30 Gross Food Facts Kept Hidden From the Public

There are dark secrets behind the food you eat every day.

Published 4 years ago in Eww

There are dark secrets behind the food you eat every day. Those ballpark hot dogs? Days old and stored in the same water for way longer than is sanitary. Those figs you love so much? They have dead wasps in them (mostly digested and broken down by the fig, at this stage, but still).

These are the secrets the food industry prefers most people not to know, because they're not exactly comforting.

1
Shrimps diet consists mainly of poop. If you've ever eaten shrimp, you've eaten poop from potentially thousands of different animals including humans.

2
Blue Cheese. The blue is mold.

3
You should not feed honey to children under one years old because it contains spores of a bacterium that will produce the possibly deadliest poison known to mankind
4
They use shellac to make some different foods and candies more shiny. Shellac is an excretion from the lac beetle.

5
Uni is just sea urchin gonads.
6
Figs have dead wasps inside them.
7
Cinnamon can carry up to 1 milligram of animal excrement per pound.

8
Oregano can legally contain up to 1,250 insect fragments per 10 grams.
9
Frozen broccoli must have an average of no more than 60 aphids or thrips or mites per 100 grams.
10
Canned pineapple can pack in up to 20% moldy fruit.

11
Apparently, If You Put Strawberries Into Salt Water, Tiny Bugs Come Out Of Them
12
chocolate bars have an average of 8 insect legs in it.
13
Some raspberry flavorings come from beaver anal glands.

14
In the United States companies can legally sell curry powder that contains less than 100 insect fragments per 25 grams Hops with less than 2500 aphids per 10 grams and coffee as long as less than 10% of beans are moldy. Even with modern technology, all defects in goods cannot be eliminated. As a result, the Food and Drug Administration has set allowable defect or "tolerance levels."
15
Ground turkey is just the whole bird ground up, without the guts. Feathers and feet are left on, after ground it goes through a machine that separate bone and feather fragments. But that is not always the case.
16
I used to work in a baseball park concession stand. The short answer is not to order anything, but if you absolutely have to buy something, don't buy the hotdogs. Do not. Buy. The hot dogs. They made it out of the package okay, and might even have been edible after we finished grilling them - and then they went into the water. We kept three pans of water at the back of the grill, that held the hot dogs. Any hot dogs left at the end of the day went back into the fridge, and came out again the next day. Me and the other cook put our feet down on throwing out the water and old hot dogs after two full days, but the management didn't want to let us. Oh, and our freezer broke so all the meat got stored in the ice bin. And our management always told us when the surprise health inspections were gonna show up, usually a week or so in advance.

17
The roe and milt of certain fish is a common delicacy across the world, including sturgeon roe, otherwise known as caviar. While roe is widely known to be fish eggs, it's not so well known that milt is fish sperm.
18
Lemons have the highest fecal content of any food found in most restaurant kitchens.
19
Every time you eat fresh produce, you're taking the risk that no one who touched it also didn't poop in their hands. So, wash everything and enjoy your salad. Prepackaged salads are an excellent source of bacteria. The salad gets washed once, then is sold to you.

20
There is always cow feces in all milk. Cows' assholes are right above the udder. Udders are cleaned before attaching the milking machines, but sh** happens all day long while cows are getting milked. Once you see a milking operation, you'll be REALLY glad to know that they literally pasteurize the sh** out of that milk.
21
The contents in a jar of peanut butter contains on average 2 bugs.
22
Worked at Subway 2010-12. Only thing I have to say is that tuna and seafood packaged used to have a label on it that said that it didn't contain dolphin or turtles in the meat, then that label suddenly disappeared in 2012.

23
One of the most expensive forms of coffee is Kopi Luwak which is coffee beans that have been eaten by a Asian Palm Civet and pooped out and can run up to $700 a kilo.
24
Tomato paste is considered bad only if more than 45 percent contains mold.
25
FDA regulations state that ten insects and 35 fruit fly eggs per 8 oz. of raisins is OK. It doesn't stop at raisins, though.

26
Usually because no restaurant ever has cleaned out the ice machine. It also depends on what they use to scoop the ice out of the machines. If you got people with dirty hands with a scoop scooping out ice you can imagine all the nasty particles that rub off on the ice etc. Do that 4-5 times a day and you see the potential for nasty to accumulate.
27
Salami isnt cooked. It is technically a raw product. In its production good bacteria is added that decreased* the ph to a point that harmful bacteria such as e. coli and listeria can't survive, which then make it safe to eat. Not to mention the cool fungus that grows on the casing to protect it from dying out too much. Very neat. (Meat Science major, we make Salami and other meat products on campus in a dinky meat lab)
28
Soda has a ton of acid so it counters the extremely sweet syrup. The bad thing is, your body neutralize the acidity with something basic, meaning calcium. Drinking soda takes calcium out of your bones.

29
Grocery stores will sometimes mix in food coloring in with near expiration date meat to make it look fresh
30
Casu marzu. There exists a cheese that contains live maggot larvae on purpose.