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dull with light rain ...
I the light of how this thread has morphed; I offer the following ....
Eating fly eggs, rodent hair, mold, and fecal matter may sound a lot like a challenge on Fear Factor, but it’s just an episode of our daily lives.
Unintended additives—indiscernible to the naked eye and unlisted on ingredient labels— squirm, crawl, fly, and plop into much of what we eventually put in our mouths. In fact, these unsavory morsels are so common that the Federal Drug Administration permits certain levels of these “natural contaminants” in our food. The FDA’s Food Defect Action Level Handbook establishes the amounts of contaminants permitted in about a hundred plant-derived foods. At or below these levels, the FDA has determined that the defects— however icky—are harmless.
What Bugs Lie Beneath
Under the regulations in the FDA’s handbook, a hefty bowl of spaghetti is permitted 200 or so bug fragments—one for every gram of pasta—fifteen fly eggs, and a maggot. Add a pinch of FDA-acceptable ground oregano and it might be spiced with one hundred itsy bitsy bug bits and a rodent hair. And while hot dogs get a bad rap for the mystery meat parts ground up in them, you might want to take a closer look at the condiments. A few spoonfuls of sauerkraut could include fifty thrips—a small, slender bug pointed at both ends. Even chocolate is impure. As you savor a chocolate bar, you might also be ingesting some sixty insect parts.
Of the foods in the handbook, many are everyday staples. Wheat can contain an “average of nine milligrams or more rodent excreta pellets and/or pellet fragments per kilogram.” The shaker of cinnamon in your spice cabinet could have some 400 bug fragments and eleven rodent hairs. In one eighteen-ounce jar of peanut butter, there must be more than six rodent hairs and sixty insect parts before the FDA considers it tainted.
Happy eating !
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