What Additives Look Like Before They End Up in Your Food

Companies have been pulling artificial colors and preservatives out of their formulations. Here's what they look like.

Food additives have been getting a lot of attention lately. In a quest to appeal to consumers who want more "natural" foods---whatever that really means---companies have been pulling artificial colors, preservatives, and other ingredients out of their formulations...I mean, recipes. General Mills is taking artificial ingredients out of all of its cereals. So is Subway, after an earlier (forced) decision to remove the leavener azodicarbonamide from its breads. The list goes on and on.

With multi-syllabic, difficult-to-pronounce names and manufacturing processes that sound more like the instructions for a nuclear reactor than a food processing plant, some of these ingredients make people wary of putting them in their bodies. But whether a food ingredient comes from natural sources---like the shellac, harvested from the resin of an insect, that coats some of your candy---or from a multi-step chemical process, the ways in which they make our food brighter, more appetizing, smoother, and safer are pretty impressive. And in almost all cases, perfectly safe. (Sarah: We can debate about this later.)

In his upcoming book *Ingredients: A Visual Exploration of 75 Additives & 25 Food Products *(out September 29, available for preorder), photographer Dwight Eschliman captured some of the most common ingredients included in supermarkets' many, many processed foods. From far away, the ingredients listed on nutritional labels look like a pretty homogenous set of mildly-colored powders and liquids, but these up-close photos emphasize their variety, revealing the small tweaks in viscosity and texture that make the difference between a great emulsifier and a shiny coating. In the book, science writer Steve Ettlinger dissects those details, exploring each ingredient's journey from raw material to highly refined ingredient to your plate. Check them out in the gallery above.