A while back I wrote about the presence of hair, beetles and beaver anal glands in the foods we eat. Of the three, beaver anal glands, a whiffy combo of glands and urine that beavers use to mark their territory, captured by far the biggest share of people’s attention. Since then numerous search queries have hit my blog seeking a list of specific foods containing these glands, which are ground up into a product known as castoreum used in raspberry, strawberry and, most often, in vanilla flavoring.
As it happens no up to date consumer list of specific foods containing castoreum exists anywhere. Why? Well to start out, would you buy a food product if you knew it contained beaver anal glands? These glands are not exactly anyone’s idea of a heavenly nosh. Anticipating this, the food industry managed to get castoreum added to foods under that innocuous, legal and sometimes not so innocent label: “natural flavoring”. So even if castoreum IS present in foods and beverages like ice cream, yogurt and soda, you and I will never know it. Nor will any food manufacture divulge this info if you contact them(why nix sales?). They will inform you that THEY never add castoreum to their foods and beverages. If pressed, they will probably add they can’t of course speak for their vendors, who supply them with flavorings containing ingredients that are proprietary information.
After Jamie Oliver, a British chef with a large following, appeared on the David Letterman Show last year and mentioned that vanilla ice cream was made with castoreum, the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) contacted 5 manufactures of vanilla flavoring to ask if there was any truth to this statement. All five manufacturers said no, that castoreum is not used today in any form of vanilla for human use.
On the other hand, Fenaroli’s handbook of flavor ingredients (a $340 industry eBook) published in 2005, provides a list of reported foods and beverages containing castoreum extract:
Reported Uses PPM (parts per million) (Fema* 1994):
| Food Category | Usual | Max |
| Alcoholic Beverages | 79.59 | 93.69 |
| Baked Goods | 62.28 | 68.47 |
| Gelatins, Puddings | 43.58 | 47.34 |
| Soft Candy | 37.28 | 44.10 |
| Frozen Dairy | 24.39 | 26.26 |
| Nonalcoholic Beverages | 24.21 | 29.77 |
| Hard Candy | 24.17 | 24.17 |
| Chewing Gum | 18.60 | 42.09 |
So what are we to believe? Are beaver anal glands still being used to flavor foods and beverages or not? And If so, how much and which foods? How about it, Food Industry?
*Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association
This shit gross!!!!!!!
You didn’t know. That is just a drop in the bucket. There are so much more. Being vegan is a joke, the FDA won’t allow it. Taste pretty good. Lol
This should be banned for human consumption. Period.
amen to that!!!
Eating and exploitation of innocent beings is the most tyranically malevolent ideology in human history….bar none!
Live vegan!!!
Or maybe it’s Partial Birth Abortion.
That sounds terrible! I’m a vegetarian. It breaks my heart about all of the babies. I was just wondering if it’s obtained from a live beaver?
They don’t use the actual glands, nothing it makes it any better but it’s not actually part of the beavers body. They use the secretion from the beavers glands, not the actual gland. And it’s their castor glands not the actual anal glands that description comes from.
not any better…
So are you saying there are Beaver farms, just to express this gland fluid into a jar {or something}
That just goes to show you what the government you vote for every 4 years care about you. People will never stand up to these guys and they know it. They’re the queen ant and we’re the working ants. Without us they’re nothing and still the citizens of this country are to coward to do anything about it. Laziness and cowardly
The left try’s to weaken the citizens to stay in control. The democratic FDA feeds you much worse than beavers ass rest assure. At least beavers ass glands are some kind of natural product I guess. There’s products been proven to, over time, kill people and the FDA won’t ban it due to the money these companies bring in
Q is a turd
If they kill him where’s all the beaver meat? Tasty tasty Beaver meat on a stick?
Considering the list of foods and beverages being claimed to contain the extract of undomesticated, carnivorous animals there must be an enormous clandestine industry thriving in forests near dammed streams which employs beaver wranglers canvassing beaver habitat everywhere!
only in Canada
Black pepper only needs to comprise 50% black pepper, the rest is up to the imagination and capitalist thirst of the seller, 100% natural offers 5% leeway to sneak in some plasticizers and whatnot, many things change the taste of something, but not all are on the USDA list of flavor additives [RE: ban on flavored liquid for vaping], and many more examples. My favorite, however, comes from computational biology of recent years, underlining advances in computing power, huge databases were mined for data on health and lifespan, one such study compared vegans, occasional meat eaters& vegetarians, and meat eaters (no differences between red meat and chicken and/or fish only eaters). The findings surprised me. The vegans fared equally poorly to the meat eaters, and the occasional meat eaters and vegetarians had at least a 10 year lifespan advantage over all others. I am in the couple of times a week meat eater group purely for health reasons, will eat veal on occasion and not care. To be more clear, I have a long list of cares that upstage animal lifestyle considerations. Ending the war on drugs, equality for all in the workplace and elsewhere, freedom of information, freedom to travel, and many others.