Our Food is Full of Crap. Also, Rodent Hair, Mildew, and Bugs.

In the wake of the peanut butter salmonella scare (caused by rats, roaches, and other awfulness inside the factory), an op-ed in today's New York Times examines the government's standards for acceptable levels of gross stuff in food. According to the writer, you likely ingest up to two pounds of "flies, maggots and mites" each year, without being aware. Snip:

In its (falsely) reassuringly subtitled booklet “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans,” the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition establishes acceptable levels of such “defects” for a range of foods products, from allspice to peanut butter.
Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).

Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation – 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.

The Maggots in Your Mushrooms (E. J. Levy / New York Times)

Here's that happy-fun FDA publication: "The Food Defect Action Levels - Levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans." Bon appetit!

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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robulus

There is shit in your hamburgers and pus in your milk.

Isn’t that a Patsy Cline song?
TroofSeeker

We’re hunter / gatherers. We’re designed to follow a herd for days, and eat bugs, roots and… anything we find, until we obtain what we prefer- meat. Our system can cope pretty well with most stuff, unless the chemistry is concentrated, i.e., poisons or pesticides.
It strikes me as bazaar that we take a deadly poison, alcohol, and dilute it so it doesn’t kill us, but it poisons us to a state of dilirium for a few hours. After thinking it thru, I quit drinking. It’s just stupid.
saragorn

@9 I totally agree. We are biologically “programmed” to be disgusted by our bodily fluids. Although I heard that the only one humans are okay with touching (of their own, or another persons) is tears. I suppose because there is nothing that can be carried in tears, but I really don’t know.

On another note, yesterday I ate some food out of my trash can at work. It was the little scrappy bits in the take out box, in my clean, otherwise empty trash can. It’s not any different that if I had left the box on my desk, but something about it felt “wrong”. But I don’t care.
mdh

#22 Bonnie “Don’t forget that Fig Newtons have wasp eggs in them too! yay!”

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch.

Protein!
jimkirk

This reminds me of a graffito I saw in a bathroom…

“That smell? It’s actual particles entering your body.”
ridl

There’s actually some evidence that a certain level of intestinal parasites are good for you and can even help with allergies.

It makes sense that we co-evolved with our parasites, and modern medicine with it’s antiseptic ideals automatically assumed any level of infestation should be eradicated.
broklynite

Well, anyone who ever had any kind of grain product left he the cabinet knows this- old oatmeal, cereal, breakcrumbs… Hekc, my brother worked briefly at a pasta factory and there’s all kinds of horrors he saw. I worked briefly at a very famous international butter factory which you would have thought would be better than most- and I couldn’t even drink milk for a few months afterwards. But look- horrifying though it is, you’ve been eating and drinking it your whole life and it probably ahsn’t hurt you by now.
ArtF

Meh. If we were hunting for our food, whether animal or vegetable, it would be full of who-knows-what and we wouldn’t bat an eye.
Greg Turner

Given a choice between a couple inch worms vs. a single inch worm and a binaca-like blast of pesticide with an herbicide chaser, I’ll take the two inch worms.

The chance bit of inorganic matter in our foods is the least of our worries. It’s the inorganic stuff we spray and inject by choice that’s causing so many problems.
jimkirk

Fortunately, my digestive system has evolved to handle all this pretty well.

re: Zuzu @9; years ago I did a little social experiment. Ask some one to swallow. Then to spit in a glass and drink it. It’s exactly the same stuff…

Regarding Mickey D. I used to work with an engineer who worked there developing food processing machinery. He designed a machine that used a vision system to scan the sheet of processed fish paste that was eventually molded into a sandwich. When it detected a worm, it used a jet of air to remove it from the fish stream.

Now consider that most fine food restaurants or home cooks wouldn’t go to such efforts.

Better to eat unidentified protein or partially hydrogenated oils & preservatives?

