By Melissa Breyer, Mother Nature Network Would you like a cow
eyeball with your burger? One of the more-enduring urban legends
about McDonald's is that their hamburgers contain cow eyeballs.
While this has not proven to be the case, their Baked Hot Apple
Pie does contain duck feathers, or at least an ingredient
commonly derived from such. Truth can be just as strange as
fiction. How have duck feathers become a viable ingredient in
apple pie? Welcome to the world of food additives. People have
been adding flavors, spices, natural preservatives and ripening
agents to food since antiquity. But as the popularity of highly
processed food has risen dramatically since the 1950s, so has
the astounding array of bizarre chemical additives used in food
manufacturing. Fast-food recipes seem to be born more from the
laboratory than from farm or field. [ Related infographic:
What's really inside your McDonald's oatmeal? ] And although the
powers that be deem these food-additive chemicals safe, the
science fiction of it all