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.