I know you’ve heard a lot about Apeel here on my substack and hopefully on social media because that means the word is getting out about how we do not want this crap on our produce. Your produce shouldn’t have an ingredient list! This isn’t about fear mongering… so much of what I post about when it comes to Apeel comes right from THEIR own website.
Many people are intentional about avoiding certain foods and ingredients, artificial additives and dun dun dunnnnn seed oils, myself included. So going back to the “your produce shouldn’t have an ingredient list” then let’s talk about what some of the coating from Apeel is made of. Remember they aren’t telling us everything we want to know… it very much feels like we’re being lied to again. Remember this post about the FAQs they changed? Hmmm. Red flags everywhere.
What they say… errr I mean boast about on their website and on social media is that it’s plant-derived:
”Apeel is made of purified mono- and diglycerides derived from sustainably-sourced, non-GMO plant oils mimicking the natural protection already existing on all fruits and vegetables. One ingredient only - that’s the full list! Organic produce that has been treated with Apeel includes the addition of citric acid, an ingredient widely found in most fruits, particularly citrus - just two simple, plant-derived ingredients. While the plant oils we use can change, there’s no impact on the final ingredient outcome because the mono- and diglycerides found in Apeel undergo a purification process that eliminates any trace of dietary allergens and impurities through heat and distillation. All that remains are the purified lipids. Think of it like distilled water – after the water goes through the distillation process, all that remains is pure H2O.”
So, the coating for conventional produce supposedly has 1 ingredient and the coating for organic produce has 2? Yet there’s a document they’ve filed with the EPA where Apeel Sciences registered their coating. Listed by the name Organipeel (for organic produce) it’s registered as a pesticide with a really short list of ingredients and not in a good way. The ingredients are: citric acid at .66% and other ingredients which aren’t listed at 99.34%. Do the math. That equals 100%. But what is that 99.34% made up of? What is in it? We want to know! You can read more about that in another post I did, here.
All that to say, I’ve had to jump through a ton of hoops to find answers on what this crap is made of. Look, I totally get that there are good people involved with this company who do in fact what to end food waste and save the planet and want world peace but you do that with HONESTY and you also do that with REAL FOOD that isn’t treated with something made in a science lab.
According to an application with the FDA, for approval on the ins and outs of how they make their monoacylglycerides, Apeel discloses (because they have to) what exactly they are using …
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