If you thought eating bugs was just another reality show stunt, you're in for an icky surprise: a lot of us are inadvertently consuming foods whose color comes from ground-up insects, and we're not winning any prizes for it, either.

I throw away bags of flour when pantry moths invade, and I don't let fruit flies breed on my bananas. Do I really want to drink grapefruit juice that gets its pretty pink hue from crushed cochineal beetles?

A number of food products, including Tropicana Ruby Red grapefruit juice and Dannon's boysenberry yogurt, derive their color from pulverized beetles instead of artificial food dyes. Good & Plenty's got it, too.

Some people are allergic to this bug by-product, which is known as “carmine” or “cochineal.” Others, such as vegetarians, and those who keep kosher, don't want to eat foods containing insect particles, either.

These consumers, along with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, have been lobbying the FDA to require that food products containing the insect-derived colorants be clearly labeled. The current laws allow food manufacturers to simply put “color added,” or, inexplicably, “artificial color,” on products containing carmine or cochineal.

The FDA has responded to the pressure by proposing that such foods include the words “carmine” or “cochineal” on the label. Some manufacturers already include this information voluntarily, while others are replacing the natural colorants with synthetic dyes.

Bugs aren't all bad, of course; ladybugs, for example, are my greatest ally in the garden when it comes to battling aphids. If it turns out that pulverized beetles are packed with anti-oxidants or have the power to lower cholesterol, we'll probably be adding beetle powder to our smoothies.

Why do we have to put all this color, fake or otherwise, into our food in the first place? Mint ice cream really shouldn't be green at all. Cheddar cheese doesn't need to be orange. What would you rather eat, a strawberry yogurt that's an anemic pale pink, or one that's got a more pleasing color courtesy of the cochineal beetle?

Image: Dried cochineal beetles