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A German baker who has reportedly been
selling sawdust cookies for around two decades has recently been
ordered to stop, as the finely milled wood has been deemed unfit
for human consumption.
An administrative court in the southwestern German city of
Karlsruhe has upheld a decision to ban the sale of cookies made
with sawdust, despite the producer’s claim that they were a
traditional vegetable product. The unnamed baker had been
operating a mail order business, selling his sawdust cookies all
over Germany. He openly listed sawdust as an ingredient on the
packaging of his biscuits, and had already written to the city
of Karlsruhe about his practice back in 2004, but received no
answer. Then, in 2017, a routine examination of a biscuit sample
led to a sales ban which he then contested in court.
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“These cookies must not be allowed into the food chain because
they are not safe, and are, objectively seen, not fit for human
consumption,” the Baden-Württemberg’s State Higher
Administrative Court decision read. In it, the judges added that
despite the baker’s claim that sawdust was a traditional
ingredient, actually “it isn’t even used in the industrial
animal feed sector”.
The court argued that sawdust was used as a filler and carrier
for technical applications, and was not on the list of novel
edible ingredients approved by the European Union. Judges added
that there was no evidence of any significant use of sawdust for
human consumption, or history of it as a safe ingredient, but
the manufacturer disagreed.
The baker claimed that the “microbiological” sawdust he used in
his cookies was a “herbal product” similar to bran, and
therefore suitable as a substitute for flour. As for historical
use of sawdust and other wood byproduct in food, there is a lot
of it, dating back from the 1700s to present day.
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According to the Conucopia Institute, in the 1700s, European bakers
started using sawdust in their products, so they could lower the cost
and thus attract more customers.
“At some point some clever miller was like, ‘Hey, what if we combine the
flour with sawdust?’” Penn State food historian Bryan McDonald told the
Cornucopia Institute. “‘We’re selling stuff by weight, and people don’t
really have a good way of knowing what’s flour and what’s sawdust.’”
However, sawdust and ingredients like wood pulp, wood flour and
cellulose were found in foods as recently as 2016. For example,
lab-tests commissioned by Bloomberg Business found wood pulp and
cellulose in several cheese brands sold in the US.
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