The Maggots in Your Mushrooms

[Blue_Tires]

THE Georgia peanut company at the center of one of our nation’s worst food-contamination scares has officially reached a revolting new low: a recent inspection by the Food and Drug Administration discovered that the salmonella-tainted plant was also home to mold and roaches.

You may be grossed out, 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.

In its (falsely) reassuringly subtitled booklet “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans,” the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition establishes acceptable levels of such “defects” for a range of foods products, from allspice to peanut butter.

Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/opinion/13levy.html?_r=1


I remember like yesterday an Arsenio Hall (who here still remembers HIM?) monologue where he grossed out the audience with some of those legally-allowed FDA tidbits...

[Spangle]

1. Need to run that clip again.

It would be cool to see some of his stuff again.

I was taught in school years, and years ago, that some 'stuff' was allowed to pass through. Using the excuse that they can not honestly keep all of it out. But it sounds like they are not even trying anymore. That is way different. Another cost saving idea, brought you by CEO's..

[Heidi]

2. I kid you not: the first time I made a salad after

I moved to Switzerland, I was absolutely motified that the head lettice I had purchased in the grocery store hadn't been washed in the warehouse or store. I had been so accustomed to buying clean, beautiful salad in the US that I had only given this lettuce a cursory rinse -- and nearly gagged when I saw some little bugs in the salad bowls. I'm not faulting Swiss standards at all -- just commenting on how spoiled I was. It was just a lesson to me to wash and inspect all vegetables very carefully. :hi:

[MineralMan]

3. My mom has always been a gardener, so fresh, homegrown

stuff always appeared on our table. That was not without its little surprises. One time, when I was about 10 years old (ancient history, now) we had company for dinner. One of the dishes was a salad, made 100% of things grown in the garden. As I was eating mine, I noticed a tiny little inchworm, making its way up one of the torn leaves of lettuce.

Ever the insightful young lad, I commented on how interesting the little inchworm was, showing it to everyone. Well, my mother was horribly embarrassed, of course. For me it was just another nature lesson. To everyone's credit, the salad was eaten, even after the wildlife demonstration.

[CrispyQ]

5. A few years ago a friend came with me to the farmer's market.

I told her she would not find tomatoes or corn in the grocery store that tasted as good as the produce at the market. She bought some veggies & later that evening called me to tell me she threw all the corn out cuz it had little worms on it. I told her mine did too, but I sat outside while husking the ears & pulled the little critters off & tossed them in the backyard. I reminded her that her choice was pesticides or little bugs that she could remove. "I'll go with the pesticides any day!" she told me. :eyes:

Yours is a great story & shows how we are conditioned as to what's acceptable & what isn't. As a kid, you found your eating companion fascinating, not repulsive. :thumbsup:

[MineralMan]

6. I still do find such things fascinating.

On another occasion, much later in my life, my wife and I were dining out with another couple. We had ordered mussels as an appetizer for the table. The woman in the other couple was about to eat a mussel, when she exclaimed that there was a crab in the shell. She wasn't really freaked out, but was not about to eat that mussel.

So I took it. I extracted the little commensal pea crab from the shell, and explained about commensal animals and how common it was for pea crabs to make their homes in the mussel shells. After I explained the relationship, I examined the little cooked crab, then popped it in my mouth and ate it, followed by the mussel.

The other couple were used to my shenanigans, so there was a bit of laughter, and we all went on with our fine meal. It was yet another teachable moment.

[izquierdista]

4. Dirt is good for you

At least that is how they think in Eastern Europe. All the potatoes and carrots sold here, both in the grocery stores and in the open air markets, are unwashed and have a healthy amount of dirt on them. It's as if they want to remind you they were pulled out of the ground and they are certainly NOT sold in clean little plastic sacks. For some reason though, beets don't seem to have as much dirt on them, maybe it is because they are very dark in color and it is hard to tell what is dirt and what is beet. Although that doesn't explain why the celery root (much more popular here than the green stems sold in the U.S.) seems to be free of the earth it was grown in.

This is all a detailed discussion of the "3 second rule". I suppose it makes a difference what was on the ground for the 3 seconds the food touched it.

[pipi_k]

7. Has anyone ever had this experience with pasta?

You buy a box and use half, then put the other half away. It sits on the shelf for a while before you get around to using it again.

You open it up one day and pour it into a pot of boiling water and the water is full of little black/brown beetle things that look like fleas (but aren't).

And the pasta itself is riddled with tiny little holes where it looks like the bugs might have been eating after they somehow got into the box.

no, no, no!

Those bugs were already IN the pasta to begin with, as eggs that hatched after being on the shelf a certain length of time.

I haven't noticed this with all brands...just a couple.


In fact, I realized that if you take a piece of (regular, not whole grain) uncooked elbow macaroni, for example, and hold it up to the light, you can see tiny black specks in it. Those are probably the unhatched eggs.

mmmm....protein!

[Blue_Tires]

9. ewww...i've had that happen

just thought it was because of bugs in the cupboard

[pipi_k]

13. I did too, but I could never really see any...so one day

I decided to use duct tape and cover all the places on a box of macaroni where bugs would likely be able to enter.

That was how I figured out they were already in the box to begin with....


:puke:

[TwilightGardener]

12. Yes--little brown wormy things, in mine--look like tiny grains of rice.

I don't know if it's because the pasta I buy comes in relatively loose cardboard boxes, or if, as you say, the eggs are already in there, just waiting for the right conditions.

[pipi_k]

14. yep, I've seen the little wormy guys too...

One place I never noticed any critters at all was in those boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese...both the kind with the dried cheese powder and the other kind with the creamy cheese in the foil pouch.

I've had that stuff in my cupboards for ages and never had a problem.

I think it was mostly the store brands, and I think a few times I had it happen with Barilla pasta.


Prince and Mueller's....not yet.

[TwilightGardener]

16. Barilla--that's the kind I buy! I'm going back to Mueller's.

[msongs]

8. maggots are a valued food source in many areas - high protein and all that nt

[pipi_k]

15. This reminds me

of one Christmas a few years ago

My oldest stepdaughter and her husband like buying "unique" gifts for each other.

Well.

This one Christmas he got her some dried and fried maggot snacks.



She loves to cook for people so I'm wondering now if she made some kind of gourmet meal for us all that included those wonderful little bits... :yoiks:


One year she tried to serve us Emu for Thanksgiving instead of turkey.

The family rebelled.

[here_is_to_hope]

10. My six year old was eating

some vanilla yogurt cereal once and came to me with a question.
"Dad, whats the nutritional value of an ant?"
Why honey?
"Well, I just ate a bunch of them, they are in my cereal."
I did the google and came up with no harm, no foul.
She went back to eating her cereal without so much as an "ugh!"
Kids...

[TwilightGardener]

11. I am off of broccoli for the time being--two weeks ago I was cutting apart

a head of broccoli into separate florets to steam, and I was munching on some stray florets as I worked. Noticed something that looked like unusual growth--a sort of whitish-green membrane or webbing that was covering some grooves in the stalks--I almost dismissed it as just, well, unusual plant growth, and then decided to slice open the membranes with my knife, just to be sure it wasn't something icky. It was--tiny, tiny little cream-colored larvae with teeny little black heads emerged, so small they almost weren't visible, if you weren't looking for them. I wonder how many of THOSE I've eaten in my lifetime. Gag.