Strange Stuff In Food
But as Sylvia Branzel observes, “The gross fact is, we eat many bugs and bug parts without knowing it. Most foods have insect contaminants.” (1)
We also eat food that contains insect poop and other stuff and that’s the subject of this report.
Kopi Luwak- The most expensive coffee in the world, Kopi Luwak, is civet poop. Civets are small, lithe-bodied mostly nocturnal mammals native to tropical Asia and Africa, especially the tropical forests. To make Kopi Luwak you must start with high-quality beans.
But then you have to feed them to palm civets, wait while they pass through the animals’ gut and be ready to collect them when they come out the other end. The result, when cleaned, fermented, dried, roasted, ground and brewed sells for between $35 to $100 a cup, or about $100 to $600 a pound.
Panda Dung Green Tea- Chinese entrepreneur An Yashi, started a business where he fertilizes green tea with the Panda dung, which supposedly contains elements that can prevent cancer and enhance the tea’s anti-cancer effects. He sells it at a whopping $35 per pound. (2)
Baby Poop Sausage- There’s no actual poop in the sausage, but there is bacteria found in poop. Bacterial fermentation is what makes your spicy pepperoni the way it is, curing it and making it dry and delicious.
But in this day and age where probiotics are being added into everything to help with good digestion, they’ve started to put the probiotic bacteria into sausages and the place that they’ve decided to get the bacteria is from infant feces.
Craft Beer Un Kono Kuro- A craft beer brewed by a Kanagawa-based brewery called Sankt Gallen was an April Fool’s prank in 2013, yet this stout beer sold out within a matter of minutes after going on sale. So what makes it so special? Two things; coffee beans and elephant poop.
Much like the Kopi Luwak coffee beans, harvested by the civet, these beans are collected by the helpful elephants of Thailand’s Golden Triangle Elephant Foundation, digested and crapped out. Unlike the civet, however, most of the beans get digested by the elephant.
Shellac – This is an ingredient that’s commonly used as a glaze on the things we eat: coated candy, chocolate, even waxed fresh fruit can contain shellac. So what is it? It’s the purified form of Lac, which is the secretion of the Lacier Lacca Kerr insect, found in India, Thailand and Burma.
Basically, the bugs secrete this (poop it out) on twigs, which are soaked in water to clear away debris like insect parts, then soaked again in sodium carbonate to remove any stomach acids from the bugs. Then it’s processed into different forms either as the shiny stuff on your M&Ms, the hard stuff on your manicured nails, or put into ethanol to make wood shellac. (2)
Coca beans- can contain 10 mg or more mammalian excreta per pound.
Sesame seeds- can contain 5 mg or more mammalian per pound.
With chemicals we talk about a few parts per million, parts per billion, or even parts per trillion. With animal excreta, note that 10 mg per pound is equivalent to 20 parts per million. These are serious parts per million!
Perfumes- Ambergris is a waxy lump in a whale’s gut that is passed out along with fecal matter. Strangely enough, when appropriately diluted, the scent of ambergris becomes extremely pleasant and is much sought after by perfume makers. “There’s a shimmering quality to it,” gushes one perfumer, “it reflects light with its smell, it’s like an olfactory gemstone.” Ambergris also acts as a fixative, allowing the smell of the perfume to linger longer. (3)
Today, even perfumers who may use ambergris hesitate to promote its inclusion because of concerns that it may suggest exploitation of whales. While it is true that sperm whales were once heavily hunted for their oil and bones, ambergris is not the result of hunting.
One perfume that does declare its use of ambergris is “Fleurs de Bulgarie” by Creed which was originally created in 1845 for Queen Victoria who reportedly wore it all the time. It is still available today for anyone desiring to smell like a queen.
Additionally, as mentioned above, besides drinking its droppings in our coffee, we smear civet buttock juice on our necks. From civets you can derive civetone, which is used as a scent. The musk scraped periodically from the perineal gland of captive African civets is refined into civetone, which ‘exalts’ the fragrance of expensive perfumes. (4)
How about vomit, spit and other items?
Honey- Regardless of whether you buy a jar from the supermarket or get fresh and organic from a farm, honey was, is, and will essentially remain vomit purged out by the bees. Yes, the natural sweetener with amazing medicinal properties is actually nectar stored in a bee’s stomach and when the bee feels overloaded, it passes on the nectar to worker bees by vomiting it up.
This process is repeated until the partially digested nectar is made and deposited into what is popularly known as the ‘honeycomb.’ Water is drained out of the nectar and the substance is reduced into a syrupy bug vomit, commonly known as honey. (5)Chica Corn Beer- Although the maize is covered in human spit, Chica brewers start the fermentation process by moistening the maize with their saliva. The enzymes present in the spit facilitate working the corn starch into fermentable sugar and after the sugar dries, corn cakes are ready to be brewed.
Artificial Vanilla Flavoring- The vanilla flavoring in confectionery products is actually Castoreum. It is a secretion from a beaver’s castor sac, which is located near its anal glands and hence it might even contain anal secretions or urine. Castoreum smells a lot like vanilla, and hence is often used as a substitute for vanilla, raspberry, and strawberry flavoring. (5)
Wine-The next time you imbibe your favorite Cabernet Sauvignon wine consider this: “At high concentrations, 4-mercapto-4-methyl-2-pentanon
So What?
Experts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decide on how much contamination is to be allowed in foods sold for human consumption. There is no question regarding how much since it would be impossible to produce food that had no contaminants whatsoever. The FDA’s Food Defect Action Handbook establishes the amounts of contaminants permitted in about one hundred plant-derived foods.
FDA sets these action levels because it is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring unavoidable defects.
However, not to worry, As Eric Berger notes, “It is incorrect to assume that because the FDA has an established defect action level of a food commodity, the food manufacturer need only stay just below that level. The defect levels do not represent an average of the defects that occur in any of the products—the averages are actually much lower.” (7)
References
Header image: CNN
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