Q: I heard veggie burgers are made with a toxic chemical. Should I be staying away?
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A: Forget the Caramilk mystery. How do meatless food sculptors get soy to look just like corn dogs, pulled pork, ribs, wings, nuggets and stuffed chicken Cordon Bleu? The whole thing fascinates me, sometimes enough to lure me into a bite. But do I ever think they’re good for me? Not a chance.
They’re all made with soy protein isolate (aka textured vegetable protein, aka soy meal) and have little to do with whole soybeans.
These substances derived from defatted soy flour are mostly used in pet foods, but sweetened up with sugar and spices, taste pretty good. Scarier question is, what are these foods processed with?
Soy oil is generally separated from flaked soybeans – leaving defatted meal that’s ground into flour – using a chemical called hexane, one of the volatile organic compounds that constitute natural gas, crude oil and gasoline. It’s an air pollutant and neurotoxin that might sound familiar to you if you’ve read recent stories about hexane poisoning dozens of workers at an iPhone factory in China.
The stuff is great for degreasing and dissolving – it’ll even remove Crazy Glue – and is widely used to extract oils from all kinds of seeds and veggies.
The problem is that not all the hexane evaporates during processing. A small residue is left in food.
The Cornucopia Institute, a U.S.-based progressive farm policy outfit, had samples of soy oil, soy meal and soy grits tested, and both the soy meal and soy grits exceeded Canada’s cap on hexane in food of 10 parts per million. Which brings us to their hot-button conclusion: there’s hexane in your veggie burger.
The institute fingered some major players in the veg world: Yves Veggie Cuisine, Garden Burger, President’s Choice, It’s All Good, Amy’s Kitchen and several U.S.-only brands.
Should you be worried? Well, depends who you ask. The makers of Yves maintain that residues are in compliance with federal standards. Amy’s Kitchen has swapped their soy protein concentrate for organic tofu to avoid the hexane headache.
An Environment Canada/Health Canada assessment of hexane says, “The contribution from food sources at the worst case is 1.95 per cent of the estimated total daily intake.” We get most of our hexane from breathing in glues, lubricants, paints and automotive cleaners.
Still, there’s been next to no research on hexane consumption through our food, so Cornucopia is simply asking that more research be done.
In the meantime, over 5 billion kilograms of smoggy air-polluting hexane was manufactured in this country in 2006, and even more is imported, since over 300 facilities reported releases of n-hexane into the environment.
Funnily enough, grain and soy processors are some of the largest hexane emitters on both sides of the border. Solae, the DuPont joint venture that supplies soy protein to Yves, Garden Burger, Mori-Nu and many others, happens to be the seventh-largest hexane emitter in the U.S.
How do you find hexane-free meatless products? Look for brands that use pricier cold-pressed hexane-free soy protein, like Tofurky.
While certified organic foods are not supposed to use hexane in processing, just be aware that hexane-processed ingredients like soy protein, soy lecithin and others can also sneak into plenty of natural health products labelled as “made with organic ingredients,” like Clif and Luna bars. The makers of both bars say they’re looking for an organic alternative.
Sticking to whole soybeans and products made from whole soybeans, like good old tofu or tempeh, will let you avoid the whole hexane mess – well, at least if you get them locally grown, organic and GMO-free. Ying Ying Soy Food is one of the few that can tick off that list.
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