gmathis

Cake. Latte. Ice cream!

Where do you find this?

OMG – this is awesome… lol

Locally, at Price Cutter (a Kroger stepchild), a health food place or to, and don’t swear me to it, but I may have seen it at Wal-Mart.

gonna half to hunt fer it…. :)

I feel obliged to point out that sassafras is carcinogenic and can cause long-term liver damage. There’s a reason they don’t use it in root beer anymore.

Wow. Taken under advisement; and will keep moderation in mind.

I wonder how it’s even legal then?

Sassafras extracted from the roots is ok, and is still used today. Sassafras from the bark can cause damage to the liver over years of heavy use and can be carcinogenic and has been banned. This is because the extract from the bark contains safrole. Now, if the sassafras extract from the bark has the safrole removed, it is considered safe for consumption and is used commercially in teas and root beer.

We used to get tons of sassafras seedlings that we had to pull up each year, and the roots smelled heavenly! They come up by the dozens and I don’t even know where the parent tree is.

In the dendrology class I was in last semester, we used to pull twigs off the trees, pull off the bark and chew on the twigs, it was so good! These and Sweet Birch trees which smell and taste like evergreen mint!

Copied from Wikipedia (which I can’t always use as a credible source per my editors, but it’ll do for basic info: In 1960, the FDA banned the use of sassafras oil and safrole in commercially mass-produced foods and drugs based on the animal studies and human case reports.¹¹ Several years later, sassafras tea was banned,¹¹ a ban that lasted until the passage of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act in 1994.¹² Sassafras root extracts which do not contain safrole or in which the safrole has been removed are permissible, and are still widely used commercially in teas and root beers.

Label on my bottle looks to contain extracts only, so I feel quite safe in moderation :)