What food defects does the FDA allow as acceptable "levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans"?

The FDA calls them food defects and defines its permissible "Food Defect Action Levels" as listed in their online booklet to be "the levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans."

The list of "defects" includes rodent feces (excrement), rodent hair, molds, whole insects, insect parts, beetle eggs, beetle larvae, and more.

Would you like a taste of the foods that we consume according to the FDA standard’s "Protecting and Promoting Your Health"? Here are a few samples of upper acceptable limits gleaned from the publicly available FDA booklet:

Whole Allspice: 5% berries per weight are allowed to be moldy,

Ground Allspice: 30 insect fragments per 10 grams; 1 rodent hair per 10 grams,

Ground Cinnamon: 400 or more insect fragments per 50 grams, 11 or more rodent hairs per 50 grams.

More Info: www.greenmedinfo.com

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32 Comments

George Oliver Prince

Didn't really want to know this

Cari G.

Shouldn't one of the answer options be "None of the above"?

michelle d blauert

How gross this is to me ! Yuck

Pat Wells

Some things are better left undisclosed.

First&Formost

Not very nice. But then the FDA does not control my food. Only on vacations

Bob Fowler

YUMMY ! 🤔😜

gbluemoon

Truthfully all answers were correct.

gbluemoon

James Webb, You would not have been wrong.

Barb Schmidt

have know this for as long as can remember, as well rem all the times in past you just ate a raspberry or strawberry or carrot or cucumber or anything right out of the garden, and if ever rode bikes or skateboards or ran outside, something, well these are understandable happenings. the moment "they" decide to what amounts to force feeding a person, human, bugs as bugs are being added to our food by "them", look up the names they are now using in order to do so, as most will not know this, and of course the outright "showing off of eating bugs" is a horrid thing to do, as humans are NOT birds that can digest huge amounts of bugs on a daily basis, but then "they" do want as many of the majority dead, as "they" push these lies and so much more out to justify the lies....

David de Tremaudan

It should be “none of the above.”

Dennis Walker

Saw a show recently promoting insects and bugs 🐞 🐜 🦂 as food now available through Amazon… the push is on!

klmilles

flanderschristy, When I was in grade school, we went on a field trip to a local meat packing plant that made hotdogs, among other things. I didn't eat hotdogs again.

lls

...I remember this from a "food study" we had to do in the 10th grade...I never quite looked at frozen pizza the same way, again...gee, maybe homemade is always better, even if the recipe fails...

flanderschristy

While this completely grossed me out, I'm not surprised. I've always said that if we knew what all we were consuming in approved edible products, we would never eat processed food again. To this day I love hotdogs. Every time I tell some one that, they ask me if I know what they are made of. I say "NO & I don't want to know." I'm not going to let them ruin my love of hotdogs. P.S. When I was a youngster, we bought pop in a glass bottle out of a vending machine that kept it ice cold. It was not uncommon to find whole roaches & mice in your pop. So we always inspected the contents before drinking it. I was told that manufacturers would stop the line when the 5 o'clock whistle blew, therefore leaving open bottles overnight on the conveyor belt. During the night, all sorts of critters crawled into the bottles & drowned. They don't do that anymore thank God.