Natural Red 4
Ever since the summer of 2000, there has been a woman I have never been able to stop thinking about. I never knew her name or much about her life story besides the fact she worked for the Yoplait Customer Service Call Center. But the older I get, the more I desperately wish I knew what happened in the hours, days, maybe even years that followed our solitary phone call. Does she still remember those few shared moments the way I do?
I was the one who had initiated the call.
The afternoon before we spoke, I had my back against a tree trunk and a book in my lap. I sat strategically in order to have a full view of my younger brothers flipping wildly off the backyard trampoline. There was no indication this would be a day unlike any other.
Innocently, I flipped the page and read about carmine bugs. I can’t tell you with certainty what I could possibly have been reading that would have been related to carmine bugs, but my best guess would be the “C” Encyclopedia. I loved reading encyclopedias. I’d read each entry, with only the first letter as a commonality. I loved the random snippets of facts, and this was way before the Stuff You Should Know podcast. Or any podcast.
Back to bugs. I learned carmine bugs were incorrectly known as beetles and also known as a very common food dye called NATURAL RED 4. I re-read. A very common FOOD DYE?! I flipped to the front of the Encyclopedia to check the publication date. This must be an old weird practice my grandparents used for food coloring but we have ACTUAL food coloring now and definitely don’t eat bugs. Right?
The publication date was recent. I picked a large piece of grass as a bookmark (earmarking Encyclopedias was forbidden) and ran purposefully into our kitchen. My reading said carmine is red, so it would be in red or pink things. My brothers and sister watched silently as I systematically pulled every food item out of the cabinets and checked each label. Piles of “safe” food items surrounded piles of “unclear” items because carmine could also be listed as “natural flavors.”
In a string of half sentences I tried to relay the groundbreaking information that I had just learned and why I was squinting reading every food label in the house.
It was go-gurt. A tube of frozen strawberry go-gurt laying in the freezer door, just waiting to cool off an overheated kid after playing outside all day.
“AND IT’S FULL OF BUGS!” I shrieked, pointing at the labeled with the mark of the beetle, Natural Red 4. My sister didn’t believe it, and none of us wanted to imagine a summer without portable froyo, so we investigated further by the only immediate means available to us.
We called the 1-800 Customer service number. It was listed in tiny print underneath the folded part of the packaging, so it took some gumshoeing to obtain. All four of us huddled around the phone, choosing a different part of the cord to wind as I dialed the numbers. After some brief business call automation messages, the woman who would haunt me for the next twenty years came on the line.
“How can I help you?” she said.
“Ummm, we just had a question about the strawberry go-gurt? I have the box if you need an ID number from it?” As the oldest in the family, I was the designated talker in this mission. My voice rose octave after octave and face turned bright red.
“Well, anyway, I swear this isn’t a prank call or anything, we just want to know if there’s bugs in the go-gurt? The strawberry go-gurt. With the natural red 4? Is that really from a bug?”
I recall this memory and imagine the Yoplait Customer Service agent silently shocked in her wheelie ergonomic chair. Sometimes, I imagine she puts the phone on mute to get her laughter under control. I’ve thought through her motioning her colleagues and putting us on speaker. I’m sure I stammered on for some time about how we honestly just wanted to know if we were eating bugs.
“Technically, natural red 4 is an extract from carmine.” She answered with A+ professionalism.
“But the BUG carmine?” I persisted.
“Technically, yes.”
I let out a defeated “nooooooooooooooooo”, my brothers shouted “ewwwwww” and my sister squealed in disgust.
“Was there anything else I can help you all with?” We were still on the line with a representative whose job day in and day out was answering complaints or at best, mundane calls she would soon forget after her second glass of wine that evening. She was near bubbling over trying to get words out.
“Yes, thank you, I guess.” I clunked the receiver into its place hanging on the kitchen wall. We were all in an uproar and diligently checked labels for a time, but eventually our outrage about insect laden parfaits died down.
For our family, that is where the story ends. Time and time again, however, I think about what it would be like to be the customer service agent who got that call. Did she go home and tell her significant other about the bunch of kids “investigating” bugs in yogurt? At the work Christmas party did she win a toaster for relaying the funniest call of the year?
I like to think she was in the middle of a slew of mundane boring days. Or maybe she just had a call from an angry customer about how his go-gurt exploded in the box and got all the other go-gurts dirty. I truly don’t know what type of complaint would warrant calling the customer service number on a go-gurt, but I imagine there aren’t many that involve a gaggle of kids demanding to know the truth in what was really in Natural Red 4.
Did she forget all about us, or does she still giggle and hear our childish screams of disgust as she puts a few carmine contaminated strawberry yogurts in her shopping cart?
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