Tomato Pomace; Not What You Think

When the tomatoes are delivered to the plant they go onto a water flow channel to transport them through the plant. This washes them as well. They then go to a pressure steam area where the skin is peeled off. In effect they are washed again. This becomes the Pomace.

That description is a little confusing to read. It almost makes it sound like they are using the whole tomato, but they are just using the skins after they are peeled off.

I'm sorry, I don't see where Mordannas description is inaccurate... Tomato pomace is the skin of tomatoes that are skinned for other human uses... tomato pomace does not contain the whole compliment of nutrients; well if it is just the skin it can't contain all the nutrients of a whole tomato... tomato pomace may contain traces of pesticides; well if the tomatoes sitting in the bin at Wal-Mart still have pesticide traces on the skin, then I can certainly believe that the tomato skins in most dog food can still have pesticide traces.

That said, I know Eagle Pack is a reputable company who takes great care with their ingredients, and I believe that they probably use a good quality product in the correct way, however I don't believe that applies to all companies.

I tend to err on mordanna's side,rather then a company "tooting it's own horn",it's not as iff they are going to be completely upfront about anything if it has any negative conotations attached to it are they?
Eaglepack like many other companies take questions of concern from the general public and then answer them in a way that shows them in good light,afterall they can say what they want,cant they(John Burns of Burns dog food is a classic example of this).Nothing wrong with that,just a wise business move [] They do seem to be doing a good job of it as i have noticed EP feeders and followers of the GDL are almost militant and almost seem brainwashed by their claims and wont hear any negativity about them because if they say it's so then it is!!
I'm not having a dig at EP/GDL or the people who feed their food,this has just been a general observation of mine. [sm=happy.gif]

They do seem to be doing a good job of it as i have noticed EP feeders and followers of the GDL are almost militant and almost seem brainwashed by their claims and wont hear any negativity about them because if they say it's so then it is!!
I'm not having a dig at EP/GDL or the people who feed their food,this has just been a general observation of mine.

 
Isn't this simply siding with who you want to be right?   I don't really know much about either of these experts except for what I read here and I gather their opinions are not the same.  Because this Mordana says something does that make her right and every one else wrong?  Or the same with the Great Dane Lady. 
 
Little story here.  There was a lady that use to fish on the jetty all the time and she did  catch fish and they started calling her the Jetty Lady and she was always giving advice to novice fishermen and they took in everything she said.  As a matter of fact, I did when we first moved down here becuase she was there 7 days a week, she did almost always leave with a stringer of fish. 
 
But then one day I heard her telling some people she thought a dolphin had swam into her line and cut it with it's rough skin.  It had skin like a shark and cut thru line so easy.  WRONG.  Dolphins have skin like rubber.  It will not cut their the line.  Of course they can break it , but it isn't cut by the skin.
 
One day I hooked into a king fish, we saw it and knew it was a king.  But she told me it couldn't be a king fish because they didn't come up the channel there.  WRONG.  We have seen them caught even further up the channel and almost on the shoreline on the surft side of the jetty.
 
I learned she talked a lot and acted like she knew what she was talking about and people believed her because she was there every day and she did catch a lot of fish and she did sound like she was an expert.  But she wasn't.  True she knew a lot about catching certain fish, but she talked a lot of stuff she didn't really know and was wrong.
 
I  would say the experts know a lot about the dog food, nutrition, but I would not be surprised if some of what they say is just their opinion, not something that has been proven.
 
And as for the tomato skins still containing pesticides, the company did say they were very well washed....just as we wash the fruits and veggies we buy at the grocery store.  And if they don't get them free of pesticides with washing, neither are we.

And as for the tomato skins still containing pesticides, the company did say they were very well washed....just as we wash the fruits and veggies we buy at the grocery store. And if they don't get them free of pesticides with washing, neither are we.

 
I was going to point that out. Even organic foods can have sprays on them, depending on what's currently labeled as safe for organic use by whatever the current definition is, since the USDA and FDA don't have a definition for  "organic." And what makes Mordanna so right about the supposing that tomatoes are not washed before being used in a prepared food? Is it because she's from Germany? Is she right because she is against the big-bad Purina? Because, as you are pointing out, Eagle Pack uses tomato pomace and EP is quite popular here but, according to Mordanna, they must be bad since they use tomato pomace and Mordanna, from Germany, knows all about american dog food preparation.
 
