flickering pictures

From Science News:

You bite into a piece of candy and find a cricket leg. Eewwww. Or notice that raisin in a bowl of cereal has legs and wings. Bam, down the disposal it goes. Such filth in foods is supposedly illegal, but the Food and Drug Administration’s actual tolerance is far from zero. FDA rules allow up to 60 insect fragments on average in a composite of six 100-gram chocolate samples. For peanut butter, it’s OK to have up to 30 insect pieces per 100 grams. Grossed out yet?

Next time you dip a knife into that one-pound jar of peanut butter (in the U.S.A., at least), you’ll know that there could legally be 136 insect wings, legs, antennae and entrail-type bits in there, waiting to be smeared onto your toast. If you’re interested, here are the Food and Drug Administration’s maximum allowable limits for rodent hair, mould, dung and other undesirables in your food. A few examples:

• Berries: Average mould count is 60% or more
• Broccoli, frozen: Average of 60 or more aphids and/or thrips and/or mites per 100 grams
• Cinnamon, ground: Average of 400 or more insect fragments (and 11 or more rodent hairs) per 50 gram
• Mushrooms, canned and dried: Average of over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid or 15 grams of dried mushrooms
• Oregano: Average of 1,250 or more insect fragments per 10 grams
• Tomatoes, canned: Average of 10 or more fly eggs per 500 grams

Hungry yet? Seems strange that more than half your raspberries can legally be mould, and that oregano stat in particular freaks me right out… And I’m a man who likes his oregano.

Last year I spent five wild weeks in India, and while at first I insisted on picking all the bug-looking things out of my food, I’m a bit proud to say that I eventually learned it was better not to ask questions and just chow down. I’m quite sure that more than a few six-legged beasties ended up in my gut as a result, but there’s still something about the idea of purposely eating insects that sticks in my craw. Which is a bit silly, really, since many of us have no problem with shrimp, lobsters, crab and other bug-like critters.

According to the Science News article, aside from the occasional gross-out, the creepy crawlies that inevitably worm their way into our diet may be doing us more good than harm:

In fact, the team found that crickets contained more than 1,550 milligrams of iron, 25 milligrams of zinc and 340 milligrams of calcium per 100 grams of dry tissue. Traditional cuisines in developing countries often fall short of the global guidelines for these minerals. Based on analyses of Luo-caught insects, just three crickets would provide an individual’s daily iron requirement.

Gram for gram, crickets or grasshoppers can be more nutritious than an equal quantity of beef or pork, says Victor B. Meyer-Rochow of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. One reason: Water constitutes a high percentage of meat, he says, whereas insects tend to be drier. Many insects also are richer in minerals than many meats, such as hamburger, his data show. And most lipids in bugs tend to be long-chain, unsaturated fats—healthier types than those predominant in conventional livestock.

And putting bugs on the menu may be as good for the environment as it is for your diet:

Diners who want to reduce the size of their environmental footprint might reassess their aversion to bugs, DeFoliart says. Insects typically eaten by people are vegans—at least for much of their life cycles, he says—and generally “clean-living in their choice of food and habitat.” Moreover, edible insects can forage on a far wider range of plants than do traditional meat animals. As such, he says, bugs can tap food sources normally worthless in conventional meat production, such as cacti, bamboo shoots, mesquite and woody scrub brush.

What’s more, insects turn more of what they eat into tissue that can be consumed by others. For crickets fed diets comparable in quality to the feed given to conventional Western livestock, diet conversion efficiency is about twice as high as for broiler chicks and pigs, four times higher than sheep and nearly six times higher than steers, DeFoliart reports. Insects’ quick reproduction and high fecundity makes them look even more environmentally attractive. For the crickets, DeFoliart has calculated, this translates into “a true food conversion efficiency close to 20 times better than that of beef.”

Gracer likens these differences to gas-guzzling versus gas-sipping vehicles: “Cows and pigs are the SUVs of the food world. And bugs—they’re the Priuses, maybe even bicycles.”

Lollipop image via Teacher Source.
Insect platter image vie ImportFood.com.

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