The shine on candy corn is bug resin. Brach's calls it confectioner's glaze. The bag reads sugar, corn syrup, then 2% or less of salt, dextrose, confectioner's glaze (shellac), gelatin, honey, artificial flavors, sesame oil, Yellow 5, Yellow 6 and Red 40. Shellac is what a lac insect leaves on tree branches in India and Thailand. It gets scraped off the bark, cleaned, dissolved in alcohol and tumbled over the candy, and it dries into the same hard coat that goes on a hardwood floor. That's the shine, and it's why the pieces don't glue themselves together in the bag. The gelatin is pork or beef collagen, there for the chew. The honey Brach's puts on the front of the bag is under 2%, behind the salt. Bags on shelves this fall list Red 40. Last year's listed Red 3, which FDA pulled from food in January 2025 with a 2027 deadline. Brach's says it makes about 7 billion kernels a year.

If you rinse your rice, you're washing the vitamins down the drain. Look at a bag of Mahatma or Carolina. The ingredient list reads rice, niacin, iron, thiamin and folic acid. Below the cooking directions it says to retain vitamins, do not rinse before or drain after cooking. Ben's Original parboiled carries the same line. White rice has had the bran milled off, along with the B vitamins and iron. Enriched rice puts them back as a powder dusted onto the outside of the kernel. The vitamins sit on the surface of the grain, and the first rinse washes them off. FDA's standard for enriched rice has a test. Rice that can't survive a 30-second swirl in water and keep 85% of its vitamins has to have the don't-rinse line, and that's most of the rice on the shelf.

Great Value frozen shrimp has 3 ingredients. Shrimp, salt and sodium tripolyphosphate. Sodium tripolyphosphate is a phosphate salt. The shrimp get soaked in a tank of it before they're frozen, and the phosphate loosens the muscle proteins, so they hold on to water. The shrimp come out of the tank heavier than they went in, and the bag is sold by weight, so part of what you pay for is tank water. It also keeps them from drying out in the freezer. Soaked shrimp sit in a puddle, steam instead of sear, and feel slick and a little rubbery. Untreated shrimp brown in the pan. Costco's Kirkland raw shrimp says no chemicals added and no preservatives on the bag. The FDA allows the phosphate, so the check is the ingredient list on the back of the bag, under the net weight.