Leading up to the last election, the president of Goya Foods stood up on TV and praised Donald Trump. Puerto Ricans call this event "Goya Gate", and called for a boycott of Goya's products, including those most used: sauces Sofrito, Recaito, and seasoning Sazon.

The internet now has plenty of recipes on how to make these easily at home, and from REAL INGREDIENTS. The ingredient list for Goya's Sofrito is very long, and reads like an explosion in a chemical warehouse. Their formula for Recaito is much shorter and more reasonable, but still features MSG in the middle of the ingredients list. Goya's formula for Sazon has MSG as the first and principle ingredient.

A Colombian cookbook I recently acquired has the author's statement, "Unfortunately, in much of North America, Latin foods are available from only one brand, the name of which I will not say".

Myself, I'm perfectly happy to support the boycott. I've always avoided Goya products due to their romance with unnatural ingredients. The one exception is their canned Pigeon Peas, for which I found no substitute, even here in Los Angeles. Mercifully the ingredient list is just Pigeon Peas, Water, and Salt. But now, I've found the local Indian market has Pigeon Peas in the frozen foods section.

Incidentally, unlike all other canned beans, Pigeon Peas are not from rehydrated dried beans, but are canned as fresh shelled beans.

. . that Goya's canned beans are among the best. Most include Calcium Chloride, a firming agent used in many foods and not harmful.

Some include Calcium Disodium EDTA, a chelating agent that binds to metals to protect flavor and color. It is considered safe even in much higher dosages than found in food, and is used to treat lead and mercury poisoning. It is very poorly absorbed by digestion in any case, about 5%.

And, speaking of Calcium Chloride. A great many Italian recipes say you MUST use Italian canned tomatoes. Double blind tastings have uniformly shown California Central Valley canned tomatoes to be distinctly superior.

The Italians claimed this was because California tomatoes were allowed to use Calcium Chloride as a firming agent. Now Italians are also allowed to, and do use Calcium Chloride in their tomatoes. The blind tasting results have not changed.

Blind testing often comes up with unexpected results.

There have been a couple large, well organized, testings of Violins, pitching modern violins against multi-million dollar Strads and Amatis. The testers were all highly reputed violinists represented on many recordings. The modern violins won hands down.