Mar 09 2004
Modified food starch
The bag of Baked! Lay’s Naturally Baked Potato Chips (what would be Unnaturally baked?) I bought today lists Modified Food Starch as its third ingredient. A couple of questions about that:
- Modified from what?
- What is meant by food? That’s a vague word in this context.
So, typing in modified food starch at google.com gives me about 88,700 hits. This definition seems the simplest:
Modified food starch is a starch that has been treated physically or chemically to modify one or more of its physical or chemical properties. The ’starch’ could be from corn, wheat, potato, rice or tapioca–it depends on the manufacturer.
Next question: what the hell is tapioca? According to Yahoo!:
Tapioca is basically a root starch derived from the cassava, or yuca plant. It’s often used to thicken soups and sweeten the flavor of baked goods, and it makes a dandy pudding.
This is never going to end: what’s a cassava, or yuca plant? I found information and a picture of it; nothing special except the Bitter Cassava variety is toxic if eaten raw.
Thus ends today’s food research.
How can one know if the Modified Food Starch is from wheat or corn or what?? Should we celiacs just avoid it at all costs?
Yeah, I think you’re screwed, unless you go to an organic food store which MIGHT be more specific in listing their ingredients.
How many carbs does it add to the food?
Oh god! Another old thread that’s going to be kept alive just like that “Best Rock Star Ever” thread. Coni, you must have gotten here from some kind of Google search result, didn’t you?
You’re not supposed to bitch about the timing people have on finding stuff. It’s just the way of the blog, chances are coni will never even come back to read the reply anyhow so you just wasted 1 minute of your life writing that, and I wasted 2 telling you, in a nice way, to shut up about it. Isn’t this site cool? I like this site, it is good in a goodly way of goodness and good. Did I mention tapioca?
Modified how? - was my obvious question. What are the most common ways to physically and chemically trad the starch?
thanks for the info… i was looking at my cereal this morning, asking myself “what the hell is modified about it?”, so i jumped on the computer and instead of having to search all around, i found your site. thanks again.