What’s In Your Food?

Maggots, insects, mold, rodent filth, larvae and parasites. Just in case you needed another reason to stop eating highly-industrialized, processed food, consider checking out the report The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels Of Natural Or Unavoidable Defects In Foods That Present No Health Hazards For Humans, from the US Food and Drug Administration Center For Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (FDA).

The Food Defect Action Levels’ document, reading like a horror story, details exactly how much ‘foreign’ matter can be in your food prior to the food being considered contaminated. The levels are set, explains the FDA, “… because it is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects”.

These 'naturally occurring, unavoidable defects' include maggots, insects, mold, rodent filth, larvae and parasites;  each ‘foreign substance’ is carefully regulated. For example, your canned tomatoes may contain up to an average of 10 or more fly eggs per 500 grams or 2 or more maggots per 500 grams. Your pizza sauce may contain an average of 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 2 or more maggots per 100 grams in a minimum of 12 subsamples. Wheat may contain an average of 75 or more insect fragments per 50 grams or 1 or more rodent hairs per 50 grams. Canned or frozen berries may have a mold count up to 60% or an average of 4 or more larvae per 500 grams.  Chocolate may contain up to 60 or more insect fragments per 100 grams or 1 or more rodent hairs per 100 grams.  Curry powder may contain an average of 100 or more insect fragments per 25 grams. Macaroni and noodle products may contain a whopping average of 225 insect fragments or more per 225 grams.

To find out what is in your food visit: http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/dalbook.html

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