We all have our favorite things. That thing we prefer above all other things.
Easter came and went this year, mostly unnoticed. Growing up, it was not my favorite holiday, although the meal was up there on the holiday charts. We always had a nice big ham, and cheesy good potatoes, green beans. But none of the customs surrounding the holiday made sense to me. There was Jesus rising, among the rabbits, the hard-boiled colored eggs, the baskets stuffed with that phony plastic grass, baby chickens. And Good Friday seemed like it should have been named something else.
Then there were the jelly beans.
Not only did I not understand their significance, I simply didn’t like jelly beans. Given a candy of choice, it would be a chocolate something. Certainly not those stale marshmallow peeps, and definitely not a jelly bean.
But today I learned a little fact about those colored beans. They’re made with insect secretions. Intentionally. I know they say we eat a lot of bug parts by accident, through the manufacturing of our food. But with the jelly bean, it is a necessary process.
And here’s how it goes. Those little candies are hard and shiny. That’s one reason they do so well in the Easter baskets with the imposter grass. They don’t stick to it because of that shell. And that shell is really a coating of shellac — a resin that’s secreted by the female lac bug (laccifer lacca) after it drinks the sap of trees.
The laccifer lacca’s bug juice. The juice she squirts out of herself after drinking a few shots of tree sap, at the Tree Sap Bar.
The lac bug is native to the forests of Thailand and India. That’s where she does her thing. Which technically, goes like this: She deposits shellac onto the twigs and branches of trees. People then come along and harvest those branches, processing that secretion into flakes. They dissolve those flakes in ethanol, and the result is the liquid shellac, which can be sprayed on anything. It can be food products, or fingernails, or even hardwood floors. All of this resulting in that incredible shiny appearance.
These days, many of the “natural” shellac processes have been replaced by vinyl-based resins. But since shellac is a natural resin, it remains the most popular choice for shiny food. Like jelly beans, or shiny apples. And kids don’t mind eating a little bug juice now and again.
But there is trouble for some people. If you’re a vegetarian or vegan, this might create more challenges for you. That shellac is an animal byproduct. And that’s a big uh-oh. Shellac is a lot of places. An ingredient in confectioner’s glaze and some other edible glazes, and may be listed as an additive using the number E904. That’s code, for bug juice.
I bet there are a lot of vegetarians / vegans out there who are eating the animal stuff of the girly lac bug. When she gets all dressed up, to go out, and paint the town shiny. With her squirty squirts. After she drinks at The Sap Bar. With her BF girly bugs, on their little bar stools, somewhere in Thailand.
The way of the world, I’ll tell you.
The way of the world.
You just never know what is making things shiny, or what might be making them dull. Either way. Snack on, my friends. Snack on.
Be brave, embrace the bug squirts, and snack on.
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All we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown. William Harvey
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/unknown-quotes
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There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception. Aldous Huxley
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/unknown-quotes
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“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
― W.B. Yeats
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