Veganism Did You Say? We Say Do Like It Halal or Haram?
By Helen Soteriou and Will Smale, Business reporters, BBC News.
If you are horrified by the thought of eating insects, the bad news is that you have probably done so many, many times. This is because one of the most widely used red food colorings - carmine - is made from crushed up bugs. The insects used to make carmine are called cochineal, and are native to Latin America where they live on cacti. Now farmed mainly in Peru, millions of tiny insects are harvested every year to produce the coloring.
A staple of the global food industry, carmine is added to everything from yogurts and ice creams, to fruit pies, soft drinks, cupcakes, and doughnuts.
The FDA has required food manufacturers to disclose whether red cochineal beetles are among their products' ingredients. These beetles are farmed, harvested, dried, and crushed to produce a red dye called carmine that, until this year, had been disguised in the ingredient list as "artificial color," "color added" or the all-encompassing "natural and artificial coloring."
The cochineal is a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha, from which the natural dye carmine is derived. A primarily sessile parasite native to tropical and subtropical South America through North America, this insect lives on cacti in the genus Opuntia, feeding on plant moisture and nutrients.
Carmine is the aluminum lake of the coloring agent, cochineal, a natural pigment derived from the dried female insect Coccus cacti (cochineal). In addition to its use in cosmetics and personal care products. Carmine is used as a food coloring and may often be found in juice, yogurt, and candy.
It is also used extensively in the cosmetics industry and is found in many lipsticks.
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