For lunch I made a sandwich, using some Brownberry 100% Whole Wheat Bread (currently my favorite substrate for sandwich construction) and noticed a peculiarity among the ingredients.

The peculiarity:
Near the end of the ingredient list, “soy flour”, in boldface and with an asterisk, is listed. The appended footnote remarks that the amount of soy flour is “trivial”, specifically: “*Trivial amount of Soy Flour.” The list continues from there.

Questions regarding the above peculiarity:
What constitutes a trivial amount of soy flour? Is this a typical method for portioning soy flour? If it’s a trivial amount, how do the manufacturers know? And why bother to tell us? Can there be a grave amount of soy flour? What about a solemn or flighty amount?

Further, the trivial levels of soy flour present in the bread are still less trivial by weight than five other ingredients, if the convention of listing ingredients by descending order of weight has been adhered to (and I see no reason why Brownberry would throw this convention aside, since they’re obviously worried about the trivial amount of soy flour). Are the ingredients listed after soy flour even more trivial than soy flour? How trivial does something have to be before it is trivial enough not to merit inclusion in the ingredients list? How many parts per million?

Also:
Before any phantom nitpickers lay into me, I realize that the emboldening of soy flour is to alert prospective ingesters to its status as an allergen. That just deepens the enigma, as both whey and nonfat milk are boldly listed on the ingredients after soy flour, and soy lecithin is listed as well, and it isn’t even in boldface type. Still, soy flour is getting special attention.

Other questions:
1. What is the manufacturing process behind the self-contradicting substance “raisin juice concentrate”?
2. What is datem?

Clearly, some inquiries must be made.