as the readings list off to the right indicates, i recently read a geeky book about the natural history of colors—that is, all the plants and soils and stuff that we humans have used to dye and paint stuff for thousands of years or so.
bearing witness to my hipness, cnn.com says that the u.s.’s fda is now considering whether or not red food and cosmetics dyed with crushed bugs should be labelled as such. (See the little bugs here.)
however, like much of what pops up on cnn.com, i think this bug thing may be not a big deal. apart from those of us whose religious beliefs forbid eating bugs, i don’t think that seeing that some of our foods’ “natural colorings” are mushed female insects will bother us consumers. i assume a lot of us kind of already knew about this but have been too worried about yellow #5 shrinking our testicles to worry about eating bug bits. likewise, i suspect that many women do much worse in search of a sexy, fertile look than rubbing dead bug parts on their eyes, cheeks, and lips. besides, there must be even nastier stuff than bugs in our deodorants. and don’t even get me started on that soylent green that is all the rage…
Sometimes I forget gelatin is the crushed bones of cows and horsies, and I lust for Jello.
by greg—Jan 29, 09:07 AM
i’m sooooo happy you blogged about chochineal…more on this later, though.
by hermit x—Jan 29, 11:28 AM
i had just seen this story on cnn.com, too…do you really think people wouldn’t care about crushed bugs in their strawberry ice cream? i know the typical american has a good deal of distance from the reality of what constitutes the food he/she eats on a daily basis, but geesh. i guess it’s not fear factor nasty, but still…
by kathy—Jan 29, 02:25 PM
i think the average person prob feels that we have enough to worry about already—between the serious concerns (e.g., health, bills, etc.) and the less-serious concerns (e.g., what will happen on my fave tv show? who will win the big game)—that maybe we have a “don’t ask, don’t tell, and try not to remember if someone does tell” policy in place vis a vis the stuff that we put into and on our bodies. but i know there are wide individual differences in how much people care about these things. (See, for example, the green pary and the anti-g.m.-food crowd.)
that’s not really my professional opinion, though. my profession’s opnion would be that people are “cognitive misers” when it comes to dealing with the crazy amount of info we are constantly confronting. we focus on what seems really important and mostly have to disregard the rest. (for instance, paid much attention to the sensations originating from your butt cheeks in the last few minutes? for your sake, i hope not.)
by chris—Jan 29, 03:18 PM
That we select what we want/need to know, though, has been the realm where the market and product-regulation has most often clashed, usually at the harm of someone or some creature or some culture or some habitat. Freakonomics takes a version of this up, too, but notes the opposite effect, that when exclusive information is made more available the people, creatures, cultures, and habitats that might have been harmed may actually be saved. (It’s pretty light handed on this, though, and in this respect limits its scope to uncovering how real estate agents cheat people out of on average $10,000 per sale.) To me the question is more in how one decides what is important and what is not, and what role persuasion has in creating importance. I think of Silent Spring, for example, and realize that before Carson wrote it, more people thought killing bugs was most important; afterwards, everybody was into saving birds.
by greg—Jan 29, 04:09 PM
Which is to say (on further thought, and by way of turning the above into a question), what is it that makes some things dismissable to most, and what is it that makes those same people react melodramatically to other things? (e.g. the Coca-Cola scare in Europe a few years ago; MSNBC-fed et al. fears about the ubiquity of child predators in America)
by greg—Jan 29, 08:36 PM
hate to say it, but i think the child predator fear is probably a well-founded one. it’s just that NBC has found a new way to sensationalize it. it’s that “how stupid can criminals be?” approach. works every time.
by kathy—Jan 29, 10:03 PM
which, undoubtedly is a big grossout for many.
it has a fascinating history, though
for two hundred plus years, the production of cochineal was a mystery to most europeans. and the spanish, actually the indians, had a monopoly on its production until 1777 when a french naturalist stole away with some cactus plants. (the spanish let the indians have the “monopoly”, which was a supplemental form of income for many natives, largely because they did it so well, and it was rather taxing labor.)
and a few years ago Jeremy Baskes did an entire book on the subject matter…applying rational theory to indian involvement in the market… no, the weren’t coerced, they freely engaged in trade.
with the pilfering of the plant/insect combo and the shipping of it off to haiti, india, south carolina (where it did not succeed), the canaries (where it did) and other places, it is one of the many times when europeans stole from the americas. another notorious case was the stealing of rubber plants in the late 19th century to set up shop in south asia and the indian subcontinent.
by hermit x—Jan 29, 11:17 PM
Hmmm… So we all should’ve known about the bug butts a long, long time—like 400 years—ago.
by greg—Jan 29, 11:46 PM
not really, since around 187ish or so, they came up with the synthetic dye and so cochineal passed into the mists of oblivion…much like bat guano
natural products fought over untill the lab fabs something new…and then we learn of the dangers of synthetic and we go back to the natural stuff we learn that the natural stuff can cause problems as well...or are made of bugs.
this sounds yummy, no?
“If you could somehow sterilize bat guano, it would probably make a good human food source,” says Fenolio.
by hermit x—Jan 30, 07:26 AM
all of that to say…it would’ve passed out of our consciousness until the whole red dye cancer connection
by hermit x—Jan 30, 07:38 AM
You know, the first thing I did when you linked the NSS discussion board was check to see if I know anybody. That’s called guano blood.
by greg—Jan 30, 09:13 AM