I eat locally grown organically raised food when I can, but always remember that it’s just been sitting outside where anything can happen, and prepare it accordingly.
Nelson.C

At the WorldCon in Yokohama I was surprised to find that what I thought was some kind of spiced shrimp that I was eating were actually crickets (or possibly grasshoppers, the translation was uncertain, and my entymology isn’t brilliant). It tasted alright, so I finished off the plate.
Clemoh

You’d be eating a lot more without the standards in place.
whitcwa

Did anyone else notice that the article says that “Tomato juice, for example, may average â€œ10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams”". So a million is acceptable? Actually they meant to say that 10 or more eggs is the action level. Every example given is backwards. Doesn’t anyone at the NY Times proofread these things?
TroofSeeker

Working as a dishwasher, I’d always finish my shift with a full stomach. “Hey, some one barely touched this pork chop!” Chomp. “Jello!” Gulp. But after a party once I found a quart of beer that was half full. I swallowed a cigarette butt.
d8^P
wormspit

Just a note… the “fly eggs and maggots” that you’re talking about in tomato juice are Drosophila – fruit flies – the little tiny ones that you don’t even see the eggs of on a banana or apple, and are surprised when they show up in the kitchen. We’re not talking something that’s crawling with big flies or maggots – they’re TINY. Not that this helps some people sleep at night.
kc0bbq

@32: You won’t find too many, if any, really, inorganic pesticides in use anywhere. Fertilizers, sure, but not pesticides.

And I’ll take them any day over not being able to feed the population. Malnutrition/starvation is a much more immediate killer than a vaguely possible correlation of pesticides in general and health effects.
jacobian

Pleasantly surprised at the non-hypochondriacal responses! Go reason!

Let’s keep the toxic botulism, salmonella, lead and other nasty things out, and let a few high-protein maggots in. Casu Marzu anyone?
gulo gulo

@45 it is actually much more likely that the eggs were laid there after it was opened
Carrie

Good grief. Yet another reason to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables.
-Carrie
JB NicholsonOwens

#3: Nobody claims we “live in a clean room environment”. That was never the point. The point is to ask: are we (collectively) living well enough? It’s more instructive to frame this issue by measuring how the most disenfranchised live. Framing the issue in the way you do is an argument tactic to get people to accept the status quo by pushing a false dichotomyâ€”you either have “a clean room environment” or how things are now. Since the former is unattainable the only choice left is what we have now. Once you get people to narrow their choices in such a way it’s easy to distract them away from objecting to the avoidable horrors of how we live.

Among the avoidable problems are a regulatory agencies which work in the interests of corporations they’re supposed to be regulating. The agencies fail in serious ways. The USDA doesn’t do enough to prevent mad cow disease from breaking out in US meat supplies. Inspecting every cow costs more than the corporations they regulate want to pay for. As a result, we continue to risk circulating and exporting mad cow meat. In 2006 Japan banned US imported meat after finding carcass parts that could have contained BSE.

We don’t think of exporting harm to others so that chemical corporations can profit. Beth Gammie wrote a report called “Human Rights Implications of the Export of Banned Pesticides” on how the EPA’s pesticide export policy allows exporting pesticides we ban for domestic use (Gammie’s report mentioned DBCP being sold by American Vanguard corporation). This ends up being a two-fold problem: First, it’s unethical: our policy says it’s not safe enough for us to use and consume the banned chemicals, but it’s good enough for someone else in another country to use and consume. This unethical behavior comes back at us in the second problem: we end up consuming it anyway because we buy produce sprayed with the banned chemicals.

Then there’s the horrible worker conditions we tolerate because raising the minimum standard would be more expensive. Eric Schlosser documents these disasters in “Fast Food Nation” and in the movie of the same name (made with Schlosser’s cooperation). Worker sterility due to exposure to domestically banned chemicals is also mentioned in Gammie’s report.

