Think Bigg

WARNING: Don’t read this post if you want to continue to eat your Yoplait in blissful ignorance!

Business Week Online recently published a story entitled, “What’s In My Food?” What IS in my food? Turns out there might be some pretty unpleasant stuff.

According to the Business Week article,

If you like Yoplait strawberry yogurt, Tropicana grapefruit, orange-strawberry juice, or Hershey’s Good & Plenty candies, chances are you will be sucking on the red coloring extracted from the female cochineal beetle and her eggs. These insects live on cactus plants in Peru and the Canary Islands.

According to the best-selling book by Eric Schlosser, Chew on This, the female bug feeds on cactus pads, and color from the cactus gathers in her body. The bugs are collected, dried, and ground into a coloring additive. It takes 70,000 of the insects to make a pound of carmine dye, as it is known. The Food & Drug Administration doesn’t require that this cochineal be identified in the ingredients. Manufacturers simply identify it as an “artificial color.”

But it turns out the the ground up bugs might be the least of your worries. To find out what other grocery items might not be everything they appear, read on.

More excerpts from Business Week:

The plump, juicy chicken sitting on the supermarket shelf is likely to have been fed canthaxanthin, a pigment added to chicken feed to enhance poultry’s yellow color and make it look palatable. And egg-laying hens are also given a dye along with their feed, making egg yolks vary in color from light yellow all the way to bright orange.

The fresh, farm-raised salmon that shoppers buy also get their orange-red hue from eating the chemicals astaxanthin and canthaxanthin.

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.

But you probably already knew that if you can’t pronounce the list of package ingredients, you probably shouldn’t be eating it.