to never again eat, drink, or even touch any food that is even remotely pink?

[CoteDAzur]

Am I being unreasonable to sputter out the cherry yoghurt I was eating as I read the following, and swear I will never ever touch any food stuff that is of any shade of pink or red?

(article about the ingredients of Danone's Shape 'Feel Fuller' Strawberry Yoghurt)

Colour:

The pink colour of the yoghurt derives from cochineal (E120) obtained from the female scale insect (Dactylopius coccus) which lives on cacti. The insects produce the intensely red carminic acid molecule to protect themselves against predators. They are harvested by hand and it takes 150,000 insects to yield a kilo of dye. The insects are killed by heating and then ground to powder. The dye is extracted with ammonia or sodium bicarbonate.

Cochineal is back in fashion as a "natural" food dye because of the belief that artificial food dyes cause hyperactivity in children.

This is from this month's Wired magazine, UK edition. My eyes popped out and they might never go back again

[bows] all part of the service moddom.

yup, it's for fining. (stopping it being cloudy and separating the sediment)

The Co-op has a heck of a lot of information on food additives. it's worth looking at their website (i assume it's all on there) they were very pioneering in that field: being the first to put whether something was vegetarian and whether something was tested on animals etc.

"Eggs with bright yellow yolks."

this one is actually a good thing: chickens who eat grass and cabbage (ie good green stuff) lay eggs with more yellowy/orange yolks. the paler the yolk, the less grazing (free-ranging) the hen has done

Yes but my point was (athough I didn't elaborate) that battery hens are fed dye to make the yolks yellow unnaturally. Consumers want yellow yolks so the farmers give them yellow yolks.

It was in response to the question - why do we have dye in our foods, what's wrong with leaving it as is.

My dd was horrified to find out that gelatine comes from hoofs and pigs skin. I was glad, she can't look at her bag of jelly worms now

I thought a certain amount of insect parts were allowed into most food products, because of the difficulty of keeping factories completely insect free.......

I don't think I could eat a cockroach. But then what are prawns but the cockroaches of the sea floor.......

[boak]

s&d that reminds me: there are certain allowable levels of insect parts in flour

will try and find link

yum

surely prawns are woodlice of the sea

ImSoNotTelling i didn't know they did this. (yellow egg yolk dye)

but thankfully, we have regs in place to make the origin known on the box (and actually on the egg itself: it has to be stamped with:
0 if it's organic
1 if it's free-range
2 if barn
3 if caged/battery

talking of yellow dye:
margarine is by nature white, but it is dyed yellow because people didn't like it to look so fake.

although, i think that margarine is illegal now, but people still call spreads margarine. (can't give a quote or source i'm afraid)

Doesn't bother me at all.
When we eat flour , we eat weevils / weevil eggs.
I will eat fish with it's head on. I enjoy meat and I enjoy fish. My children are also not squeamish about their food.
If you pick brambles and eat them before soaking them , you have possibly eaten maggoty things (no idea what they are , if you soak brambles they wriggle out and float to the top).
I have to say that I would be very unlikely to eat a little pile of the beetles but I am happy to eat food containing the dye.

nickelbabe: I've heard the same of margarine being illegal, but what I can find online is mentions of coloured margarine being illegal in the past to dissuade people from buying those in favour of butter.

But I swear I watched one of those science programs saying that pure margarine is actually illegal to sell, but I can't find anything about it and am really curious now!

I knew this 10 years ago, how did you miss this?

Isnt there some fact/statistic about in your lifetime you will at a certain amount of spiders in your sleep as well??

We always used to say it was made from cockroaches. Yum.

Nancydrewrocks - How did you get your dragon to turn green? I tried to make a green train for ds's birthday and after adding most of a bottle it was still a horrid toothpaste green. Then I noticed the bottle said only use a tiny bit per packet of icing. The party was for 2 and 3 year olds so I binned it and did chocolate in case I poisoned them all.