This contains cancer causing chemicals, but eat your potatoes!!

Kind of a short blog tonight.

I was at Andronico's Market, in Berkeley, today. I don't go there very often and really the only reason I sent there today was because I wanted to check out their frozen food section to see if it really was the place where Hall's filmed that goofy commercial where the drill sergent is chewing out this Asian stock clerk over her cold. (Turns out it wasn't as the shelves are different).

When I go there I usually make a serpentine route. First I go through the produce and frozen food, and then over through beer and soda area. Continue on to the prepared food section, and finish up by wandering through the isles to see if there's anything that looks interesting. This can be a dangerous way to shop, especially if you're hungry. But I digress.

One thing that caught my eye was over in the frozen food section. There was a Proposition 65 mandated warning sign in front of the frozen onion rings and french fries. It said,

WARNING: Cooked potatoes that have been browned,
such as potato chips, contain aacrylamide, a chemical
identified under California Proposition 65 as causing cancer.
Other cooked foods that have been roasted or browned
such as coffee, cereals, French fries, potato crisps, breads,
crackers, cookies and nuts, also contain acrylamide, but
usually at lower levels than in certain cooked potatoes that
have been browned.

Acrylamide is not added to these foods but is created when
these and certain foods are browned
The FDA has not advised people to stop eating potato chips
or any foods containing acrylamide as a result of cooking.
For more information, see FDA’s website at www/fda.gov.

Honestly, this is the first time I've ever noticed this warning. I kind of chuckled at it and moved along. Mind you I'm not chuckling because of what it says, but how it says it. Namely, the bad stuff wasn't put in there, but it's created when cooking. But we're not telling you to stop eating it.

In my wandering I went to buy some potato chips for some of the spaghetti sauce dip I blogged about on Sunday. Sure enough, there's that same sign!!

What's interesting is you DON'T see the warnings in the other isles by coffee, nuts, crackers, etc. Granted, they say it's in lower levels. But, poison is poison, isn't it? And while we're on that track, why aren't there warnings in the raw potato section telling us not to fry them?

In doing some further research, it turns out this whole "potato chip" warning stems back to 2005 when Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed suit against several companies to get these labels on packaging.

We're not talking cigarettes here, we're talking potato chips!! It reminds me of the person in New York State that sued MacDonalds because they didn't tell him their burgers contained saturated fats that would make him fat, and that the more he ate of it, the more obese he would get. Utter nonsense.

Anyways, that's it for the night.