It's pure coincidence of course that I have some M&M's handy
, so here's what the ingredient list says: Milk chocolate (sugar, chocolate, milk, cocoa butter, lactose, soy lecithin, salt, artificial flavors), sugar, less than 0.5%: coloring (includes yellow 5 lake, red 40 lake, blue 1 lake), cornstarch, corn syrup, dextrin. Contains milk and soybean ingredients.
Yuck.
At least I don't see anything called confectioner's glaze, but I will watch for that on candy boxes. (Thanks for the info, Dick!
)
Here's some information about shellac coatings on food from Wikipedia. The page for confectioner's glaze forwards to a pharmaceutical glaze entry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmaceutical_glaze
Double Yuck.
Always looking for the bright side
, I found a fun page that talks about how M&M's are actually made:
http://www.madehow.com/Volume-3/M-M-Candy.html
Cool factoids:
1) M&M's were first manufactured in 1940.
2) Plain M&Ms' are proportioned (approximately) as follows: 30% brown; 20% yellow; 20% red; 10% green; 10% orange; 10% blue. Peanut M&Ms' are 20% brown; 20% yellow; 20% red; 20% blue; 10% green; and 10% orange. Peanut Butter Chocolate M&Ms® and Almond M&Ms® have even proportions (20% each) of yellow, red, green, blue, and brown.
3) During panning, the chocolates are rotated in large containers as liquid candy made of sugar and corn syrup is sprayed onto them. The coats are sprayed on rotating chocolates at timed intervals. These intervals allow each coat to dry. Each coat leaves an even layer, a shell, of dry candy substance. The chocolate centers receive several coatings to ensure a uniform, complete coat on every piece.
I'm still mildly suspicious... but that won't stop me from eating them, especially the red ones.
--MJ