Kids love foods with color, and lots of it! Strawberry seems to be at the top of the list too. I just wanted to share with you the typical ingredients found in the chemical makeup of “strawberry flavor”:
Then if you’re really lucky and you see the words cochineal, carmine or carnimic acid on that brightly colored package of Gogurt, that is derived from the crushed carcasses of a South and Central American insect, a beetle type of insect to be more specific. Cochineal can be found in everything from jello to fruit juice to candy. It comes from the female Dactylopius coccus and takes 70,000 carcasses to make 1 pound of cochineal. Starbucks made news in March 2012 when it leaked out that the colorant they’ve been using in their Strawberries and Creme Frappuccino has cochineal in it. They took the stance ‘the move to cochineal was to move away from artificial ingredients’. Hey! I have an idea… why not use real strawberries? Just an idea… RESOURCES:
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Not to be a total downer but you know most of these chemicals exist naturally in fruits and are the reason the fruits actually taste good? Sure, many flavor chemicals are strictly synthetic (and often just derivatives of the original ones that exist in nature and not any more dangerous) but more than half of this list occurs in the foods they are being used to mimic. You can’t just “use strawberries” in many applications unless it’s homemade and eaten in a matter of days. To say that these chemicals are dangerous because they sound like scary chemicals would say that real strawberries are also dangerous. Vegetation just pumps out all these ethyl esters, alcohols, ketones, etc naturally. To say they’re bad because a chemist made them is an uninformed claim to make.
Also “solvent” at the end of the list is just unnecessary fearmongering. We both know this is regulated. At least specify what solvent you believe to exist in flavoring. Every edible food technically contains solvents but if you’re going to suggest foods contain industrial solvents (acetone, butane, heptane etc) then you should specify what. In terms of “residual solvent” (from industrially practices), this is not a real thing in finished products. Even fruits naturally produce the same chemicals used as industrial solvents as they break down so this was kind of a silly claim to squeeze in at the end.
Phyo-Tec,
Thank you for this well-structured, informed comment!