Ice cream always makes things a little bit better whether you like classic flavors like vanilla and chocolate and someone has even invented an ice cream that somehow, changes color the as you eat it so there is an ice cream out there for everyone but after reading this you may want to skip the Raspberry flavored one.
The use of the dead Cochineal beetle to colour our food red is well known and we accept that we may find the odd Cochineal leg or crushed shell on the red Smartie's but if you are eating anything flavoured raspberry you may want to stop reading now or at least stop eating it for a second.
Being the simple soul that i am, i always assumed that raspberry flavoured products were given their distinct flavour by people picking raspberries then handing them to other people who squeezed the raspberries who then gave it to yet more people who do the magic bit of making our ice cream and other treats raspberry flavoured.
Turns out that raspberries are not raspberry enough for our refined taste buds so they have to use something else that tastes more like raspberry than raspberries. That something is beaver, or more precisely, beaver’s anus.
Of course beaver arse flavoured ice-cream would not be flying off the shelves at Iceland or Sainsbury's so its official name is 'Castoreum' which comes under 'natural ingredients' on the label.
I'm not sure what the person who discovered this was thinking when they were coming up with ideas for new flavours. Apple? No. Lime? No? Beavers tush? Hmmm...
If you have a freezer with some raspberry flavoured ice cream in it, i wouldn't tell the kids just yet, just as you might not mention it just yet to that woman who drinks the stinky fruit flavoured tea at work, or at least wait until she has drank half of it anyway.
And to think not that long ago people were moaning that they were sneaking a bit of horse flesh into their burgers!
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