It’s hard to overlook these things or rationalize them away by concluding that fixing them is too much to ask. We’re not dealing with organizations that fail to choose perfection. We’re dealing with preventable problems we choose not to solve because we favor corporate greed over our own lives.
eustace

How about frop? Suppose there’s any of that in our food? We could use the slack…
dragonfrog

Troofseeker @54 – Do you need any help emptying your liquor cabinet?
minTphresh

ya know, if u fry maggots up with some olive oil, they pop up just like popcorn! hence the term ‘iroqios popcorn’. not bad with a lil salt. and rats do NOT taste like chicken! one of the beautiful things about being human, is that we could eat our shoes and survive. it is one of the reasons that we thrive so well as a species. we can thrive in any climate, and eat about anything.
TroofSeeker

Dragon Frog- It’s been 17 years.
schickm

Meh, I ate bamboo caterpillars for dinner a couple of nights ago…but I guess that was by choice.
spacemunky

If it’s good enough for Bear Grylls…
mdh

Rather more disgusting to my way of thinking is that there is a food additive, approved by the persnickety European Union, that consists of ground up chicken feathers. God knows what thats for.

Red Bull?
Agies

Oh jesus, you’ve hit upon a nerve. This is one of my big pet-peeves. We do not live in a clean room environment. The world is dirty, live with it. I’m not saying that we should be living in filth but the anti-bacterial germophobic society that is marketed to us is frankly more unhealthy. Let your kids eat some dirt, build up a healthy immune system.
Pipenta

Insects aren’t a big deal, except when they are hosts for other parasites, parasites that might find your gut a good home.

And I’m not too keen on feces in my food. Salmonella? Yeah, not keen on that. But the E. coli H7:0157 (I think I have that number correct) is what really alarms me.

Might I suggest two books by Nicols Fox to the Boing Boing readership?

“Spoiled: Why Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.”

- and -

“It was Probably Something You Ate; A Practical Guide to Avoiding and Surviving Foodbourne Illness.”

These books aren’t the most recent on the subject, but they’re pretty good.

I have no patience for the germ-phobic and feel that, more often than not, cleaning products are worse for you than the organisms they are being used to destroy.

But I’m also really annoyed by the blustery, “Oh, our food is better now than it has ever been!” types.

Actually, it’s not. The methods used to manufacture more and more food for more and more profit have put our health and environment at risk in all kinds of ways.

Part of the reason that can happen is because of the strange creature that is the American consumer. Yep, we buy all kinds of hideous cleaning products for fear of “germs”. We’ll wipe down our toddlers’ toys with bleach products. But at the same time, we tolerate chicken dipped in fecal soup. We accept that all eggs are toxic unless they are cooked rubber-hard. We are so ignorant of history and of biology, that we just assume it was forever thus.

We’re fucking damn crazy, is what we are. So spray your kid down with Clorox before you sit him down to a meal of Feces McNuggets.

Ack.
karengeier

greaaaaat.now OCD cases can get in a big tizzy. These acceptable levels have been in effect for years and people are none the worse for the wear. you have to give your immune system a workout sometimes to keep it in tip top shape, so eff it.
merreborn

“you likely ingest up to two pounds of “flies, maggots and mites” each year, without being aware.”

Meh. I’m willing to bet that’s the *lowest* foreign-matter ingestion rate in human history, or damn near it.

The world is a dirty, dirty place. And it used to be even dirtier. Before the advent of refrigeration, how many rodent hairs and insects do you think American pioneers were unintentionally eating?

When you’re on the frontier and poor, you can’t afford to throw everything that “goes bad”.
ferrjerr

I read an article about how Pizza Hut had successfully redefined “Meat” in such a way that “Meat” was no longer “Meat” get it? Anywho, the change enable them to sell their pizzas in public schools! Of course the Hut’s def. of “Meat” is secret so who knows what it is! Ugh!
igpajo

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala
Can’t hear you….lalalalalala

Sticks fingers in ears.
timmaah

…how many rodent hairs and insects do you think American pioneers were intentionally eating?

fixed that for you..
TroofSeeker

MINTIFRESH: “one of the beautiful things about being human, is that we could eat our shoes and survive. it is one of the reasons that we thrive so well as a species. we can thrive in any climate, and eat about anything.”

