Berries Over Bugs! We Can Do Better Than This!

Although this is a partnered post, all opinions are my own.

It’s morning. The kids fed and are off to school. Now it’s finally time for you to eat. Coffee is poured, so you grab some strawberry yogurt out of the fridge. STOP! I hate to be a total breakfast buzz kill, but have you looked at the ingredients?

Check your yogurt! If you enjoy Fruit on the Bottom, Light and Fit Greek, Activia, and Oikos and others, chances are it contains an innocuous ingredient called carmine. Carmine when talking about color is a rich red, slightly purple pigment. Sounds beautiful, right? Carmine when talking about ingredients? Not so beautiful. Carmine is made of the carcasses of beetles.

Berries over Bugs

I can’t help but wonder why these companies don’t keep it simple and use actual fruit and berries. Is the cost of farming the insects and later chemically treating them considerably lower than the cost of real harvested fruit and berries? The idea of a someone conjuring up food coloring from cochineal beetles is sickening to me.

Does this sound appealing to anyone?

To prepare carmine, the powdered scale insect bodies are boiled in ammonia or a sodium carbonate solution…
^[1]

No? Maybe this sounds better…

Treatment of carmine with aqueous ammonia provides the traditional soluble red form of the colourant.
^[2]

Regardless of how you word it, carmine is still derived from bugs.

The FDA requires this ingredient to be listed, which is good {I’d just 86 the bugs all together} – but if someone doesn’t know what carmine is, how is that helpful to the consumer?

So, we’re spreading the word and making it known. We’re sharing this info with you because we think Dannon can and should do better.

Carmine has been reported to cause severe and life-threatening allergic reactions with some people. This is not an ingredient to masquerade and pretty up by calling it anything other than what it is; insect derived coloring. Though, I suspect that might be a turn off for some people {which is why it is labeled as carmine in the first place, right?}.

Head over and Take Action, join thousands of other supporters, and let your voice be heard. Tell Dannon that you expect better of them. Lay on some motherly guilt, for good measure.

And then, go take a look at the labels on the food in your fridge.
^{[1] Carmine – Wikipedia↩
[2] COCHINEAL AND CARMINE – Food and Agriculture Organization↩}