Bugs in My Juice!

Okay, I had heard this before, but I never believed it. Ground bugs in my food in America!?!?

I had to see if it was true after reaching for my weakness, pink grapefruit juice. I thought that pink grapefruit juice was from pink grapefruits. Which this turns out to be true but the color of fresh squeezed pink grapefruits and the color of my juice was clearly self-evident, it was too pink from the bottle. So, sure enough, checking the label I found that my juice contained "Carmine" on its list of ingredients.

Being a bit curious I looked this up on our favorite search engine. (Yes, I admit to being a googlean.)

Turns out that "carmine" is found in a host of other products ranging from lipstick to food products, and from clothing dyes to artist paints, the simple truth is that it is everywhere I turned. So what exactly are we eating drinking, wearing, and decorating with?

Carmine comes from cochineal, a species of beetle I grew up calling a mealy bug. I remember rubbing them off of our roses and vegetables in the farm garden and getting stained fingers every time I did. (Hey, they would have killed out plants by sucking out their juices; I was saving the plants life.)

This little bug is "harvested" in large batches ground up, processed with alum, cream of tartar, stannous chloride, or potassium hydrogen oxalate; sometimes egg white, fish glue, or gelatin are added before during or after the extraction process.

The significance of this is that on a daily basis we are consuming the beetles in the form of lipstick and foods and wearing them on our bodies as clothing. In addition to this some people are allergic even as far as anaphylactic shock and death. Even after all this, this beetle is still being used and touted on the label as the "natural" ingredient carmine.

I don't know about you, but the thought of running out and scraping those white fuzzy bugs off of plants and chewing on them is enough to make my stomach turn.