Minti, it feels great to agree with you whole-heartedly. Have you noticed that very few animals will eat human? How often have you seen a sharkbite where the shark didn’t eat any meat- they bite, then change their mind. I suspect that we have developed a self defense wherein we taste, eve n smell, like shit. Our pets learn to cope with it because we give them food, but we ain’t got many predators. We stink.
Marcel

Gotta love stats like that. Heared some while ago that the average person swallows an average of three spiders a year during their sleep, because the little buggers are attracted to moist places.

Sleep well.
zuzu

“That smell? It’s actual particles entering your body.”

I think that’s from The Ice Storm:

Mikey Carver: Because of molecules we are connected to the outside world from our bodies. Like when you smell things, because when you smell a smell it’s not really a smell, it’s a part of the object that has come off of it, molecules. So when you smell something bad, it’s like in a way you’re eating it. This is why you should not really smell things, in the same way that you don’t eat everything in the world around you because as a smell, it gets inside of you. So the next time you go into the bathroom after someone else has been there, remember what kinds of molecules you are in fact eating.
sum.zero

y’know, in some places they sell bugs and larvae as snacks on the street…
The Lizardman

I can eat two pounds of LIVE bugs in a day – and they are damn tasty. Why are you people settling for them all ground up dead and essentially unnoticeable in your food?
zuzu

Basically, if you don’t get sick, it’s not a problem.

There’s a difference between sanitation, which is biological, and cleanliness, which is psychological.

For instance, take a beaker and autoclave it. Then spit into it. Then a minute later, drink your spit. It’s totally sanitary, but probably psychologically “disgusting”.

And Americans in particular are obsessive about “cleanliness” of food, while frequently ignoring whatever is in it that’s actually physically harmful to you. McDonald’s food possibly epitomizes this.
sirdook

How about some rat tart?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dehAiSJHZM
noen

There’s an awful lot of urban legends in this thread. Really though, is it too much to ask that our food be reasonable clean and healthy? Sadly, for some people that answer is: “Yes, that is too much to ask because it costs money.”

That is why we need to regulate industry, especially food. Bush lowered standards for mercury and arsenic and in general trashed our food safety. The food contamination cases that we’ve been hearing about for years now are a direct result of the delusion that the market can regulate itself.

There is shit in your hamburgers and pus in your milk. But that’s ok because it’s just the magic of the free market performing it’s wonders.
zikzak

Another shocking revelation: Your hamburger contains the ground up muscle-tissue of an shit-smeared, infection-ridden cow that was impaled on a massive hook and drained of blood while it was still alive.
j9c

We grow our own leafy greens in… horse poop. Our figs grow in it too. Composted, mixed-up horse poop. Please don’t tell the kids. Er no wait those are the ones playing in the big pile of composted manure. Ok, don’t tell the grown-ups then!

I suppose eating of worms does have one drawback. It really depends on what kinda worms (or eggs thereof) you’re ingesting: http://www.gitract.info/articles/intestinal-disorders/intestinal-parasites.php but then, I suppose that’s why people started taking a spoonful of castor oil once a month.
TroofSeeker

I am, by no means, a germophobe, but I’ll usually hold my breath when passing someone closely. I’m annoyed by overpowering perfume or cologne, and like Mommy used to say, “you don’t know where that’s been.”
bitman362

Grow up, people, and get over it.
Every breath you take you are inhaling poo, viruses, bacteria, mold, etc. Its everywhere. Its called “Nature”.
Your immune is like a muscle, if you don’t challenge it, it will apostrophe and die. And you’ll die from the first common cold virus that comes along.
So embrace it and make yourself stronger, or go crawl into a plastic bubble for the rest of your life.
greensteam

Not urban legend but absolutely true. i used to be a deck officer on a grain carrier taking corn (maize) from the USA to the USSR (yes that long ago). When we loaded up the grain near New Orleans, the stuff was tested by a US official who came and took a measure of the corn from each hold and it was tested for rat hairs.

