You might want to think twice before eating the olive out of your martini or the cherry off of your next sundae. The levels of filth allowed by the FDA are enough to turn your stomach.
Have you ever wondered how much rodent shit the FDA will allow in the wheat that ends up in your bread or how much mold is okay in frozen strawberries? All of the numbers are available in the FDA Defect Levels Handbook, if you are brave enough to look.
Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 110.110 allows the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to establish maximum levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods for human use that present no health hazard. These “Food Defect Action Levels” listed in this booklet are set on this premise–that they pose no inherent hazard to health.
You can look forward to reading about contamination by:
Copepods
Extraneous Materials -Including objectionable matter contributed by insects, rodents, and birds; decomposed material; and miscellaneous matter such as sand, soil, glass, rust, or other foreign substances.
Foreign Matter -Including objectionable matter such as sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc. Also includes the valueless parts of the raw plant material, such as stems.
Infestation - The presence of any live or dead life cycle stages of insects in a host product, (e.g., weevils in pecans, fly eggs and maggots in tomato products); or evidence of their presence (i.e., excreta, cast skins, chewed product residues, urine, etc.); or the establishment of an active breeding population, (e.g., rodents in a grain silo).
Mildew, Mold, Rancidity, Rot
Whole or Equivalent Insects – A whole insect, separate head, or body portions with head attached.
Enjoy the Handbook. But wait until you have finished your lunch!
FDA Defect Levels Handbook
Bisphenol A, commonly abbreviated as BPA is a building block of several important plastics and plastic additives.
