Thursday 26 January 2017

Enjoying That Shiny Sweet?

My friend has got hold of some of those coffee beans that has been passed through an elephants digestive system, picked out the animals poop and then put in a bag and sold to Westerners for £20 a pop.
I declined and settled for a Maxwell House but i was wondering who was the first person to look at a pile of elephant dung and
think to themselves, 'I bet that would make a nice cup of coffee'.      
There are some things that once you know you wish you didn't, such as if you have eaten a sweet with a red colour in it
recently or something with a raspberry flavour, then you probably shouldn't click here or here
So you are probably diligently leaving the red smarties in the tube and passing on the raspberry flavoured sweets in favour of the strawberry or blackberry ones which is a wise choice, unless the sweet is shiny of course then a bit of beetle or a beavers backside is probably the least of your worries.   
Shellac is the thing that gives the sweet that shiny glaze and Shellac comes in many different names, the ingredients on the packet could call it Goma Laca, Gomme-Laque, Gommelaque, Gomme Laque, Lac, Lacca, or Laccifer lacca but it's all still Shellac and Shellac is a secretion of the Laccifer lacca Kerr insect.
The happy little fellas spend all day pooping on branches in Thailand and along comes a farmer, scrapes off the poop and sells it to confectioners who liquefy it and turn it into the glaze that then gets painted across all those shiny, yummy sweets such as jelly beans, Barley Sugars and gobstoppers .
As with the elephant poop coffee, the mind boggles what the first person who thought what sweets need are a coating of insect poo was smoking but what we don't know doesn't hurt us but now you know you may never be able to eat a Haribo again without noting just how shiny it is and wondering if that got a double coating of insect droppings.  

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The one that amazes me is the first person to eat a raw oyster. That took extreme hunger...