Lice in food?
5 crazy ingredients that can end up in food and cosmetics
Symbolic picture: A woman takes a closer look at the ingredients in a bottle of ketchup.
© bodnarphoto / Adobe Stock
Well, maybe you’ve even feasted on a louse or two. Unusual ingredients can be hidden behind many E numbers or technical terms. We’ll give you a few of them to take with you.
You can hardly believe that! However, we are not necessarily aware of where lice are responsible for part of our food and where animal-derived substances are behind the unknown names. Many of them have been in use for years or decades and are of course considered harmless. But after reading, can you still buy some things like you did before? Knowing about the ingredients behind the E numbers or certain names in the list of ingredients is one thing: unusual – or even daunting. We’ll give you a few examples that you can make up your own mind about. So: Bon appetit!
Aphid droppings instead of flower nectar?
What do you think of when you reach for forest honey? Maybe not the following… The secretions of aphids are responsible for the delicious reddish-brown to dark-brown product of the honey variety. But of course it is not the case that someone is busy scraping this secretion off the affected plants. But it is still the bees who collect the sweetish secretion, the so-called honeydew, and use it for their honey production. According to the Lower Saxony State Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety (LAVES).
The ingredient is harmless to us humans and the strong and spicy aroma is popular with many honey lovers. Whether they know about the small insects or not is an open question. The honeydew producers can be, for example, scale insects, aphids or leaf hoppers. They drink the so-called phloem or sieve tube juice from plants and excrete it later as a sugary secretion. If a bee has discovered the excretion for itself, it will stay with this secretion during its trip, since the insects do not flower. Successful forager bees are also real trendsetters and let the others know where the good stuff can be found. In this way, bees from one hive collect the same ingredients more often. And the lice secretion honey is ready. A special feature is the honeydew of oak trees, which in Croatia and Bulgaria, for example, is not produced by insects but by the acorns themselves.
Lice in the ketchup
We’ve all looked at a product’s list of ingredients and ignored all the E numbers. But have you ever come across the number E120? Probably yes. It stands for carmine, a dye obtained from scale insects. However, the insects do not get off so lightly here. The red pigment is obtained by squeezing and decoctioning female cochineal aphids. E 120 or “real carmine” is found not only in some types of ketchup, but also in many red-colored products. These include sweets, drinks and sausages, for example. If you prefer to do without it: The synthetic variant of the substance is called E 124.
Crustaceans in cosmetics and food
Fibers from the shells of crustaceans are used in diet, hair, oral and skin care products, among others. The so-called chitin is found naturally in the shells of marine animals such as shrimp and crabs or in insects. Crab waste is mainly used for extraction. Chitosan is then made from the chitin. The dietary fiber can bind many times its own weight in fat, which in turn can help to lower cholesterol levels, for example. Because the fats bound in this way are excreted directly with the stool. However, a side effect of too much chitosan is not exactly nice either… if it is too much of a good thing, diarrhea occurs. Which isn’t really surprising given the increased amount of fat excreted… so it just slides, whether you want it or not.
Shiny and appetizing by insects
What do chocolate beans, coffee beans and cigarettes have in common? Shellac is often used in their manufacture. This is a type of resin that is used, for example, as a coating, gloss or binder. Again, the scale insects are responsible here. Because they secrete a secretion that can be harvested from the trees and processed. Well, not all that glitters is gold. Candy that is shiny is often coated with shellac to give it that look. Many nail polishes or cosmetic products also contain the resin. It is used as an adhesive in cigarettes. Shellac is marked as E 904.
wool wax or lanolin
This substance is mainly hidden in various cosmetics. Wool wax is obtained from the sweat and sebum glands of sheep and is used, for example, to make creams against neurodermatitis or psoriasis. However, it is sometimes also used in chewing gum so that it does not stick to dentures. What sounds very ugly at first is, for example, well established as a fat cream. The product is obtained from sheep fleece with the help of isopropanol. For this, the animals are shorn and the lanolin is removed from the washing water. The sweat glands themselves are not affected and the animals are not even aware of this extraction. Reference number: E 913.
Sources used: LAVES, CodeCheck, Oekotest, associations for independent health advice, German Lanolin Society