Red Dye

 Kids have asked me what the red coloring in their Flaming Hot Cheetos is, and I have told them that it is probably made from a certain kind of crushed beetle. I was wrong. The ingredients in Cheetos are:

Ingredients

Enriched Corn Meal (Corn Meal, Ferrous Sulfate, Niacin, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, and Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil (Contains One or More of the Following: Corn, Soybean or Sunflower Oil), flamin hot seasoning (Maltodextrin, salt, Sugar, Monosodium Glutamate, Autolyzed Yeast Extract, Citric Acid, Artificial Color (Including Red 40 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake, Yellow 6, Yellow 5), Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil, Hydrolyzed Soy Protein, Cheddar Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes), Whey, Onion Powder, Whey Protein Concentrate, Corn Syrup Solids, Natural Flavor, Buttermilk, Garlic Powder, Disodium Phosphate, Sodium Diacetate, Sodium Caseinate, Lactic acid, disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, nonfat milk, Sodium Citrate, Carrageenan) , salt.

The food coloring is artificial and not very good for you . . . not like the more natural food coloring made from bugs.

Much of the red coloring we use in food is actually made of crushed bugs. Yep, creepy, crawly bugs. 

Cochineal insects, as they’re known, are scale insects that, in their pre-crushed state, look like this:

Cochineal insects can be found on prickly pear cacti in the North American deserts, where they spends most of their lives sucking away on the plants’ sap. They produce a bitter, crimson-colored pigment called carminic acid, which they store in their guts and use to ward off predators. 

To make red dye, manufacturers dry the cochineals and grind them into a powder. The powder then turns a bright red when mixed with water.

It may sound gross, but humans have been brightening up life with the crushed guts of cochineals for centuries.

The Mixtec Indians of pre-Hispanic Mexico even farmed and domesticated the bugs, using the dye to color their clothing and show off their social status. By the 1900s, Americans began using cochineal dye to color a variety of foods, including sausages, pies, dried shrimp, candy and jams.

But when word got out that the crushed-bug dye was in Starbucks’ beloved Strawberries and Creme Frappuccinos in 2012, people started to freak.

Starbucks ditched the dye completely, but cochineal dye is still widely used in the food industry — just check the labels on colored Jell-O packages, candies and yogurts for the words carmine, carminic acid or cochineal extract.

And while cochineal dye definitely has an ick-factor, the alternatives are synthetic, including one dye that is made from coal tar sludge, according to Bob Alderink of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

“Cochineal dye has been around for centuries. It is a natural, renewable resource,” Alderink explains in a video. “And in my opinion, it’s just plain cool.”

I got my information from :
http://www.fooducate.com/app#!page=product&id=1E3DCB04-7564-11E0-A55F-1231380C180E
and
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/red-food-dye-cochineal-bugs_us_56fafd25e4b083f5c605f3dd

You can go to these web sites and read more about the subject.