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.
4 comments:
Dye is also an entry point. The red dye in red M&M's particularly.
Food Network would lead you to believe insects are delicacies.
KP
I am not as concerned about the insects as I am about rodent feces.
Of course FDA says it's an acceptable amount.
DV is school.
Source? lol, but we eat spiders while we sleep anyway. Same difference.
Just want to share that you ruined my Peanut Butter crunch this morning, DV. I could literally feel myself eating fly and roach legs.
Ughh...!! And yeah, I know that we all eat a bug or two every now and again, but still... ughh...
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