Dr. Schmidt explains the world: Did GDR soup cubes really cause cancer?

A feature colleague said that he was going to the concert of the band Ostzone Soup Cube Maching Krebs. The name must have something to do with the “Bild” newspaper. Was there ever a scandal about bouillon cubes in the GDR?

No, one was made. However, that was a long time ago. It actually surprises me how a band from the 80s ended up with such an old Bild newspaper headline. Because it’s from 1952.

Oha.

The background was that in the shortage situation shortly after the war, the Soviet occupying power obliged large companies that were still functioning to some extent to also produce consumer goods. And at the later Bitterfeld Chemical Combine, people remembered that they had already worked on food substitutes there during the war as part of IG Farben. The specific plant was Bitterfeld-Nord. Consequently, they called their product “Bino-Würze”. And someone apparently came up with the idea that if it comes from a chemical plant, it can actually only be poisonous.

… and cause cancer.

It was alleged that a chemical waste product had been processed into the Bino wort. As with many successful lies, this was a half-truth. There were waste materials in there, but from the food sector. Fish and meat waste, bones and not forgetting horn, cow horn. All of this then had to be chemically treated in such a way that water-soluble proteins came out.

Otherwise the broth would have just remained powder?

It wouldn’t have just been powder, it wouldn’t have had the flavoring effect either. The decomposition process creates various end products, including individual amino acids such as glutamic acid. And their salt, sodium glutamate, is the classic flavor enhancer. And if today it says somewhere without flavor enhancers, but with yeast extract, then it’s practically the same thing in light green.

Isn’t that better at all?

Nope, since yeast extract is no longer the yeast, but also a processed product, that doesn’t matter in this regard.

And at what point does it take something?

Because, unlike the original Bino seasoning, there are no animal ingredients in it. Incidentally, Maggi and the like were an answer to an earlier industrial product. Most people today will no longer know the inventor – Justus Liebig, later von Liebig, 19th century chemist.

The university in Giessen is named after him.

Exactly. He not only discovered that yeast contains valuable nutrients for human nutrition. He also invented a product that was still available for purchase until a few years ago: Liebig’s meat extract. And that had an amusing history. Liebig had published the production method. And this happened to be read by a person who had recently been traveling in South America and had seen huge herds of cattle in Uruguay, of which only the skins, i.e. the skins, were used for leather and of course the hair for felt and perhaps the bones for the production of gelatine have been. The US company Eastman Kodak is said to have later even kept its own herds of cattle for the gelatine so that the quality of the films remained constant.

What a waste.

The Argentinians and Uruguayans could never eat the amount of meat in their lives. And in the middle of the 19th century there were no refrigerated ships. This means that a significant part of the meat was left there for the vultures. And the traveling salesman said that the whole thing could be raised industrially and the inexpensive amounts of beef available could be processed into extract. In fact, that’s how it turned out. And Liebig added his name. I don’t know if he got paid for it. Nowadays you would probably have gotten a lot of money for it. This company must have still existed until 2014. Back then I saw the jars at what was then Galeria Kaufhof.