If there were more than a certain number of rat hairs per measure then the maize was not considered suitable for human consumption and all had to come out again and another lot loaded.

The joke is that after all that trouble, at the other end, in Novorossisk on the Black sea, the corn was offloaded into old cattle trucks which had barely been cleared after the cattle got out.

Rather more disgusting to my way of thinking is that there is a food additive, approved by the pernickety European Union, that consists of ground up chicken feathers. God knows what thats for.
Joe Funk

Yup. I worked for a short while in the tomato hauling industry, and when they graded the tomatoes that came out of the field, there were acceptable levels for mold, worms, and a few other things including “MOT”. I eventually found out that it stood for “Matter Other-than Tomatoes”, which was their way of saying stems / rocks / dirt / small mammals.

I still enjoy pizzas and ketchup, though. The reality is that while it may seem a little gross, maggots and dirt won’t hurt you. I’d happily eat a maggot smoothie if it meant I didn’t have to eat something laced with salmonella or lead.
karl_jones

Years ago, I worked on the night shift cleanup crew at a certain bakery (long since defunct) in Minneapolis.

The bakery lost a major client — a big name department store (also since defunct, at least at that location) — when a customer sliced into a nice fresh loaf of bread … and found a cigarette butt.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m pretty sure the responsible party was that one baker who chain-smoked on the job. Probably rested his lit cigs on top of the mixing machines ….
Malgwyn

Every time I leave flour or pancake mix for more than a year, I open the package to find lavae wiggling around, or their corpses if the air has been consumed. That would indicate that bug eggs are universally part of all flour containing products.

According to the USDA food Pyramid I’m supposed to eat 6 to 11 servings of Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta. So somewhere near half of my diet is grains. I’d guess I eat a couple hundred pounds of them a year; that would mean that half of the bugs consumed would be from that. So bugs to grain ratio would be about .5%.
Secret_Life_of_Plants

This always reminds me of those infomercials selling the toothbrush sanitizing device — so that your toothbrush doesn’t retain the floaty bathroom poop molecules that get on it when you flush the toilet.

…But as soon as you stick the toothbrush in your breathing, coughing, eating, drinking, kissing, sucking, licking, love-making, fingernail biting, finger-licking MOUTH, it doesn’t matter that the toothbrush was ever sterilized. All the stuff of the environment is already in there along with everything else you’ve breathed in in the course of a day.

World’s dirty, so are we.
IamInnocent

And yet, I’m hungry.
rawbacon2

I worked in a meat-processing plant in my youth, packing cans of spam-like products. If they where banged up or ruptured they got thrown in a plastic container. One day one of these containers tipped. Result: Maggots a plenty on the factory floor.
At the time I was a vegetarian, this incident prolonged my veggie-resolve for a few years. Then I rediscovered how good pork-rinds and bacon taste.
Meat & maggots for the win!
Anonymous

whatever… I know as someone who makes wine, that wine contains Spiders, Spider nests, earwigs, yellowjackets and everything that hangs out with grapes!
GregLondon

soylent green is peeeople!
mdh

#70 – I was (at 64) making a joke that I’ll bet most people who read, got. I’m not sure what you were reading, or why I need to be your strawman. Cheer up.
Secret_Life_of_Plants

Also I had a friend who was in the Marines when he was younger and was living in the Philippines for awhile. Near the base there were a bunch of kiosks that served chicken or beef shish-kebob or satay-like meat on skewers. He had a favorite kiosk that had the most delicious succulent meats.

One day he went to get some lunch and the kiosk was closed. It had been condemned for selling rat meat.

My friend was very sad because apparently the remaining beef and chicken options were not nearly as delicious.
TroofSeeker

I just ate some canned ravioli. To me, that is the most mysterous of meats, if it’s meat at all.
thefill

I have a growing list of “things to be ignored in order to continue to live happily” and crap in my food is one of them. I just don’t think about it. However I will gladly take a few pounds of bug heads and larvae over salmonella any day. Especially when I think about people in China who can’t even give their babies formula because it’s tainted with evil chemicals. We have it pretty good.
insert

I once bit into a cookie and found a screw-ended eye from a hook-and-eye fastener thing.