Edie's right, too. A company will always have the right to defend itself and will say what they want to in that defense. Does what a company have to say have any relation to reality? Can a holistic dog food company paint the rosy picture of picking a hand full of this and a smattering of that and lovingly hand-grind it so they can bring it to you? Are a couple of the young fast workers going out and tracking a bison and killing it quickly and mercifully with, say, a Remington 700 series .243, then field dressing it, carrying it back and carving out a sirloin steak cut to be used in the recipe?
 
Or do they, especially the smaller companies that can't even afford their own factory, buy ingredients by the ton to be mixed and made? Once again, for those in the back of the audience, ingredients in kibble have to be ground to a fine particle before being used in the extrusion cooker. Even the tomato pomace is a dry particulate. More often than not, it was made into pomace somwhere else. You don't have a bunch of peace-loving hippies waiting for tomato skins to dry so that they can grind the dried remnants into something. You have John Q. Redneck running a big machine because the company stays profitable by producing shippable tonnage. But, any company making food ingredients must have quality control and procedures that are checked. The same people that busted Diamond can bust anyone. So, I think tomato pomace is fine, whether it is in EP, Innova, or Purina. They may get their tomato pomace from the same supplier. So, as you, Sandra, are asking, what makes Mordanna correct and everyone else wrong?  And for that matter, what makes tomato pomace in EP muy bueno and yet helps set Purina apart as ground-up crap? Is it because she's from Europe or that her creds are from a school system different than our own? Or because she says things people like to read? Does she work in the inspection branch that regulates food producers in a America? I don't know.
 
It was kind of like Ian Billinghurst with his creds from the Aussie education system making statements about the american vet education system when he's never been through it, though there are some people here who can find fault with our system. Do people believe him because he's got that quaint accent? I don't think most of us are that shallow but it is easy to get into a belief system and to end up justifying a number statements to support that position, even if evidence or reality turn out to be different.

I just canned tomatoes last week so maybe I have a LITTLE insight into those skins.
 
I do BUSHELS of tomatoes at a time.  Since I do LOTS of them, I use the tub as my water tray, with the hand held shower head IN the tub and running cold water through the tomatoes.  This does NOT remove all the dirt from the tomatos.  Sometimes they have really caked on dirt that has to be removed.
 
Next I scald the tomatos in a  boiling water bath to make the skins slip off more easily.  This also does not remove any dirt I might have missed.  Tomatoes go from the hot water bath into a sink full of ice water, and the skins are discarded into that water where they sit until I need to scoop them out.  Still some of the dirt can remain on the skins.  It is not uncommon for me to find a bit of sand in the bottom of the sink when I change my water.
 
As for the skins...wow, they are TOUGH.  Out of curiosity I took just a small handful and ran them through the blender....hmmm, still BIG pieces.  Next I put the pre blended pieces into the food processor.  Now these are heavy duty commercial equipment....neither could completely break the skins up.  No, I didn't dry them first, but I have made sun dried tomatoes to store, and the skins are STILL tough and inedible in dishes.  No amount of cooking breaks those skins down really well and I'm fairly certain that my body, or the dogs, isn't going to be able to either.
 
Now, occasionally I DO use stewed tomatoes in a pot of dog food, so I yes, did consider finding a way to use the skins.  I failed, miserably.  I often use the skin from peaches, pears, apples, etc IN the food, but gosh, THOSE I can run through the food processor and break down nicely.  Not so with the tomato skins.  There might be some food value in the skins....after all, we've always been told that MOST of the vitamins and minerals are IN the skins of fruits and veggies....but by gosh, it sure isn't easy to USE the darned things.  And I'm CHEAP, so I don't throw much away...but I haven't find a way to make these readily useable....

I think it's like the term "by products". If the bag says "by products" it could be anything from the half-rotten stinking garbage thrown out by the meat packing plant, or it could be high-quality nutritious animal innards. You don't know from reading the bag. Tomato pomace could be tomato skins carefully prepared solely for the dog food company, or it could be the contaminated garbage thrown out by the tomato processing plant.

