ITS BUG POOP! and 'they' KILL zillions of poor little lac bugs to get it! OH MY!
The following article was written by Paul Ridden, of Animal Action, for the Vegan Village website - date unknown. Unfortunately, Vegan Village appears to be defunct. I couldn't find a Copyright for this article anywhere so I pulled it off Google and reproduced it - verbatim - here.
I'll let the article speak for itself....
It's used as a coating for fruit and vegetables. It's used as glazing on sweets. It's even used in varnish. It's claimed to be a natural product, but what exactly is Shellac? You may not want to know the answer.
Shellac comes from an insect called the lac (Laccifer Lacca). India and Thailand are the dominant producers but the US and Indonesia are the main users. Lac insects thrive on certain kinds of trees, the Palas, Kusum or Ber in India and the rain tree in Thailand. A 'crop' of egg-laying female lac (or brood lac) are tied to the twigs of the host trees. The brood lac can lay up to 100 eggs, which hatch into small red larvae and crawl along the twig and settle in to feed.
Both male and female lac larvae insert their long proboscis into the tree and draw out the sap. While they feed a protective layer is secreted from their bodies, the secretion hardens and completely covers their little bodies, leaving openings only for waste products and for breathing. The larvae mature under the protective coating until, after about 8 weeks, they are sexually mature. Only the male goes through a full metamorphosis, developing antennae, legs, wings and losing its long proboscis. The male has only one job, to fertilise the females, who retains her mouthparts but doesn't develop wings or eyes. After the male has performed his duty, he dies. Once fertilised, the female increases the production of the secretion and increases in size during the next 14 weeks. Once the next brood females are just about ready to lay their eggs, they are 'harvested'. The brood lac and all the secretion are scraped off the branches and left to dry out. The freshly scraped shellac, or sticklac, consists of the secretion, the brood lac, a crimson dye from the ovaries of the brood lac and twigs. A number of live brood lac are collected to form the next crop, the lifespan of the lac allows for 2 harvests per year. Sticklac is then sold for processing.
Manufacturers of shellac crush the sticklac and then remove sand, dust, and impurities such as the shrivelled insect bodies, the crimson dye and twigs. The remaining secretion or resin then undergoes a number of refining processes until commercial shellac results.
The manufacturers then sell it on to food producers, who coat fruit and vegetables and chocolate and coffee beans and some nuts in it, to paint manufacturers, who put it in their paint and varnish and floor polish, to cosmetics manufacturers, to dentists, who use it as a mould for dental plates, and so on.
About 300,000 lac are killed to produce 1Kg of shellac. Nearly 9 million kilos of shellac was exported from India alone in 1995-96 - my calculator won't even work out how many dead lac that makes! The UK imported 226,175 kilos during this period, which makes somewhere in the region of 67,800,000,000 dead female lac for one year's usage.
So be careful when you go to the supermarket or your corner shop to pick up your weekly shopping of fresh fruit and veg, the produce in your basket will most likely be coated in shellac. Don't be tempted by those shiny chocolate brazils in the sweet shop window cos they're probably coated in shellac. If you're a DIY buff then isn't it about time you found out what exactly was in the paint and varnish you so lovingly splash on your walls. And what about your hair lacquer Mrs? And those tablets you're taking, avoiding capsules because they're made from gelatin won't get you away from shellac!?! And those rubber gloves? And the ink for your newspaper? And so on, and so on...