No matter how many blog posts I write and the topics I write about, the most visited page on this site is my post about gelatin in yogurt. Now I found an even more confounding mechanism for innocuous delivery of gelatin via another food that doesn’t need it – dry roasted peanuts. Yes, you read that right, dry roasted peanuts. I got a giant box of Planters dry roasted peanuts from Costco and didn’t bother to check ingredients. After all what animal product could possibly be in dry roasted nuts? Well, gelatin of course.
Shame on me for not checking ingredients:
PEANUTS, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: SEA SALT, SPICES (CONTAINS CELERY), DRIED ONION, DRIED GARLIC, PAPRIKA, NATURAL FLAVOR, SUGAR, GELATIN, TORULA YEAST, CORNSTARCH, DRIED CORN SYRUP, MALTODEXTRIN.
Obviously, I’m not the first one to notice this. A lot of people have and one determined soul even reached out to Planters and received this hilarious response:
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) carefully supervises the production of gelatin. During the production process, gelatin changes chemically so that the final product is not the same in composition or identity as it was in the original protein form. Because of this, gelatin isn’t considered a meat by the United States Government.