Friday January 27, 2006

Bad news for vegetarians and others who don't like eating ground-up bugs. It turns out that "bug juice"--that ubiquitous summer camp drink--probably does actually contain real, ground-up bugs. And so do a number of other foods and drinks that are vivid red or bright orange in color.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal today, cochineal extract and carmine are two coloring agents made from the cochineal beetle. In the case of carmine, the bugs are ground up to create a stable, vivid red coloring agent.

Good & Plenty candy, several flavors of yogurt, Tropicana Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice, and several other drinks are listed in the article.

I was going to blog about this last summer during bug juice season, but before I did I re-checked the local supermarket and found that "carmine" had disappeared from the list of ingredients in ruby red grapefruit juice and was replaced by the more generic "artificial color." Since ground-up bugs don't fit my definition of artificial, I figured that bugs had become too expensive and manufacturers and adopted some other approach. But no. It turns out that under current labelling laws it is okay to describe ground-up bugs as "artificial color", or even just "color added."

The FDA has published a labelling proposal which would require manufacturers to label these products as containing either carmine or cochineal. This has been brought about by objections related to vegetarianism, kosher foods, and the fact that a small number of people have potentially severe allergic reactions to these compounds.

The 54-page labelling proposal is here.