Here’s a tip if you ever want to ruin a Halloween party. Seek out the most squeamish-seeming adult or child you can find in the act of consuming candy corn. Then tell them they just filled their mouth with bug secretions.

If this fact alarms you—or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared—I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as “confectioner’s glaze.” This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.

This sounds innocent enough, until you understand that the glaze is shellac—a shiny, moisture-blocking resin that’s the product of lac bugs’ lifelong work. As the female lac bug pierces a tree with her needlelike mouthparts and sucks the sap out, she secretes a goo, also called lac, from a gland on her abdomen to form a cocoon of sorts. (Male lac bugs don’t do much besides mate and die after about four days.) Inside her lac coating—which hardens on contact with the air much like, well, a candy shell—she spends her life feeding and laying eggs, safe from predators. If all goes well, she completes her life cycle and dies in her resinous home.

The amount of resin produced by each insect is virtually microscopic, but over time, enough of the bugs cluster on one branch to make an amount worth pouring over a batch of Raisinets. The process has been the same for thousands of years: Strip the resin from the bark, melt it down, remove any impurities (translation: bits of wood and bugs), let it harden, and break it into shards. One pound of finished shellac requires the secretions of 100,000 insects. For every shiny candy you eat, roughly a quarter of 1 percent is this bug by-product, Michelle Frame, a candy scientist, told me.

Humans are still harvesting shellac because it’s not really like anything else—man-made, bug-made, or otherwise. Most adhesives that are strong enough to coat surfaces or give them such a high gloss aren’t food-safe. Shellac is. It also has an appealing reddish color, thanks to the naturally occurring laccaic acid in it, which can be used as a dye. Depending on the alcohol or solvent that shellac is mixed with, it can be used as a furniture polish, as nail polish, or to make hair spray shine. It’s sprayed on some fruits to extend their shelf life and used to coat many pills, both to slow the rate of absorption in the stomach and to mask the taste of bitter medicines.

None of this is a compelling advertisement for shellac as a candy ingredient. “People sometimes panic, like, It’s in your furniture!” Frame said. But all of those uses are evidence of shellac’s versatility, not a nefarious plot to get Americans to eat wood polish. Even if you restrict its applications to candy making, shellac, which is both natural and tasteless, is more useful than any alternative. For example, zein, a protein derived from corn, can be used as a vegan candy coating. But Frame, like many other food scientists, believes that zein is not as strong as shellac, nor is it as good at keeping moisture out. (It also smells like a wet dog while the candy is being made, she said—even though the smell does go away once it dries.)

Really, the fact that so many candies contain a product made by insects shouldn’t be a surprise. “Even highly industrialized societies are heavily dependent on the products of other species,” Edward Melillo, the author of The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World, told me. (Melillo readily acknowledged his own dependence: “I love candy corn personally, so I eat a lot of shellac,” he said.) People eat meat and wear wool, silk, and leather. A beeswax candle might be burning in your house (or in your jack-o’-lantern) right now. Corn syrup, used in many candies, is extracted from a grass that humans selectively bred into a monster version of itself, then processed into sugar in industrial laboratories. People have used red dye that’s sometimes called carmine or cochineal extract, made from crunched-up cochineal bugs, for more than 2,000 years. The substance is responsible for the vibrant red in Nerds Gummy Clusters, some Airheads products, Good & Plenty, and other candies. Meanwhile, squishy treats such as marshmallows and gummy bears—and candy corn—still largely use gelatin made from animal collagen, found in bones, skin, and ligaments.

Whether any of this counts as icky is, of course, a matter of taste. Plenty of people eat insects and ligaments on purpose and with aplomb. And whatever your personal threshold, we’re all eating bugs and other perhaps undesirable animal bits all the time. Insects, rodent hairs, and droppings are so unavoidable in many agricultural products that the FDA has a list of legally acceptable defects allowed in popular foods; chocolate is permitted to have 60 insect fragments and one rodent hair per 100 grams. (According to Frame, even this is not so alarming: “A bug leg is just a bit of protein that will go through you anyway,” she said.)

As much as you may want to avoid thinking about it, virtually all Halloween treats are creations worthy of Frankenstein. Why not consume a little bug goo on the side?