On eating bugs

Is there any negative effect to all the bugs I'm probably accidentally eating on the organic lettuces/berries I buy? Sometimes I look a little too closely and find something creepy / crawly on something I'm about to put in my mouth.

When I lived in Indonesia my neighbor cooked me latkes, or that’s how I initially interpreted what they were. The first bite was delicious. Then I made eye contact with a small fish protruding from my bite mark.  I looked more closely and realized that every sliver of potato was actually a minnow. They were fish-cakes made from tiny, whole fish. In retrospect, the fact that I was living in a 99% Muslim fishing village should have been a tip off that I was not eating latkes. 

Aside from that, I also ate a ton of bugs. It was a really buggy island. Or maybe it was just me. In my journal, I noted that I was often greeted with the refrain, “Mr. Ned, you are covered in ants.”  Naturally the ants found their way into my food and I quickly adopted a policy of eating in low light so I wouldn’t see the bugs I was nom nom’ing. This wasn’t totally convenient so I shifted towards not looking at my food while I ate. Eventually, I accepted that I was going to eat a lot of bugs and stopped caring. That said, I experienced violent food poisoning on a weekly basis. I never really considered that these two things might be related before now. Huh. 

The food safety risk associated with bugs isn’t that they’re poisonous— it’s that they’re dirty. Flies live in filth and shit; the food safety concern is that they’re transmitting pathogenic bacteria from this filth onto your food when they land on it. 

If you see small flies in a restaurant, that means there’s unsanitary conditions (i.e. literal griminess) somewhere in the immediate area. If you see big flies (house flies) then I would leave that restaurant immediately. Houseflies live on shit and decomposing animals. Houseflies in any food establishment should be a giant warning sign.

So back to your buggy produce: It’s a good idea to rinse even your organic fruit and veggies. Even though there aren’t any pesticides to wash away, there might be dirt and a few bugs. Should you be worried about these bugs? I guess that depends where those bugs were before they ended up in your lettuce and how dirty their feet are. They were probably moseying around the organic farm which doesn’t sound too bad to me. Eat ‘em.

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