ORIGINAL: ron2

I was going to point that out. Even organic foods can have sprays on them, depending on what's currently labeled as safe for organic use by whatever the current definition is, since the USDA and FDA don't have a definition for  "organic." And what makes Mordanna so right about the supposing that tomatoes are not washed before being used in a prepared food? Is it because she's from Germany? Is she right because she is against the big-bad Purina? Because, as you are pointing out, Eagle Pack uses tomato pomace and EP is quite popular here but, according to Mordanna, they must be bad since they use tomato pomace and Mordanna, from Germany, knows all about american dog food preparation.

What does Germany have to do with anything? Everyone comes from somewhere. Are we only supposed to consider the knowledge of US born people? Geez, how many great things would have been overlooked in history...

Anyway, I think that what Mordanna says gets so much credit because she has done as much research as anyone into commercial foods . She may not be a nutritionist (and she doesn't claim to be), but she knows what these products are and how they are made. This is a personal project, out of her pocket, done purely for the information value. There could be someone out there who has researched in the same way that she has, but I haven't seen them yet.

She endorses Eagle Pack, even though they use ingredients that are on her ingredients to avoid page because she evaluates each company on the quality of ingredients, processes they use, and reputation of the company. Her guidelines are just that, guidelines. They are a starting point for someone researching foods.

And she's not saying products aren't washed. I'm not sure where you got that. Just running water over a product is not washing it. I'm sure if that's all a person or company is doing then there still will be pesticide residue on the products. That's why they make fruit and vegetable wash and why people scrub each individual piece of produce with their hands or a soft brush.

Oh, and [linkhttp://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/09/15/tainted.spinach.ap/index.html]bagged spinach[/link] is supposed to be already 'washed' ready-to-eat too... [8|] Any mass-producing system of anything is going to miss stuff.

That description is a little confusing to read. It almost makes it sound like they are using the whole tomato, but they are just using the skins after they are peeled off.

 
  You're probably right; it was late when I read that and I was very tired and thought it was the pulp and not the skin that they used.  However, why would they throw away the pulp and use the skin if they start with the whole tomato?

They don't, they use the skins of tomatoes that are peeled for some other human use, probably canned stew tomatoes or something. When Eagle Pack says "the plant" I don't think they mean their plant, they mean the plant that the tomatoes are processed at.

I'm not having a dig at EP/GDL or the people who feed their food,this has just been a general observation of mine

   I disagree; I think you are "having a dig" at people who feed Eagle; it's hard to interpret what you said any other way when you use descriptions like " almost militant" and "brainwashed". My intention with this thread was to point out that we shouldn't rely completely on one source for information about the ingredients in dog food and assume that just because Mordanna says an ingredient is " an inexpensive by-product" that only serves as a filler doesn't mean that's always the case. I now stand corrected thanks to Kelly [],and Mordanna was right after all ,but I still think Eagle uses it for the reasons stated; a good source of lycopene and an ideal fiber source. 

They don't, they use the skins of tomatoes that are peeled for some other human use, probably canned stew tomatoes or something. When Eagle Pack says "the plant" I don't think they mean their plant, they mean the plant that the tomatoes are processed at

 
 Never thought of that they were referring to another plant; [&o] looks like I gave Eagle too much credit.

When I do tomatoes, I have probably 10-15 lbs of skins from each bushel.  Times that by the millions of bushels that are processed in the canneries.  If someone will BUY the "waste", they sure are going to SELL it.

 I was always  taught that so many of the nutrients are in the skins of fruits and veggies.  If what EP says is true about the tomatoe skins having such important things in them, then I would not call them a "cheap filler".  That sounds like they are just using them to fill the dog and it has no value.  Cheap maybe, but not just a cheap filler. Personally, it if was something good for my dog, I wouldn't care if the maker got the product for free.
 
However, I can't say one way or the other if the tomato skins have the value EP claims.  So in this case, I do not know if tomatoe skins are a cheap filler as that Mordana claims, or a cheap valuable food as EP claims.