The scarlet cochineal is present in more than a hundred Hacendado products and 65 from Carrefour. In fact, it doesn’t matter which large distribution chain you choose: Lidl, Día, Eroski or Alcampo… they all have dozens of cochineal products on their shelves.
And it is not only something of ‘white marks’. El Pozo, Pascual, Haribo, Coca-Cola, Nestlé and a hundred other major brands have it as a regular ingredient. In fact, the cochineal is present far beyond food: we can find it in textiles, medicines, cosmetics and all kinds of cleaning products.
And the worst thing (especially if you were surprised to learn) is that it is not even something new. The cochineal has been with us all our lives.
The insect that dyed the world red. In the Mixteca, they called it nocheztli, ‘blood of the cactus’. And it was there, in the mountainous region between Puebla, Guerrero and the valleys of Oaxaca, where the ‘people of the rain’ domesticated the cactus and its main plague for centuries: Dactylopius coccus, the scarlet or carmine mealybug.
The result was almost a miracle. So much so that, after gold and silver, cochineal carmine was the most exported product to Europe from the other side of the Atlantic.
And it’s not that the old world didn’t know about red dye. In fact, since Sumerian times, pre-classical peoples used another type of cochineal, the ‘quermes’ from which the term ‘carmine’ comes, to dye all kinds of fabrics, make paints and achieve an intense red colour.
But the red cochineal played in another league. It not only generated colors that were much deeper, beautiful and full of nuances. It is that it yielded much more and, as if that were not enough, it resisted and was much better preserved.
The Spanish quickly grasped the importance of this dye and kept its origin hidden as long as they could. Not only did they prevent live mealybugs from leaving the territory of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, but they referred to them in ‘agricultural’ terms with the intention that the rest of the powers would believe that it was a plant that generated the dye.
The chemical secret of the cochineal. But no, the dye came from the cochineal. Of the females, to be precise. Collected, baked and sun-dried, mealybugs were a very important source of carminic acid. 21% of its dry weight was this complex compound.
Subsequently, different preparations were used whose objective was to catalyze a metallic salt of that acid (incorporating aluminum or compounds with calcium or ammonia). For 450 years that product dominated the world.
The end of the Red Queen. So much so that, when the American republics became independent (and in the middle of one of their recurring agricultural crises), the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country of Santa Cruz de Tenerife decided to try to cultivate cochineal in the archipelago.
From the first moment (thanks to the favorable climate of the islands and the demand of the European and Spanish textile industry), it was a bombshell. From 1845 to the end of the century, production increased by leaps and bounds. 1869 was the great year of the Canarian cochineal.
From that moment on, English and German synthetic dyes began to reach the market en masse. They took a long time to reach colors comparable to cochineal carmine, but they were much cheaper. And thus, surrounded by anilines and azo-derivative dyes, the Mexican red entered a crisis.
It wasn’t ‘goodbye’, it was ‘see you later’. In recent decades, safety considerations surrounding synthetic red dyes have been a major concern of researchers. As with all additives, research on its impact on health is very complex to carry out. But that has not prevented the authorities from reducing the amounts that can be consumed (or that can be in textiles).
On the other hand, although it may contain allergenic components (protein residues of the original insect), the truth is that cochineal carmine (or as it is known in Europe, E-120) is a very, very safe compound. And that has made it easier for him to come back strong. Today, as I said, it can be found in more and more products.
Where can we find today the cochineal? For obvious reasons, these types of colorings are usually used in strawberry or red fruit flavored products. We are talking about smoothies, yogurts, sweets, jellies, jams and chocolates. However, we can also find them in all kinds of sausages, sobrassadas, meat derivatives or reddish fish substitutes.
And beyond that, lipsticks, makeup, all kinds of cosmetics, paints of various kinds, toys, cleaning products… The question has begun to be in recent years, if there is red, pink or even orange color… where the piglet is not there?
In Xataka | Some people say that the vanilla flavor is made from the beaver’s ass. Well, it’s a little more complicated.
Imagen | Frank Vincentz
