Blue freezies and cochineal insects

Earlier this week a friend and were having a conversation regarding the ingredients in a popular brand of yogurt. She was asking my opinion on the contents. Overall they weren't too bad... but they did list one item that has always made me wonder: colour. How is it that colour can be a food ingredient? I suppose if they said food colouring this would fit more with my understanding of what qualifies as an ingredient, but would really not be any clearer. So my friend did a little online hunting, and it turns out that many of the colourings we use in our foods are derived from natural sources such as spices, berry juices, and in one case a cochineal instect. While I'm not wild about the idea of consuming "juiced" bug, that's more just me being squeemish than anything. I was far more disturbed by the discovery that several synthetic food colourings, the most distinct of these being Brilliant Blue FCF, E133 or Blue No.1, are derived from a substance called "Coal Tar".

So what is coal tar? I'm going to do something really bad here, which would be frowned upon by scholars the world over... I'm going to cite wikipedia. Before I do I have to say that this is not the only site I've consulted in researching this, it is simply the one that presents most of what found all in one place. Here are some of my favorite bits from the wikipedia page on Coal Tar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_tar):

"Being flammable, coal tar is sometimes used for heating or to fire boilers."
"used to kill and repel head lice"
"Coal tar was formerly used as one of the primary ingredients of asphalt pavements"
"The NPF states that coal tar contains approximately 10,000 different chemicals, of which only about 50% have been identified, and the composition of coal tar varies with its origin and type of coal (eg: lignite, bituminous or anthracite) used to make it."
"According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer, preparations that include more than 5 percent of crude coal tar are Group 1 carcinogen."

Now I don't know how carcinogenic "Group 1" is, and I am 100% sure that by the time this becomes Blue No.1 and goes into my freezy it does not contain 5% crude oil. But I can tell you that I'd rather eat bugs... but maybe that's just me.