Government Food Contamination Standards
Robert Choate, a government nutrition consultant, once stated that
there was more protein in the INSECTS in some breakfast cereal than
in the cereals themselves.
Current regulations include :
As many as 10% of the beans in a sample of coffe can be infested
or damaged by insects.
250 Milliliters (about a cup) of orange juice is allowed to
contain ten fruit fly eggs, but only two maggots.
Apple butter can have 5 insects per 100 grams (about 25 in a 16
ounce jar), but little insects like mites, aphids, thrips, and
scale insects don’t count toward that limit. The cleanest apples
are sold whole, and the wormy ones are made into apple butter.
Wheat can average “9 milligrams of rodent excreta pellets and/or
pellet fragments per kilogram.
Peanut butter can have 50 insect fragments per 100 grams (as many
as 620 in the 40 ounce jar of Skippy’s Super Chunk) or one rodent
hair per 100 grams.
Curry powder can contain 100 insect fragments per 25 grams. Most
spices are rife with insects before they reach the market; the
FDA acknowledges there isn’t much that American spice importers
can do about the matter. (But “no live insects are permitted,”
an American Spice Trade Association spokesman insisted.)
100 grams of tomato juice can contain two DROSOPHILA maggots,
five eggs and one maggot, or ten eggs and no maggot.
Frozen Brussels sprouts can have 40 aphids or thrips per 100
grams, that amounts to about 200 vermin in a 1 pound package.
“Foreign matter” as applied to food contaminants can also include
metal shavings or lubricants from the canning or processing
equipment.
Sufficient quantities of metal have been found in foods to create an
industry for metal detectors expressly designed for food production
lines.
Lead shot is often found in raisins as a result of hunters firing
into game hiding in the vineyards.