How Much Rodent Hair, Bugs and Poop is Legally Allowed In the Food We Eat?



Brace yourselves, America: Many of your favorite foods may contain bits and pieces of creatures you probably didn’t know were there — and it’s totally legal. How about some rodent dung in your coffee, maggots in your pizza sauce, or mold in the jelly on your toast? So sorry, chocolate lovers, that dark delicious bar you devoured might contain 30 or more insect parts and a sprinkling of rodent hair. Called “food defects,” these dismembered creatures and their excrement are the unfortunate byproduct of growing and harvesting food. According to the FDA, “It is economically impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.” So, while there’s no way to get rid of all the creatures that might hitch a ride along the food processing chain, the FDA has established standards to keep food defects a minimum. 

  • • The coffee beans you grind for breakfast are allowed to have an average of 10mg or more animal poop per pound. 
  • • As much as 4% to 6% of beans by count are also allowed to be insect-infested or moldy. 
  • • As you sprinkle black pepper on your morning eggs, try not to think about the fact that you may be eating more than 40 insect fragments with every teaspoon, along with a smidgen of rodent hair. 
  • • Common fruit flies hitched a ride on that fruit you had for breakfast, getting onboard anywhere from the field to harvest to grocery store and being trapped by processors or freezing in refrigerated delivery trucks. 

……and that’s just breakfast. Nevertheless, the FDA says this is all very, very low-risk, that insects parts are gross, but they don’t lead to foodborne illnesses. Cross-contamination from raw food, under-cooking food, hand-washing and spreading germs from raw food — those are the things that contribute to more than 48 million cases of foodborne illness each year in the U.S., not a few bug parts.