I'll tell you another place where it is sometimes used — on corn. Soy oil is approved by the FDA and USDA as a dust-control spray for use on corn (for all I know it may be approved for use on other grains, also, but I'm only familiar with it's use on corn, because I was a food corn processor for years). I know for a fact that it isn't used very often on corn though, because it interferes with the effectiveness of the cleaning equipment. When you're cleaning corn to food grade specs it's easy to identify corn that has been sprayed with oil — it won't slide properly on a gravity table (a machine used for a final cleaning stage), because the oil makes the corn slightly more viscous.Patricia wrote:Wow!!! That's crazy! I would have never thought that soy oil is sprayed on produce! That's terrible.
One of the things that a gravity table does is to remove stones and other foreign matter the same size as the grain that's being cleaned, but either lighter or heavier than the grain being cleaned. If the grain doesn't flow properly on the table, it's possible for the equipment to fail to separate out stones, or other impurities, and fail to remove them. So soy oil is bad news not only for the contamination it brings, but also for the reduced effectiveness of the cleaning equipment. This can also cause grains that should not be in there (such as wheat in corn) to not be properly removed, because of the reduced cleaning effectiveness.
In all the years I processed corn, I only encountered corn that had been sprayed one time, and it all came from a single processor who was located in downtown Waco. When I called him he admitted that he had used soy oil to prevent a dust problem when unloading corn at his facility (because of his downtown location).
But this is just one more example of how contamination can show up in places where one would never dream that it would happen.
Tex
