Reese's Dark

I love reading the ingredients list on packaged food. The more heavily processed the better. Ever since I was young I had this morbid curiosity about the components that make up my favorite shelf-stable snack items. So for today's post, I'm going to be running down the ingredients list of my friendly bag of dark chocolate Reese's cups and trying to shed a little bit of light on someone of the more mysterious ingredients.
Here's the full list:

Semi-sweet chocolate (sugar; chocolate; cocoa butter; milk fat; soy lecithin; vanillin; artificial flavor; PGPR; milk); peanuts; sugar; dextrose; salt; TBHQ.

I'm going to pick out a few of these to highlight since there is not a whole lot of intriguing mystery around ingredients like 'milk' or 'sugar'.

soy lecithin: This is lecithin from soy. Mystery solved. Okay, fine. Lecithin is actually a broad term that applies to "any group of yellow-brownish fatty substances occurring in plant or animal tissues" (thanks, Wikipedia). So for our purposes, it is a fat, insoluble in water. I'd be willing to bet that in my Reese's it is acting as an emulsifier. The job of an emulsifier is to stabilize an emulsion, a mixture where two "unblendable" substances are blended together, typically a fat with a nonfat. In order to keep the fats from congregating together (fats love hanging out with other fats), they are coated with an emulsifier that essentially lessens their attraction for eachother. So the soy lecithin in my Reese's cup is keeping it from becoming a greasy mess.

PGPR: This stands for polyglycerol polyricinoleate, another emulsifier! It is derived from castor beans and it is primarily used in chocolate, usually in conjunction with a lecithin (like soy lecithin!). It can also be used to replace cocoa butter in chocolate, which is a significant cost saver since cocoa butter is a more expensive raw material.

artificial flavor: Could this be any less descriptive? What flavor are they trying to convey with this artificial flavor? Why is it "artificial" while some flavors are "natural"? It seems to be that our artificial flavor here is probably mimicking chocolate, since it is listed as one of the ingredients of chocolate. And as far as artificial vs. natural, the difference is one of origin. A natural flavor is derived from an actual plant, like a mint leave or a vanilla bean. The amount of processing it undergoes before it reaches your "all-natural" ice cream isn't accounted for. An artificial flavor, on the other hand, is a chemical mimic of the dominant molecule that makes up a certain flavor. Natural flavors are incredibly complex combinations of different flavor molecules. Artificial flavors approximate the general idea of these flavors, which is why fake strawberry tastes fake.

TBHQ: This is the merciful abbreviation of tertiary butylhydroquinone. This is a preservative, particularly for fats, to prevent them from oxidizing and becoming rancid. This makes perfect sense in the context of our Reese's since they are largely fat. High levels of TBHQ fed to lab animals seemed to result in malignant stomach tumors, so if your pet rat has a weakness for Reese's maybe you should tell him to lay off the TBHQ.

Well I've found this very interesting, but somewhat tame. I now feel compelled to seek out the strangest, most out there food additives I can find. I'll get back to you after my next trip to Price Chopper.