The lice in your rice
You may not want to read this until you’ve had lunch, but there’s some interesting, if not appetizing, information from an op-ed by E.J. Levy in today’s New York Times on what’s really in the food we routinely consume.
“You may be grossed out,” Levy writes, “but insects and mold in our food are not new. The F.D.A. actually condones a certain percentage of “natural contaminants in our food supply — meaning, among other things, bugs, mold, rodent hairs and maggots.”
For instance, tomato juice may average 10 or more fly eggs per gram, canned mushrooms more than 20 or more maggots.
At least there’s extra protein to be had.
For more delectable details, click here.
Comments (3)
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Allen This is why our grandmothers canned everything to pasturize foods. If a farm family died out from botulizm it just meant they were careless. Many mass produced foods are being carelessly processed..shame on them.Christine
Posted on February 13, 2009 2:13 PM
Oh, our grandmothers certainly ate many more fly eggs than we ever will. Maggots and rodent hairs have nothing to do with botulism. The recent news from China notwithstanding (for some reason we've decided to outsource our food-safety inspections to foreign countries!), our food supply is much cleaner than that of our ancestors. Striving for 100% purity is pointless and self-defeating, and it's why so many of our kids have asthma and peanut allergies. Let 'em get dirty. Let 'em eat fly eggs. Mmmmm.
Posted on February 13, 2009 3:31 PM
Say I'm a white southerner eating at the Supreme Court hot dog stand in 1896, and I share a table with a fellow who introduces himself as Homer Plessy. I think nothing about it until the next day until I learn from the paper that Homer is "black." I'm shocked and disgusted.
It's basically the same thing: the violation of food taboos based on symbolic constructions of cleanliness and purity. My shock at learning I've been drinking fly eggs is precisely analagous to my learning that I ate with a black man (or learning that my countertop is probably dirtier than my floor, despite different food taboos attached to each). It's a post facto sense of violation apropos of nothing much except for archaic schemes of social regulation (see Leviticus for further examples).
Posted on February 13, 2009 10:28 PM