I suppose I coulda sued or something, but I was like eight, so the two free cookies I got seemed like a pretty swell deal.
littlesplits

This isnÂ´t a shock and it shouldnÂ´t shock people at all. The air we breath is not clean so why would you expect food produced in a factory to be spotless clean. Most processed food contains ingrediants which would make people retch. A little dirt is good for the immune system, we are part of nature and therefore need to live in nature not a bubble outside it.
http://littlesplits.wordpress.com/
Frau Blucher

a lot of these tasties are due to our industrialized food chain, which of course is an outgrowth of warfare.

insects are good food. dirt(aka ‘soil’ or ‘earth’), probiotics, etc. are one thing but human thumbs, feces and cigarette butts are another. take this peanut butter and salmonella sandwich (please).
doug117

Ya buy fresh fruit, vegs, meat, grains, nuts, and you will not see too much in the way of ratshit, dead bugs, or poison.

Most Americans buy food in boxes, jars and cans — food made in factories. I don’t think it costs less than fresh, maybe sometimes more. It may be laziness or ignorance.

If you buy factory food, you’re asking for trouble.
t3knomanser

@ZikZak: and it’s delicious.

In any case, realistically, you probably inhale half a pound of mites every year. You’re covered in them.

It always makes me chuckle: here you have humans, disgusting, oozing, oily, parasite and symbiont ridden humans get all pissy about eating a few insects or rat droppings or something.

Seriously, in perspective: humans are more disgusting than anything they eat.
dragonfrog

Heck, give me bugs in my food over bug poison, anyday.

You know how greens from the garden will have little caterpillar-munch tracks in the leaves, but greens from the grocery store typically don’t? It has always seemed odd to me that some people are worried by the caterpillar tracks, not by their absence.

I have heard vague and unattributed stories of certain religiously prescribed vegetarian diets, whose adherents in the old country are quite healthy, but on moving to the West begin to come down with various nutritional deficiency-related health problems. The difference: the new-world diet doesn’t have enough insects to make up a balanced diet.
Strophe

Any stats on Unicorn Chasers and their acceptable MOU (matter other than unicorn) content?
Jerril

Food produced in a factory is hardly the bottom of the pit, either.

Most food poisoning cases start at home, as people don’t take care with, for example, cutting up raw chicken, or fully cooking ground hamburger, or tossing out those left overs which have been sitting in the fridge for a few days but look perfectly fine.

Growing the ingredients at home doesn’t protect you either (having found bugs and parts of bugs in garden-grown veggies before, and heard horror stories about slugs).

Plants, basically, grow in dirt. Animals (including ourselves) are piss and shit factories.

Wash your hands before handling food (with regular soap), wash your cutting boards and utensils (again, just soap and hot water), take a moment to pick or wash the obvious problems from your produce, and you’ve basically got your bases covered.
Bonnie

Don’t forget that Fig Newtons have wasp eggs in them too! yay!
mrmopwater

FIG PASTE Insects (AOAC 964.23) Contains 13 or more insect heads per 100 grams of fig paste in each of 2 or more subsamples

…MAY ALSO CONTAIN FIG PASTE
ill lich

Are vegans allowed to eat rat turds?
flytch

insects and parasites are part of life… without them there would be no life! it’s a symbiotic relationship…

take raisins for example… if it were not for the maggots that punch small holes in the skin of the grape they would never become raisins…
Halloween Jack

Old news. A biology teacher once told my class that, if you removed all matter from the earth except for nematodes, you’d have a very complete outline of the biosphere made out of the little buggers. Also, topsoil is basically worm shit.
Tensegrity

@18 Hahaha what the heck are you talking about?

Fresh fruit and veggies don’t have dead bugs? Well, I suppose they’re live at first but after I cook them they’re dead.

