Apparently In 2016 Lab-tests Commissioned By Bloomberg Business,

found wood pulp and cellulose in several cheese brands sold in the US.

so it came as a bit of a surprise to a German baker who has reportedly been selling sawdust cookies for around two decades, who has recently been ordered to stop, photograph Olia Nayda/Unsplash, An administrative court in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe has upheld a decision to ban the sale of cookies made with sawdust, despite the producer’s claim that they were a traditional vegetable product. The unnamed baker had been operating a mail order business, selling his sawdust cookies all over Germany. He openly listed sawdust as an ingredient on the packaging of his biscuits, and had already written to the city of Karlsruhe about his practice back in 2004, but received no answer. Then, in 2017, a routine examination of a biscuit sample led to a sales ban which he then contested in court, “These cookies must not be allowed into the food chain because they are not safe, and are, objectively seen, not fit for human consumption,” the Baden-Württemberg’s State Higher Administrative Court decision read. In it, the judges added that despite the baker’s claim that sawdust was a traditional ingredient, actually “it isn’t even used in the industrial animal feed sector”, 

photograph Shop Reddish, the baker claimed that the “microbiological” sawdust he used in his cookies was a “herbal product” similar to bran, and therefore suitable as a substitute for flour. As for historical use of sawdust and other wood byproduct in food, there is a lot of it, dating back from the 1700s to present day, according to the Conucopia Institute, in the 1700s, European bakers started using sawdust in their products, so they could lower the cost and thus attract more customers, “At some point some clever miller was like, ‘Hey, what if we combine the flour with sawdust?’” Penn State food historian Bryan McDonald told the Cornucopia Institute. “‘We’re selling stuff by weight, and people don’t really have a good way of knowing what’s flour and what’s sawdust.’” so is the ban on the bakers sawdust cookies a good or bad thing?