Vic2rsBlog: Coming soon to a food lable in your house…
When you dig into a strawberry Yoplait yogurt, take a moment to contemplate where the beautiful pink color comes from. Strawberries? Think again. It comes from crushed bugs. Specifically, from the female cochineal beetles and their eggs.
Yummy! Chile has huge cochineal beetle farms that supply much of the red color for clothing and food. I believe they thrive on certain cacti. Hey, Yoplait ain’t yoghurt anyway! It contains all sorts of crap and doesn’t even taste close to what yoghurt is supposed to taste like. Can’t get food that is more processed than that.
I seem to remember that the reason Buddhist monks in South-East Asia wear orange robes is that the red color has always been derived from the beetle, while the orange is a plant-derived color.
When you consider how lovely strawberries themselves are and how little of that juice it would take to color the yogurt, it’s pretty strange they’d turn to imported bugs for the right shade. Can’t be much cheaper than mixing in an actual strawberry or so. Maybe they’re lower in calories or something.