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August 14, 2006

You've Been Eating Bugs

I'll bet you didn't know that any time you eat strawberry Yoplait yogurt, Good & Plenty candy, or Tropicana grapefruit juice you are eating crushed beetles. Yes, it's true. That lovely pink food coloring comes from the female cochineal beetles and their eggs. The food industry doesn't call it "crushed beetles," however. No, in industry-speak, it's known as "carmine" or "cochineal extract."

Food activists are trying to change disclosure requirements. The Food & Drug Administration has received numerous complaints over the issue and is now in the process of considering a proposal to require color additives like the cochineal extract to be disclosed on the labels of all foods that use them. … [C]onsumers want to know what they're eating. Some are allergic to bug extract; others are vegetarians.

It's not just pink bug juice that people don't know they are eating. In fact, farmers can pick from a pallet of food-enhancing pigments to feed to chickens to make their flesh look more appetizing in the store and their eggs more yellow-orange. Farm-raised salmon, who can't get their pink color from eating wild shrimp, instead are fed coloring chemicals that may negatively affect people's vision.

A walk down the grocery aisle for processed food is an eye opener—the bacon and ham get their red tint from sodium ascorbate, an antioxidant and color stabilizer, and the Betty Crocker icing gets its bright white color not from natural cream and egg whites but from titanium dioxide, a mineral that is also used in house paints.

For some time now, I've been exceptionally grateful that my mother brought me up on home cooking, made from scratch, rather than pre-packaged, processed food. Whenever possible, I've had a big garden and grown my own produce, and we almost exclusively eat fish we catch and meat we hunt. Not being fond of eating bugs, I think I'll perhaps be even more careful now.

Posted by Becky at August 14, 2006 10:29 AM