoriously untrustworthy.

Why is there so much cancer in the world???Now diabetes is on the rise. Perhaps it's what we are eating. The food industry is in it only for the money. They want it to taste great so people will buy more.They want to make it with ingredients that cost less.Somewhere in there is the magic compound. You know the one that makes you hungry even after you have eaten. It must be working. Look around you. How many overweight people do you see??? Almost all of them. One must read labels. By controlling what we buy, the food industry will change. Let's all read labels and try to leave the chemicals on the shelf.

There are definitely preservatives in anything processed - and a lot of the stuff in school lunch programs are processed. However, there are also preservatives in a lot of canned and packaged foods the average person buys at the grocery store. Did you realize that canning and packaging plants are ALLOWED to have a certain amount of PPM (parts per million) of insects and other things you really wouldn't want in your food? Sounds disgusting, doesn't it? We don't need scare mongering and scare tactics, and the truth of the matter is kids are not dropping like flies from anything present in the school lunch programs. Unless... of course you live in another country where they are allowed to put poison in the food supply...

I am aware of these harmful ingredients in almost all the products we are eating everyday and it's kind of scary because somehow it will produce some illness in to our body in the long run. When small parts of these ingredients remains in our body it will accumulate all those toxic residue in our body and those making us sick in the long run. Too bad our children were already exposed to these kinds of ingredients and there seems nothing we can do about it. I just wish we can go back to the old ways where everything is fresh and never modified. Just a wishful thinking. The best thing we can do is minimize the harmful foods we eat everyday.

I don't know what half of these ingredients really are or where they come from. How can students know what they are getting in their lunches at school when we as parents are also unsure? how can some of these ingredients be good for our children?

this gas is dangereous for people acid gases me.i am so for not touch gas reply for another thing not uses so environtement to damages me.environment is this gases is provide to you higher population not function provide me.

I save a lot of money and worry by making my own bread (it's so easy with a bread maker) and I make waffles, burrito shells and wraps, and cookies.. all with 100% whole wheat flour.. I suppose our fruits, meats and vegetables are still laced with things, so we do grow a conservative garden each year but don't can, but may buy a freezer for freezing one of these days..

I suppose all of you have read the ingredients of pepsi and coke...Yeah, the acid on the list is the same stuff that you clean your toilets with...that is why you CAN pour a can of it in you toilet and clean it. You can also clean the battery contacts of your car with it. It must do wonders for your internal plumbing... More and more "fake" ingredients and pheromones are being used in foods instead of the real "food". Then they just use fillers to "fluff" it out. Who knows what is really in there. Now that the 'S510' bill has been passed, most of us will not be able to afford to buy fresh vegetables soon...Remember the movie "Soylent Green" from the 70's? It is coming. Just like no one ever thought we would see the day that Orwell's "1984" would come true...Well, Wal-Mart and Homeland Security have seen to that. Now we are headed for "Soylent Green"