For the National Geographic web series Ingredients, chemist George Zaidan studies what’s inside the food we eat and the items we commonly use. The extract of cochineal tends to come up a lot.

After cochineals die, their legacy lives on in the brilliant red hue produced by their hemolymph. Dyes made from cochineal have been used in textiles, paintings, and even in your food! You’ve seen ...

This is because one of the most widely used red food colourings - carmine - is made from crushed up bugs. The insects used to make carmine are called cochineal, and are native to Latin America ...

Poleske isn’t a conspiracy theorist about Nerds’ secret ingredient. Carmine color is indeed made from insects and has been ...

But there's a big catch. Many red food colorings are a specific pigment called carmine, which is made with cochineal, an insect product. This, of course, means that any of these red food colorings ...

Squashed female cochineal bugs, to be specific ... But it wasn't until more recently that they made their way into commercial foods. From 1955 to 2010, the consumption of food coloring rose ...

But today, Peru dominates the market, and Mexico’s cochineal farms are disappearing ... cosmetics, and foods like M&Ms and Yoplait yogurt. Indigenous people across Latin America traded it ...

Cochineal was used to dye the cloaks of Roman Catholic cardinals and to color jackets that gave British "redcoat" soldiers their nickname. Today, cochineals are still a natural source of dye for ...

Squashed female cochineal bugs, to be specific ... But it wasn't until more recently that they made their way into commercial foods. From 1955 to 2010, the consumption of food coloring rose ...

mostly from its use in foods and beverages but also from cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. These are immunoglobulin E–mediated reactions directed against cochineal proteins.