Which Veggie Burgers Were Made With a Neurotoxin?

By on April 21, 2010 in News 4

This story has raised a lot of controversy last week on the internets … here’s a post on it from Kiera Butler in Mother Jones:
Veggie Burger

UPDATE: Veggie burger rumors are flying! Some readers and other news organizations have alleged that the study I wrote about was funded by the pro-meat, anti-soy group the Weston A. Price Foundation.

But this morning, I spoke with Cornucopia Institute director Mark Kastel, who said that the Weston A. Price Foundation did not contribute any funding to the “Behind the Bean” (pdf) study. More here.

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[Last] Monday, I wrote about a recent study by the Cornucopia Institute that found that many popular veggie burgers are made with hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and a neurotoxin. Commenters had lots of interesting discussions and good questions, many of which require far more knowledge of the subject than I have to answer. So I called up Charlotte Vallaeys, the lead researcher on the Cornucopia Institute’s soy study “Behind the Bean” (pdf) to talk about some of the issues readers have raised.

Read More on Mother Jones

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  • ditm

    I don't understand the instant link that seems to be made between vegetarian food and soy. I have actually never seen a vegetarian eat soy, and many veggie burger recipes I find have no soy at all in them. This should stick to being a story about soy, rather than branching out into rumours and inevitably false statements about products that soy can be used in.

    • Belcat

      The veggi burgers I've seen had soy. It's high protein content makes it a good substitute for meat protein, and some flavoring makes up for the difference in taste. I've never seen anything to suggest that it had hexane though.

    • voxmagi

      You must know a truly unusual group of vegetarians, the half dozen that I know all eat products with soy, some which were listed in the article in question. Second, switching into automatic denial mode and claiming that everything within is false or misleading seems disingenuous, since the processing techniques for soy products is the real question, and several companies have products on both lists ('good' and 'bad'). In the end, this doesn't look like a hatchet job, but rather like the start of some good healthy questioning about the ingredients and processes we use for food that gets labeled as 'a healthy choice'.

  • voxmagi

    You must know a truly unusual group of vegetarians, the half dozen that I know all eat products with soy, some which were listed in the article in question. Second, switching into automatic denial mode and claiming that everything within is false or misleading seems disingenuous, since the processing techniques for soy products is the real question, and several companies have products on both lists (‘good’ and ‘bad’). In the end, this doesn’t look like a hatchet job, but rather like the start of some good healthy questioning about the ingredients and processes we use for food that gets labeled as ‘a healthy choice’.