I read this minging minging story the other day about coffee. Apparently, the anecdote goes, there was an eminent entomologist who always insisted on making lengthy detours on field trips to find coffee which was freshly ground from coffee beans. His colleagues assumed he was a coffee snob but when one of them asked he replied that he did this because he was allergic to cockroaches.

It turns out that for preground coffee is all processed from huge stockpiles of coffee which are infested with cockroaches, it’s impossible to separate them so they all get ground up together and the preground coffee you buy is actually a blend of coffee beans and cockroaches (the same goes for chocolate of course!).

Anyway, the FDA has a website on “Defect Action Levels” for food, which is basically the acceptable limit of defects in food, it makes for some very interesting, yet stomach churning reading, here are some excerpts:

Blackberries (Drupelet, Canned or Frozen)   -   10 or more whole insects or equivalent per 500g

Chocolate – 60 or more insect fragments and 1 or more rodent hairs per 100g

Curry powder – 100 or more insect fragments and 4 or more rodent hairs per 25g

Fig paste – 13 or more insect heads per 100g

Red fish / ocean perch – 3% of the fillets examined contained 1 or more copepods accompanied by pus pockets

Whole ginger – 3mg or more of mammilian excreta per pound

Macaroni and noodle products – 225 insect fragments or more and 4.5 insect hairs per 225g

Mushrooms (canned and dried) – 20 or more maggots of any size and 75 mites per 100g

Ground pepper – 475 insect fragments and 2 or more rodent hairs per 50g

Ground thyme – 925 insect fragments and 2 or more rodent hairs per 10g

Canned tomatoes – 2 or more maggots and 10 or more fly eggs (1:5 if both found) per 500g

Anyone feel hungry?

Before you throw up, bear in mind that these are MAXIMUM limits, hopefully the average levels are much much lower than this