30 Facts About Food People Regret Learning

"It is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects," explains the United States Food and Drug Administration (aka the FDA).

Translated from corporate-speak, this means that it’s not possible for food products to be completely free from bits of bugs, mold, animal hair, and other parts of the Great Outdoors. Sure, it might sound yucky, but we don’t even notice these ‘food defects’ the vast majority of the time and we’ve been swallowing them our entire lives.

However, nobody wants to be chomping down on chocolate bars that are entirely made up of insects. So the FDA has guidelines to keep icky bits of Mother Nature out of your snacks. For instance, CNN reports that the FDA allows an average of 10 milligrams of animal poop per pound of coffee. What’s more, 4 to 6% of the coffee beans are allowed to be moldy or infested by insects.

Meanwhile, peanut butter and jelly sandwich lovers should look away from this paragraph. FDA standards permit an average of one or more rodent hairs and around 30 insect fragments for every 100 grams of peanut butter. Jelly and jam aren’t controlled, unfortunately. So something like apple butter can contain an average of 4+ rodent hairs for every 100 grams and around 5 whole insects. That’s in addition to the aphids and mites.

Finally, let’s ruin raisins for you, dear Readers. Do you know those iconic kid-sized boxes? They’ve got around 4 fruit fly eggs and a whole insect in each box. We hope that we haven’t ruined your appetite forever, dear Pandas!