Look, I totally agree with your point that there’s a lot of problems with factory food, but if you think organic/fresh food is magically “clean” then you need to get out of Whole Foods and get into an actual garden or farm. Sure, they will not have poison or pesticides, but there’s all sorts of bugs in fresh foods. In fact, the trade off of organic is MORE bugs (a good tradeoff IMO and hopefully they are normal garden pest-type bugs as opposed to flies/maggots).

Anyway, that’s why you wash stuff before you eat it! Even still, I’ve probably ingested a fair number of aphids with my backyard broccoli.
Toby

It does make veganism more of a shades-of-gray proposition, you have to admit…
toupeira

Ah, yes. I’ve recently stumbled on this interesting fact in the excellent novel Nine Kinds of Naked by Tony Vigorito. I wonder what the standards are in other parts of the world…
Marsha Keeffer

The less processed food we eat, the less of that junk we ingest. Great reason to stay away from boxes, cans and jars, eh?
TroofSeeker

RawBacon2 worked in a meat processing plant as a vegan. So did I, and I agree: it was disgusting, the things they made me pick up and throw back in the mixer. d8^P

I was a vegan for an unusual reason: I had been told that when they slaughter animals, the animals have adrenalin in their blood, knowing they’re dying, and it promotes aggression in anyone that eats the meat.
I felt no different after many months, so I got me some bacon. d8^d
Daemon

Actually, I’m more disconcerted about the various medications that have known side-effects like “causes suicide”. Exactly how many suicides, for is a given med allowed to cause before it’s disallowed?

Especially when the suicide-causing medication is an antidepressant or an acne medication, for example…
avraamov

semantics.
HotPepperMan

#64:

The ‘food’ in question is PET food. Something that has been done in the US for a long time. The info below is out of date as the EU has now approved the use of feathers for animal food (no more land space!!!)

“In Europe they [feathers] are all landfilled. In the U.S., they use a technique that autoclaves the feathers at high temperatures, [turning them into a] brown material used as animal feed [for livestock, cats and dogs]. It’s not very nutritious and it costs about as much money to make as what they sell it for, so it’s not a very profitable operation.”

Now, check out what is done for human consumption here:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters
the r kelly

“you likely ingest up to two pounds of “flies, maggots and mites” each year, without being aware.”

This sentence is constructed to say that it is unlikely you consume more than two pounds a year, but that it is still quite possible.

I do not think that is what is meant nor implied by the post.

Just sayin’. “Up to two” means “between zero and two.”
kengland4

After hearing all this, I’d still rather prepare my own food at home-well-cooked and inspected-instead of worrying whether some diseased chef or server has spat in it due to some perceived slight. That that is tolerated is the height of folly. This article DID make it more difficult to enjoy the bowl of cereal I just ate, though… It hasn’t killed us yet, though (statistically), so we must be built for it. Besides, many people chose to starve to death, instead of eating perfectly digestible (and plentiful), protein-laden insects. Give me cheese and/or soy sauce, and I’ll eat just about anything!
alisong76

The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazardsfor Humans

You’re still alive, aren’t you? You’re not sick after eating? Deal with the odd bit of, as the experts say, natural, unavoidable and non-hazardous contamination in your food. Better that than have zero immunity because everything you touch and ingest is sterile.
salsaman

@18 doug117 nails it re: factory food. The best way to avoid (unwanted) bugs+crap+rot in food is to avoid packaged and processed food whenever possible. Food shouldn’t be shipped in tanker trucks or be bought and sold by the ton! HFCS, partially hydrogenated oils, flavor “enhancers” and artificial coloring and preservatives don’t belong in good food– they exist to mask low quality, partially-contaminated ingredients, poor food handling, and lack of food preparation skill.
zuzu

It always makes me chuckle: here you have humans, disgusting, oozing, oily, parasite and symbiont ridden humans get all pissy about eating a few insects or rat droppings or something.

Previously:
* Your body has 10x more bacterial cells than human ones