"If you scan the label on, say, a container of strawberry yogurt, you may spot 'carmine'—a popular coloring concocted from insects.

Used to give red, pink, and purple color to everything from ice cream to lipstick, carmine is made from a pigment called cochineal. Cochineal, in turn, is extracted from dried female insects that feed on a cactus found in Peru, the Canary Islands, and other places.

The pigment builds up in the insects' bodies; after the six-legged moms deposit their eggs on the cactus and die, their rotting carcasses, along with the eggs and hatched larvae, are brushed off the plants, crushed, and then baked, boiled, or steamed to produce cochineal."

Source: Fortune July 21, 2003