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Are insects actually added to food in the US?
Someone told me that insects — real, actual bugs — are used in modern food products. (I don’t just mean incidental parts that happen to be in grain and Fig Newtons and the like.) I’m pretty much positive that kind of thing stopped being used like a century ago. Please tell me I’m not really eating bugs.
Don’t bug out
Well… you’re probably eating bugs. Sorry. And yes, we mean insects are added to food found in modern, first-world countries — and not just in those creepy lollipops that have crickets embedded in them or the worm in a bottle of mezcal.
Seeing red?
The most major bug-food you’re likely to encounter on a fairly regular basis is carmine (aka carminic acid, cochineal, Carmine 40, E120, Crimson Lake, Natural Red 4 and CI75470).
Carmine/cochineal is used as a red dye, and is made from the crushed female Dactylopius coccus, a little beetle bug that lives on certain cactus plants in South and Central America. Carmine is a bold colorant — it’s what makes a lot of strawberry yogurt pink, enhances the shade of several brands of pink grapefruit juice, livens up candy like Nerds and Mentos, brings out the red in some popular frozen dinners — plus is found in products like shampoo and clothing dye. (See a list of some foods containing carmine here.) Though they look pretty blah on the outside, there’s lots of pigment inside those little critters.
Ick? Well, just think: By using carmine, at least the front label of whatever product can tout that it “contains only natural colors.”
A bug’s life
The other two common bug-related foods aren’t actually made from bugs, but by bugs. By the little guys’ secretions.
First up is confectioner’s glaze (otherwise known as shellac, candy glaze, pharmaceutical glaze, “glazing agent” and E904), which is produced by some insects actually related to the little carmine makers — they’re both in the Coccidae family. The glaze is used to make things pretty and glossy, and gives them another layer of protection.
Again, it’s the girls doing the heavy lifting — this food-grade glaze/shellac is secreted by the female lac bug (Kerria lacca), who lives in the forest of Thailand and India. She guzzles down some tree sap, and out the other end comes the raw shellac. The resin is then scraped from the trees, melted down and filtered, and then dropped on to your Junior Mints, shiny apples, into your Chex Mix, as well as hundreds of other products — even pills.
What’s really wild about shellac, though, is that it’s also the same stuff that is used to refinish wood floors (and once was the main material used to make gramophone records in the days before vinyl). Not too many things can boast of being both a foodstuff and a household varnish!
Finally, of course, there’s what the bees make: wax and honey. Honey has long been a common food product, and the beeswax — in addition to being used in candles and beauty products — is used to shine up everything from fruit to candy and gum.
Bugs in history
The insects mentioned herein and their creations have been used for not just hundreds but thousands of years, by both primitive societies and modern-day man.
It’s interesting to realize that even in this day and age of seemingly every conceivable thing being made inside a laboratory or factory, these little tiny bugs are still helpful enough to be part of billions of daily lives… even if some of us would really rather forget all about the creepy-crawly critter connection.
Photo of the cochineal opuntia in Peru by putneymark
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