Breakthroughs Today

The application of shellac is wide-ranging than most people think it is. And one of those applications is as glaze on fruits and vegetables sold in your fruit stands and grocery stores.   “IT'S easy for Americans,” says former US Sen. Christopher Dodd, “to forget that the food they eat doesn’t magically appear on a supermarket shelf.” That may also be true for Filipinos.   While the use of shellac in pharmaceutical products may have ebbed in the last few decades, its use in food, particularly as a protective coating for fruits and vegetables, has not. Its use has the specific advantage of extending shelf life, which is critical in ensuring that they are sold before they start to get overripe.   The previous article (“Glaze of the lac bug”) noted that shellac is a natural form of plastic. On apples, for example, this “wax” coating increases the resistance of the skin from gaseous diffusion, particularly oxygen, which speeds up the ripening process.   ...

AMERICAN poet William Carlos Williams wrote: “Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.”   Many Filipinos may not know how a snow glaze looks like; but one common glaze that Filipinos are familiar with can be seen in furniture. And we call that glaze “shellac.”   What most Filipinos, even those who have actually seen a snow glaze, may not know is this: the glaze of shellac has been fairly used in pharmaceutical products. The flakes come from the resin that the female Laccifer bug (Kerria lacca or just lac) secrete on trees in the forests of India, Thailand and Burma (now Mynmar). It takes about 100,000 lac bugs to make 500 grams of shellac flakes.   Shellac is a natural bioadhesive, chemically similar to the synthetic polymers we call “plastic.” In a sense, shellac is a natural form of plastic. And it is used as a glazing agent on tablets and capsules. It contains denatured alcohol, which dissolves the 20-51 percent...