You Won’t Believe How Many Bugs Are Legally Allowed In Your Food In Wisconsin

Believe it or not, you can actually have bugs and bug parts in your food.

Most of us aren't planning to sit down to a meal this week that intentionally includes things like maggots, crickets, worms, or any kind of creepy crawly. We've seen horror stories of people finding bugs in their fast food or opening something from the grocery store to find a bug in it.

Maybe it was just past the 19 maggot limit you can legally have in mushrooms.

Bugs Are Allowed In Food

Reader's Digest, CNN, and Food Safety Training & Certification all say that the FDA allows a certain number of bugs, insect fragments, rodent hairs, "foreign matter", and "mammalian feces". It's pretty much allowing a certain number of "defects" before calling it a problem. Meanwhile, there are some ingredients used in items that are made with insects by boiling or grinding them, but let's focus on the actual bug in the peanut butter.

Most Often Bugged-Out Foods

Peanut butter may contain up to 136 insect parts before it's considered contaminated. (I still love my peanut butter, I don't care.)

Chocolate can contain whole insects & insect larvae. But no more than 60 insect fragments per 100 grams. Specifically, cockroach parts are common in chocolate. Multiple other foods can contain whole insects too.

Pasta may contain 225 insect parts per 225 grams of pasta.

A 3.5 oz can of mushrooms can legally contain 19 maggots and 74 mites.

Frozen broccoli can contain 60 or more aphids/thrips/mites per 100 grams. Aphids are very small and make up 10% of the world's consumed bugs.

Canned tomatoes (a 14.5 oz can) may contain fly eggs or one maggot. 

Fruit juice can contain one maggot part per 250 ml.

Ground pepper can legally have up to 475 bug parts per 1/4 cup.

Berries can contain 4 larvae or 10 whole insects per 100 grams.

Cornmeal can contain no more than 25 or more bug parts or 1 or more rodent hairs per 25 grams, or 1 rodent poop pellet per 50 grams.

The Bugs Are Not Actually That Bad

Before you get grossed out beyond appetite, some bugs really can carry a lot of protein. Mealworms, according to experts, are a kind of insect larvae that can provide more protein than chicken or salmon.

Experts argue that some bugs or bug parts have to be allowed to be sold to consumers because "resource costs would be too unmanageable to eliminate all defects from food production". So in terms of logistics, there has to be some level of bug allowance.

Some of us used to eat dirt as kids, so I'm confident to stick to my chocolate bars, thanks.