Fake Butter Smell Cripples Popcorn Workers

(PHOTO: LINNELL ESLER)
I always felt that the microwave popcorn butter flavor was noxious, and now I know why. It’s because it’s chock full of diacetyl, a perfectly normal byproduct of fermentation that lends a buttery or butterscotchy taste to food in large doses but also has an evil side. It causes debilitating lung damage in artificial butter factory workers amongst other pockets of the flavor industry.

The disease, called "popcorn worker’s lung" is actually bronchiolitis obliterans, a debilitating form of lung damage which normally strikes those exposed to toxic gas or as a manifestation of transplant rejection (ironically lung transplants are the only known treatment of popcorn lung). Suffice to say it’s nasty and people are lobbying hard to protect flavor industry workers against the effects of inhaling that seemingly wholesome fake flavor in large doses.

In the past five years, the flavor industry has dished out over $100 million to popcorn workers lung victims in lawsuits. California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber has introduced a bill to ban diacetyl in the workplace by 2010.

The next logical question is, what does this mean for the unwitting public? Judging by how the smell of fake butter permeates the air after nuking microwave popcorn, one imagines consumer exposure to be worthy of investigation. Back in 2003, the EPA commissioned a study to look at the effects of microwave popcorn in the home. It was slated to be finished by the end of that year but got stalled when the principal investigator was transferred to tend "homeland security duties." The EPA anticipates publication of the study in an academic journal by the middle of 2007. To which I reply, "pop goes the weasel."