What's Inside The 26-Ingredient School Lunch Burger?

04-02-2012 • http://www.npr.org, by Allison Aubrey

Thiamin mononitrate, disodium inosinate, pyridoxine hydrochloride.

Why are these hard-to-pronounce ingredients added to everything from a burger served in schools to veggie burgers in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store? We try to answer that on this edition of Tiny Desk Kitchen.

It turns out the answers are as varied as the ingredients. But as we yearn to know what's in our food and how it's made, these kind of ingredients with unfamiliar names make people suspicious.

"For me, it's just a huge red flag," says Ryan Lonnett, a parent of children in Fairfax County, Va., schools. He's an advocate with the group Real Food For Kids.

When he looks at the ingredient list of the burger served in his kids' cafeteria, he says things like disodium inosinate stand out. "Since I don't know what it is, I'd rather not put it in my body," Lonnett says.