Friday, July 20, 2007

Put The Egg McMuffin Down ...


Every year it is estimated that the average person unintentionally consumes just over 3.2 pounds of insect parts.

One of the major entry points for insects into our food is flour which we use to make a wide assortment of foods, from bread and pasta to desserts and cereals. During the flour milling process, one of the purposes of the so-called "Entolator" is to smash insect parts into such small pieces that they cannot easily be seen with the naked eye.

Moreover, the U.S. government legally permits certain levels of non-hazardous insect parts in various foods. Examples:
1) chocolate, for example, can contain up to 60 insect fragments /100 grams
2) peanut butter up to 30 /100
3) tomato sauce up to 30 fly eggs 30 /100 grams

Both the Canadian and U.S. governments permit up to twenty maggots per one hundred grams of mushrooms, approximately three hundred and twenty insect parts per fifty grams of ground pepper, and less than fifty insect parts per fifty grams of flour. The list goes on and on.

5 comments:

J.C. said...

Great. Extra protein.

Anonymous said...

Yup!

Anonymous said...

To be honest, I try to limit the amount of information I have in this regard. Realistically, what can I do if even mushrooms are problematic?

Anonymous said...

Can we say...too much information!

Anonymous said...

I believe insects in flour should be the least of our concerns.... most insects are quite nutritious.... a lot more nutritious than a lot of the rubbish we eat.

Accra