Can you believe it that the average Americans consumes one to two pounds of insects and insect parts per year? According to the Terro Chemical Company, The average coffee drinker could take in as many as 136,000 insect parts in one year’s time. Coffee is not the only type of food that has its share of insects and insect parts.
Chocolate, broccoli, peanut butter and about any other fruit and vegetable are victim to defects or foreign matter including insects, rodent hairs, or in some cases rodent filth. The scary part about this information is that the FDA allows a certain number of foreign defects in the foods we eat or products we use if the number is below what the FDA considers a danger threshold.
Some interesting thresholds would include:
- Tomato paste can include 30 fly eggs per 100 grams of product and pass as fit to eat.
- Apple butter can include 1 rodent hair and 1.6 insects per serving of about 30 grams.
- Your daily 8-ounce orange juice could contain 8 to 10 fly eggs and still pass as grade “A”.
Insects are a part of most of our foods and if monitored cause no issues believe it or not, some foods are eaten with the taster knowing insects are present. There is a food namely Casu Martzu that is extremely dangerous. Casu Martzu is a cheese that contains live maggots; if the maggots survive stomach acids, it causes a host of problems. If dead maggots are eaten, one could be poisoned. This cheese is banned in the United States and many other countries. Guinness Book of World Records declares Casu Martzu “the most dangerous cheese in the World.” Why someone would choose to eat a food like this, who knows?
What food do you eat that has the most ‘food defects?’