Complete and Utter Zebu

According to Ohio University researchers, every American eats about “a pound or two of insects every year…ground up into tiny pieces in such items as strawberry jams, peanut butter, spaghetti sauce, applesauce, frozen chopped broccoli, etc.” The FDA regulates what they call “filth” in food. It permits, for instance, one maggot or five fly eggs in each 250ml of orange juice, one rodent excreta pellet in each popcorn sample and 50 insect fragments in each 100g of peanut butter.

It sounds absolutely disgusting, though nutritionist Robert Choate claimed that there was more protein in the insects in most American breakfast cereals than in the cereals themselves.

Feeling slightly smug, we looked up what the EU permits. After all, as the Commission’s Food Safety website says: “The Central Goal of the European Commission’s food safety policy is to ensure a high level of protection of human health.” To this end it has very strict rules on contaminants like toxins, lead, PCBs and genetically modified anything.

But we had trouble finding the rules on the sort of things the Americans call “filth”. And then we realised why. EU regulations define contaminants in food in detail. But at the end, it says:

“Extraneous matter, such as, for example, insect fragments, animal hair, etc, is not covered by this definition.”

In other words, the EU doesn’t mind how much animal hair, insects and rodent droppings enter the food chain because it doesn’t count as food. In case you doubt us, and we could understand why you might, click here or google “eu insect fragments animal hair.”

The journal of American Agricultural Law Association believes the reason is because:

“EU policy places a higher priority upon free trade in food among member states than it does upon consumer health.”

It points out that it is actually illegal for anybody to prohibit, restrict or impede foods on the grounds that they contain bits of insect, animal hair or other extraneous matter.”

Suddenly, we begin to wish we had FDA-style regulation in this area. If you want to look on the bright side, having such “natural” additives to the food chain probably means fewer pesticides ar used. And insects are full of protein. Just not so sure about the rat droppings.