9 Gross Secrets About The Food Industry That You Didn't Know Before

There's a lot more bugs involved than you might think!

1. Your white wine might contain an additive that's made from fish bladders.

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Dried isinglass is a fairly common additive ingredient used for clarifying wine and removing clouding and small residues. There are now plant-based filtering methods available as an alternative – but otherwise, your wine might not be as vegetarian or vegan-friendly as you thought.

2. Your burger bun could contain an amino acid that comes from human hair.

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L-cysteine is an amino acid usually extracted from human hair (likely hair gathered off the floor of a hair salon in China) and used to make commercial bread and buns really nice and fluffy.

3. The red food coloring in your candy is made from bugs!

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Carmine a type of red food dye that is made from from cochineal insects. These small beetle-like bugs are dried and dunked in an alcohol solution to create carminic acid, a bright red pigment.

4. That shiny layer on your apple consists comes from bug poop.

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Shellac is the material used to add that protective film on fruit in supermarkets, and it's produced from the resin secreted by lac bugs.

5. The fake vanilla flavor in your yogurt comes from wood.

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Imitation vanilla comes from replicating one of vanilla's flavor compounds in a lab — and it's usually synthesized from a type of tree resin or lignin, which is basically wood pulp.

6. Your gummy bears are mainly made of gelatin, which, FYI, is basically boiled animal skin, cartilage and bones.

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Basically, gelatin comes from boiling the leftovers from the meat industry, ICYMI.

7. The egg on your deli sandwich probably came from this "long egg."

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The invention of the "long egg" allows the food industry to easily achieve a perfectly sliced egg every time. Basically, they're made by cooking egg yolks and egg whites separately, and then arranging them together in a log — once shrink-wrapped and frozen, these eggs can be kept up to one year.

8. You might think you're buying some healthy whole wheat bread, but it might actually just be white bread that's dyed brown.

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Check the label for the words "whole wheat" or "whole grain," because otherwise, you might just have white bread with caramel coloring added in.

9. Oh, and finally, your peanut butter probably contains dead insects, too.

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FDA regulation does allow for peanut butter to have up to 30 insect parts per 100 grams, apparently!

This post was translated from German.