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» Does your veggie burger contain trace amounts of hexane residue? Do you care?

Today’s health scare story floating around the tubes is about the use of hexane to process isolated soy protein, a common ingredient in non-organic veggie burgers. Even though this is old-ish “news,” it’s one of those zombie stories that keeps resurfacing every six-to-nine months as “THE REAL STORY” about the dangers of soy, which means that vegans are, once again, wrong about everything/lying to ourselves/the real killers because once a field mouse wandered into a tractor harvesting soybeans.

If you’re eating organic soy, this story has nothing to do with you. And if you’re eating unprocessed, unpackaged food that you cook yourself or leave to cooks who care about fresh ingredients, this story still has nothing to do with you. If you’re eating packaged food manufactured by giant corporations, well, you get what you pay for.

But despite all the dire warnings in the Cornucopia report about hexane explosions, there’s a curious lack of any statistics about any actual deaths or disease caused by trace amounts of hexane in non-organic veggie burgers or soy baby formula. Which means that the number, as far as we know, is zero.

To be fair, the report is only calling for an FDA investigation into whether or not hexane residue is dangerous. And go for it; food safety is important. But the real agenda here is to cast soy as dangerous—maybe even explosive!—by innuendo, while glossing over the toxic waste dump of meat and dairy and the raging epidemic of death and disease caused by their overconsumption. But the public always loves a “this thing we thought was good is actually bad!” story, so expect to see this one reposted on your Facebook wall about 12 times by your smug-omnivore distant cousins.

[Correction: The post originally stated that the Cornucopia Institute is funded by the Weston A. Price Foundation, a pro-meat-and-dairy think-tank. While Cornucopia and WAPF share resources, and Cornucopia’s founder has ties to WAPF and to the organic dairy industry, we were unable to verify a financial connection between the two organizations.]