Where are all the 'E Numbers' gone from food ingredients?

Mango Joe

Do many of you on here remember growing up in the 80's when everything you ate was crammed chock-full of mysterious E Numbers?

For the rest of you, basically certain items from the ingredient list printed on the packaging of most food and drinks where listed under a code starting with the letter E.

Then you had to decrypt this code by reading it off a chart which gave you its actual name & if you had decent standard of chart it also told you whether that particular E Number was going to give you cancer, grow an extra limb or shrink your cock into a protuberant nubbin.

Now of course people would casually explain this all away in a dismissive manner by saying "ah they're only the usual, everyday ingredients that are put into food anyhow" and what-not.

The thing is though - The Manufacturers had no problem listing the benevolent, wholesome ingredients by name - Things like flour, water, egg or butter were there in plain english - It was only the more sinister sounding stuff with names out of a chemistry book that got conveniently hidden behind a generic E Number label.

Anyway....Were they banned, phased out slowly or did they just simply fall out of fashion?

frozenfrozen

only recently there was one used in white icing and chewing gum that's to be removed

seamus

Mango Joe wrote: »

The thing is though - The Manufacturers had no problem listing the benevolent, wholesome ingredients by name - Things like flour, water, egg or butter were there in plain english - It was only the more sinister sounding stuff with names out of a chemistry book that got conveniently hidden behind a generic E Number label.

Well, that's exactly the point. Manufacturers used E numbers to hide what they were putting their products.

So people could no longer go "OMG, it's got monosodium glutamate! That sets babies on fire!".

But it backfired. Because the same hysterical people then started believing that all E-numbers were baby igniters, so anything with E-numbers was accused of being the devil.

So manufacturers stopped using E-numbers and went back to the actual names. The content of the product hasn't been changed.

E numbers still exist.

silliussoddius

seamus wrote: »

Well, that's exactly the point. Manufacturers used E numbers to hide what they were putting their products.

So people could no longer go "OMG, it's got monosodium glutamate! That sets babies on fire!".

But it backfired. Because the same hysterical people then started believing that all E-numbers were baby igniters, so anything with E-numbers was accused of being the devil.

So manufacturers stopped using E-numbers and went back to the actual names. The content of the product hasn't been changed.

E numbers still exist.

Isn’t the hysteria a bit like how natural fetishists talk about ingredients you can pronounce to make sure we avoid evil chemicals, but every ingredient is a chemical but some are so commonly used we have different names for them.
https://www.lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/dhmo.htm

branie2

No more hyper kids then

JustAThought

Some of the best products were full of E’s.

Blue coolpops.
Exploding chewing-gun.
Gobstoppers with a different colour every layer.
Most yoghurts.
Exotic cooked meats, Pot Noodles. etc.

Ribena hasn’t been the same colour since they took its E’s away - dosn’t taste as good either

buried

Eezer Goode, Eezer Goode

PsychoPete

Since they stopping putting them in food, now I just get my fix of "E's" on a Friday and Saturday night

Speedsie

Can't be doing with all those chemicals & e numbers. I mean, look at this, should be banned

https://imgur.com/a/EwBEKXs