This conference is full of great stories. Take this one, from the fabulous four-day symposium on food color quality. Surimi is a seafood product made of white fish and additives that often stands in for crab—its most familiar incarnation is the “crabstick”. The fish is headed, gutted, and mashed up into a paste, which is then poured out and cooked in thin sheets and rolled into tubes. The tubes, cut just so, simulate the flaky texture of crab meat. Somewhere along the line, a bit of red is added to make it look really crabby.

In the United States and Europe, one of the most common dyes used for this is carmine, which, as you may know, comes from the crushed bodies of tiny insects that live on cacti in Peru and thereabouts. The bug is called the cochineal, and the dye is, according to Jae Park, surimi expert at Oregon State University in Astoria, “stable to light, oxidation, and heat.” It does bleed a little bit, but this can be fixed with a good emulsifier, like polyglycerol polyricinoleate.

Carmine is not just used in the seafood stuff that one finds in the ubiquitous California sushi roll, but in a number of consumer products, including cosmetics. As Park says, “Crabstick and lipstick: basically same color.”