Food Research Project: White Roasted Sesame Seeds

I have been doing a research project in my 8th grade humanities class on food products brought in by us students. We were searching for information about the products we have brought in, to be specific how much control companies have over what goes on the nutrition label and how advertising affects what consumers buy. This project has come up very interesting, frustrating, and disappointing.

My research project was white roasted sesame seeds from a company called JFC. I approached this project with an open-ended research that got me no where. Yet with this open-ended research I did have some questions when I started. But before all this began I first started with an examination of the product casing. What caught my eye was the logo, not to mention the Japanese writing on the front. The Japanese writing only said goma which means sesame seeds or at least the part I could read. On average these sesame seeds seemed pretty healthy from the looks of the nutrition label, I mean what is there to hide about plain old seeds?

Being plain old seeds there must be no dirty little secrets on them, but I was going to go deeper in to this investigation. I was going to ask questions; being it's my nature to be stubborn and non accepting. Thinking that by my nature I just might get somewhere. The questions I had were "is there any fertilizers, pesticides, or chemical of any kind used on the sesame seeds?", "who picks them?", and "where are they grown and who grows them?"

I called the JFC head office and their New York Branch, but I didn't catch them on their business hours. I also went on their web site, http://www.jfc.com/, which was no use because it was set up to show other products they distribute, recipes, and contact numbers. But I'm not stopping there, I'm determined to catch them off guard (during their business hours) and answer my questions. So when I get the time to call them, I will add on the answers to this post.

-Mikiko