A small amount of insect contamination is practically unavoidable in the fruit and veg chain. In the US, there is precise guidance on how many “fragments”, and of what, are allowed in food, which makes for stomach-churning reading. US consumers may have to put up with 30 insect fragments per 100g of peanut butter, 60 fragments per 100g of chocolate, 225 per 225g of pasta, two maggots per 100g of tomato paste, one maggot per 250ml of citrus juice and up to 35 fruit fly eggs in one cup of raisins. Fortunately, the rules are tighter here. “Food placed on the market must be free from visible insect contamination … there are no permitted tolerance levels for insect fragments,” says a spokesperson for the Food Standards Agency (FSA). “While minor, unavoidable contamination can occur in natural products, visible contamination, or anything that could compromise safety or quality, will generally trigger enforcement action.”
Glory Be! Our regulations are tighter.
Well, no, they’ve just not as specific. Instead of saying two – well mushed – maggots per 100g we say not enough to compromise safety or to be seen. Which, with well mushed maggots will be, oooh, say 2 per 100g?
It’s a different approach. And it’s absolutely not “tighter” either.
This also produces an opportunity to repeat an old story. Not wholly sure how true it is but so the saying goes vegans coming from poorer countries end up sometimes with deficiency diseases in the UK. In those foreign places they were gaining a hefty dose of animal proteins from contamination, much less here, and enough less to trigger those diseases.
As I know from a friend who worked for MAFF and later DEFRA and arrested a gang selling horsemeat as beef, the way we used to be more stringent was that food inspectors actually insepected food whereas in the EU they merely inspected the bit of paper accompanying the meat saying it was beef…
It was many years ago, as you can tell, so it may well have changed with His Majesty Kier I tampering with international relations…
Grist, this business of believing what people tell you is becoming so widespread as to be verging on criminally stupid, in fields other than just food. In the construction industry we have ‘contractor self-certification’ which means that they say they did something and you believe it. In the Carmont/Stonehaven rail crash, the contractor said they’d built something according to the design they’d been given. They hadn’t. But that let the designer off the hook.
As a civil engineering student told me long ago “You can be as scientific as you like but it all gets built by Paddy.”
The guys were rightfully arrested.. Good horse is *far* superior to most beef.
What a waste…
When I lived in Austria, I bought some ground paprika in a little jar ( the ones with the flip top plastic lids ) from a big Spar supermarket.
A few days after I opened it, I tried to sprinkle some on whatever it was I was cooking and none came out. I checked inside the jar and saw a web and a lot of little creatures wriggling around inside. I wonder how many of their brothers and sisters I had had with my curry a couple days before.
I had the same in a jar of black pepper. I only noticed it when the pot was well down so suspect the contamination happened after purchase. This was in Hong Kong so all sorts running around.
On holiday in Crete c.30 years ago, I bought my 10yo daughter a plate of chips. The vinegar was infested with larvae. I mentioned it to a waiter with limited English: “It is the fly – good flavour!” The locals didn’t care.
Sounds like the working class version of the worm in the tequila.
“Visible” would likely be more than 2 mashed maggots / 100g.
And so on.
The US limits are specific and probably all a lot tighter, but generally scorned be EU lovers because specific. As in: the US will let you do this, yuk disgusting, we don’t (but we do, but non specifically, and more so).
Studies have shown that 95% of wild blackberries have maggots.
If you soak fresh blackberries they start to leave after a few minutes.
I have asked vegetarians if they eat blackberries and most say yes.
I was going to quote the Indian vegan story. It is probably true. I’d guess the weevil per kilo score for Indian flour would be somewhat higher.
I’ve met some really fat Indian vegans.
If anyone finds this stomach churning, I would strongly recommend they never eat out. Or read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.
\\\\\\\or ride a motorbike without a full face helmet.
I learned about this a couple of months ago while attending a talk about all kinds of bugs at a zoo near Bristol. It didn’t really faze me. So, I’ve been eating small traces of creepy crawlies my whole life, more than most probably as my dad grew a lot of his own veggies, and yet I’ve made it to sixty seven with very little illness.
I should also mention that I used to cycle to work and I wasn’t that rare for an insect to fly straight into your mouth in such a way that it was impossible not to swallow it.
You must have been a sensationally fit cyclist Stony. Slower ones breathe through their nose
At some point in the future we’ll have laws restricting the fruit contamination in our yummy insect meals.
I’ve just been down to the chicken run to collect the eggs. One of them was cracked and I managed to salvage it by putting the contents into a little plastic pot. This got me reflecting about what a revolting thing an egg is and that it is best not to think about these things too deeply. Milk, bits of dead animals, prawns. Lots of this stuff is delicious but it really is better not to think too hard about where it comes from. So what difference does eating a few more invertebrates make in the end?
Depends on which end.
If you feed the chicken Guinness, will you get black eggs ? (Pissed hens notwithstanding ).
We don’t have individuals’ standards to compare to these government standards.
Additionally, if someone sees something odd in the food, they pick it out and don’t eat it. They note where they got it. If it happens again, they stop using that food. Producers know that customers better not see anything odd in their product. I.e., producers have incentives before government shows up to “help.”
That’s just the insect bits… that’s not including the mold, etc being “included” in the product…
Thing is… that’s why it’s called food *processing*…
Take the tomato paste. They aren’t going to use prime tomatoes for that, it’ll be seond, even third choice and damaged tomatoes.
Which *will* have mould and all types of insects in/on them.
There’s a limit, if it gets too bad it’ll affect the taste, but that’s what blending is for….
Then the whole lot will be tossed in a pressure cooker and macerated before going into packaging.
There shouldn’t be *anything* recogniseable in the paste anymore, and should definitely be sterile.
And anything bacteria or funghi would produce that could be toxic to us will have been Cooked to Death. Proteins and even other biologicals do *not* do well in an acidic environment at high pressure and temperature..
If you *do* find recogniseable bits or even whole bugs in there, there’s something wrong with the packaging line, and the packaging process is very much *not* up to spec.
Which is why most food-processing plants aren’t too fussed about the stuff incoming up to the point where things go into the Cookers.
The bit from there up to where the packaging is closed is treated like a Clean Room though.. Because of the risk of that secondary contamination.
I can vouch for this, having installed kit in a certain soup factory in Wigan. You could do a lot of damage with their carrots if you had sufficiently strong elastic in your catapult.
Slightly related: I had a friend 50 years ago who ran a green bean packing plant on VA eastern shore (Accomack County). He kept up with the production schedule, and when it came time to switch, he brought out the new labels for the operators to apply to the cans.
To wit, whatever brand of green beans you bought, they were all canned there. The only difference between brands was the labels.