Gross. I just found out something awful about the food industry that I thought I had to share. I am reading a book called Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser - and it goes into how gross our "food" supply is. On the chapter on food additives, he tells us about a particular coloring agent called " cochineal extract" It is also known as carmine or carminc acid.

This stuff is made from the bodies of female Dactlyopius coccus Costa, a small insect harvested mainly in Peru and the Canary Islands. The bugs eat cactus berries and the color from the berries turns the females and their unhatched larve red.
The insects are collectred, dried and and ground into a pigment. "it takes about 70,000 of them to produce one pound of carmie, which is used to make processed foods look pink, red or purple. Dannon strawberry Yogurt gets its color from carmine, as do many frozen fruit bars, candies , fruit fillings and Ocean Spray pink -grapefrult juice drink.

And guess what? Because the ingredient is oranic, these products get to file them away as "natrual colors"

EWW! Why doesn't anybody have to tell us we are eating bugs? Exotic as they may be, they are BUGS! I wonder what food color they get when they grind up roaches and spiders. This just makes me want to vomit. I drink pink-grapefuit juice all the time, and you know, I always thought "100%" juice was 100% juice. But the COLOR isn't juice - it is damned "carmine red". Who knew that they couldn't get pink grapefruits to shoot out pink juice?! No, they have go and smash BUGS into it. Icky, nasty dead bugs.

So actually, I have been eating bugs for years. I thought the term "bug juice" only applied to red Kool-Aid.

I am thinking that the person in charge of food coloring who decided to mush up bugs and hide them in food is the same guy on the playground from 30 years ago that used to set creatures on fire with a magnifying glass and the sun out on the playground. This same character tried to get people to eat chocolate-covered ants.

Since nobody would do it, he decided to grow up and become a "food-scientist" so that he could nefariously get people to eat the bugs. What the hell is a "food-scientist" anyhow? When did food become a science? I guess around the same time that store-bought bread started having 93 ingredients, 89 of which can't be pronounced.

I am starting to agree with J.J. Rousseau. Things WERE much better before we grouped into societies and set about changing the natural order of things.

Harumph!