Every few years people seem to be shocked that carmine is used as a food dye. Years ago the freak-out was because it was in fruit juice, now it’s Starbucks. For those that don’t know, Strawberry Frappucinos were colored with dye derived from crushed insects. Somehow, despite the fact that this should be common knowledge at this point, people constantly panic at the thought of eating an insect. There’s a lot of other things that people are usually shocked to find out about their food.

• There’s a dead wasp in every fig.
• Gelatin is made of boiled animal bones.
• Sausage cases are often made from pig intestines.
• Honey is bee spit.
• Most cheese is made with rennet, an enzyme used to digest milk. This rennet is derived from slaughtering unweaned calves.

The list goes on and on.

If you want to get really squeamish the FDA establishes limits on contamination that are published in a useful book called Food Defect Action Levels. In the guide are such limits as:

• No more than one maggot per 250ml of canned fruit juice.
• No more than 60 insect fragments per 100 grams of chocolate.
• No more than 30 insect fragments per 100 grams of peanut butter.
• No more than 1 rodent hair in 50 grams of flour.
• No more than 20 gnawed kernels of popcorn per pound.

Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable for rats to gnaw on popcorn as long as they don’t gnaw on too much of it.

People panicking about this stuff is kind of understandable, especially when you’ve grown up in the loving arms of a first world country. Insects are, however, a vital protein source for a significant portion of the world’s population. In fact, far from being a pure subsistence food, ant larvae and cricket tacos are popular in certain parts of Mexico.

For all the ire about the insignificant things that gross people out there are things that they don’t get nearly as squeamish about:

• Pink slime: Thankfully someone finally coined an adequately grotesque term for this stuff. It looks like our days of eating meat paste washed in ammonia might finally be coming to an end
• Mad Cow Disease: Caused by cows being forced into cannibalism when they’re fed bone meal of other cows. If we stopped that bizarre practice, it wouldn’t be a concern.
• While we’re on the topic of cows, antibiotics: Cows are fed antibiotics to keep them from dying of ulcers before they go to market. This is because cows are made to eat grass, not grain and grain destroys their stomachs.
• Salmonella: Should never happen with healthy chickens. Meringues shouldn’t be something to agonize over. Eggnog should contain raw egg and there shouldn’t be a problem with that. Why could our grandparents eat raw eggs with impunity but we almost have to treat them as toxic waste until they’re cooked or pasteurized?
• E-coli: Caused by cow shit contaminating meat. Yes, cow shit in your meat is why you need to overcook your hamburger so you don’t die.

Complaining about dye derived from insects is kind of the height of first world privilege, especially when the dye is used because we’ve been trained that things made with strawberries have to be very very red and the pale pink that you get from just using a natural strawberry just won’t do. Our food supply is broken in hundreds of other ways and it’s a completely safe natural food coloring that’s been used for centuries that people complain about simply because it’s derived from insects. People would literally rather get cancer than eat an insect.

If you’re at all squeamish about carmine, you have no moral standing for eating a shrimp, because I’ll guarantee you that if one of those crawled out from behind your fridge, you’d burn your house down and move. Eating it would be the last thing on your mind.

Posted from Los Angeles, California, United States.

I was on a rare trip into the office this week when I received a text message from my fiancee: “You got a parking ticket in the mail”.

OK, not a big deal, I figured it might have been a red light camera or something. Turns out that it is actually a parking ticket, the specific violation being parking at 2 hour meter for longer than two hours, but not for my car. My license plate number is on the ticket, but the car is listed as a gray 4 door Toyota. What’s more, it was on a day that I was home, at a time that I was working, in a city I can’t remember ever visiting. Obviously, someone screwed up and transposed digits somewhere. Since the city in question is a 40 minute drive from me, I called the number on the ticket to contest it. It turns out that not only can I not contest the ticket by phone, I can’t even contest it by mail. I have to physically go into the office with my registration to prove that my Ford Mustang is not, in fact, a 4 door Toyota.

There’s multiple problems with this:

1. What are my options if I lived further away? I’m lucky enough to live in LA, what if I lived in San Diego or San Francisco? I’d have no recourse but to pay a $48 penalty because a meter maid made a mistake somewhere or someone fat fingered some data entry.
2. If I were an hourly employee I’d have to take what amounts to half a day off of work to go straighten this out. Since the office is only open 8-5 Monday through Friday it would mean missing half a day of pay.
3. All else aside, this is going to cost me some amount of money to take care of. Even if I’m not missing work I’m still out the gas money and time to drive there and correct their mistake.

My complaining aside, this is a minor inconvenience to me, both because of my proximity to Hawthorne and because the financial burden is minor. Had this happened to me while I was in college, it could have very well caused me to choose between paying an unjust parking ticket and eating. If this happened to the wrong family it could potentially mean kids going hungry because the parents had to choose between feeding them and clearing up a bad ticket before they could register a car so they could get to work.

Something this simple should be easy to clear up over the phone. They had to pull my car registration to send me the ticket in the first place, meaning they should be able to see that the make and model is clearly incorrect. I should just be able to talk to someone who will fix it for me, especially in the case of such an obvious error. At the very least I should be able to get it taken care of by mail.

Since the city of Hawthorne has no way to fix their screwup besides actually physically going to the city and contesting the ticket, it practically amounts to a regressive tax. If you’re too poor or too far away to contest the ticket, oh well, give them the $48 anyway. They certainly need it more than you do.

Posted from Los Angeles, California, United States.