how many rodent hairs are acceptable?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sun Nov 10 16:20:20 PST 2002


Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Spy quoted from this in the 80s, and Harper's did in its October
> issue, but it always makes good reading: the FDA's Food Defects
> Action Levels - and the beauty of the web is you can get the whole
> thing yourself: <http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/dalbook.html>. less
> than 10mgs of mammalian excreta per pound of cocoa beans, fewer than
> 30 fly eggs per 100g of tomato paste, fewer then 13 insect heads per
> 100g of fig paste are of no danger to human health....
>
> Doug

Of course under any conceivable social structure or mode of production, past, present or future, an attempt to reduce such "defects" to zero would equal starvation. There never has been nor will be a wholly "pure" food supply (outside the laboratory anyhow).

Carrol



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