The Maggots in Your Mushrooms

[XemaSab]

HE Georgia peanut company at the center of one of our nation’s worst food-contamination scares has officially reached a revolting new low: a recent inspection by the Food and Drug Administration discovered that the salmonella-tainted plant was also home to mold and roaches.

You may be grossed out, but insects and mold in our food are not new. The F.D.A. actually condones a certain percentage of “natural contaminants” in our food supply — meaning, among other things, bugs, mold, rodent hairs and maggots.

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.”).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13levy.html?em

[KittyWampus]

1. I grow my own food. Stuff happens. Not to excuse really foul conditions....

people have become so alienated from their food sources.

edit- I have to cut maggots out of my corn sometimes, for instance.

[XemaSab]

3. There's a world of difference

between a grub in your organic corn and knowing that the allowable limit for cow shit in burgers isn't ZERO.

[appal_jack]

4. i am sure i have eaten >1000's of mushroom maggots

I grow my own shiitake mushrooms, and sometimes I don't harvest them quite soon enough. In that case, there are already little bugs laying eggs in the gills of the mushrooms. Do I throw the mushrooms away then? No, I tap them against my hand a few times to shake the bugs out, then cook and eat the still-delicious shiitakes. Maybe a few of their grubs stay behind. Bugs are part of life (and not all that far from shrimp, evolutionarily): I don't stress too hard abut a few going down the hatch.

Cow shit in hamburger is conceptually more troubling, but making hamburger DOES involve slitting cows open and removing intestines and bones before grinding up the rest. Shit's gonna fly. A good slaughterhouse will keep the shit-meat contact minimal, and otherwise run a clean operation, but Zero is not a possibility.

Years ago, before he got really famous, I was visiting Joel Salatin's farm. His son Daniel was processing rabbits that day. For a high school kid (which he was at the time: he's now a grown man), Daniel was doing great. But his knife did slip a little on one rabbit (maybe he was nervous from all of us watching) and pierce a rabbit's intestine: hence a little shit got to where it didn't belong. Daniel wiped off his knife on a clean rag and kept going. I am sure that no one got sick from that event.

I'm not making apologies for slack production, or saying that limits of any of these nasty substances should be higher. But trying to achieve zero bug parts would lead to more insecticide use, more irradiation, and more difficulty for small farms to supply product into the wholesale food chain.

My great-grandmother used to say the we need to eat a pound of dirt before we can die & go to heaven.

-app

[KittyWampus]

2. Here's an old joke. What's worse than finding a worm in your apple?

HALF a worm in your apple.

[seabeyond]

5. lol lol lol

i liked your old name. now what am i gonna do. have to remember cryin and kitty.... oh the challenge.

[SoCalDem]

6. The orchard people around here say that you want to find a worm hole in an apple

that means the worm is GONE.. :)

[JCMach1]

7. The average American consumes as much as two pounds of insects each year

Here are some more fun FDA regulations:

...here are a selection of the FDA guidelines for what is acceptable -


1. One maggot or five fly eggs per 250 mils citrus juice

2. One pellet of rodent excreta allowed in a sample of popcorn, or twenty gnawed grains per pound or one rodent hair found in 50 percent of sub samples

3. Sixty insect fragments or 1 rodent hair per 100 g of chocolate

4. One parasite permitted in 3 percent of fillets of redfish and ocean perch

5. 225 insect fragments or 4.5 rodent hairs per 225 g macaroni... http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=98704

[Vickers]

8. This thread is making me HAWNGRY!

:spank:

[riverdeep]

9. We're awash in a microscopic zoo.

This idea of perfect cleanliness is a falsehood. There are 'germs' everywhere and most of them are either benign or beneficial. In fact, the idea of separate species is in some ways a myth because without these microbial invaders, most species couldn't survive. In an effort to rid ourselves of 'germs' (antibacterial everything), all we have done is create more supergerms.

As far as acceptable levels of larger contaminants, taking something down to zero is very difficult and hence very expensive. Fruit and vegetables are already expensive enough. I'm not saying let's go the way of China, but there's an intersection between reducing contaminants and no real benefit or no real detriment to human health. Even with all of the Bush administration's failures at regulation recently making the news (tainted spinach, tainted peanut butter, lead in children's toys, killer pet food, etc.) we still have a largely safe food supply, and hopefully Obama will make it that much safer.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

10. Then there are the bugs that are deliberately put in food, like Carmine, a food coloring

used to give food red color. It's ground up bugs and Dannon uses it to color their strawberry and cherry yogurt. Other companies use it too.