There’s More Hair, Feces, and Toenails in Your Pork Than You Realize | Hacker News Reader

There’s More Hair, Feces, and Toenails in Your Pork Than You Realize

munchies.vice.com

23 pointsprostoalex11 comments

There's more unpleasant stuff in all your food than you realize, and always has been. It's impossible to eliminate grubs from blackberries, no matter how many times you wash them. All you can do is rinse them in salt water so they stop climbing out from the crevices. There are insect parts in every jar of jam, trace amounts of rat droppings in every jar of peanut butter (or entire rats), and if you eat enough fresh fish, you'll quickly discover how often it has worms (fortunately, most fish for sale was frozen at some point, rendering the worms dead and nearly undetectable). Processed or organic, plant or animal, all food is contaminated. Even salt -- ever think about what's in sea salt besides NaCl? Hint: nothing you'd want to eat. And table salt has it too, only less of it.

Fortunately, if you follow proper food-handling practices, none of this is unsafe. But if you think you don't eat a few hundred parts-per-million each day of hidden disgusting things, you're deceiving yourself.

Thanks for the heads up, I'll keep deceiving myself.

Me too, even hot dogs.

Is it just me, or does the paleo diet seem like it should include all of the above in order to be accurate?

While it might be true, there's a potential for bias in that it's based on reports by inspectors, most of whom would expect to lose their jobs if this program is expanded.

I doubt that their potential for bias outweighs the food producers' incentive to hire people who are content to just approve everything that whizzes past them on the line, without any sort of whistleblowing protections against employer retaliation. The inspection program should of course be subject to double-blind testing to determine its effectiveness compared to a control...but that sort of testing takes money, which has to be approved by Congress. I would imagine that the meat producers are a stronger lobby on Capital Hill than food safety advocates.

There are FDA-employeed folks at meat producers doing inspections. It's not entirely left up to the companies.

The affidavits[1] referred to in TFA describe just how useless this relationship has become. The inspectors receive little support from the USDA and are now tasked with, essentially, the management of poorly-trained company "inspectors" who are themselves under pressure from company management, on pain of termination, to keep the line moving (at a higher than ever rate). The authority of the USDA inspectors, under this "let them eat salmonella" program, seems to be in terminal decline.

[1] http://www.foodwhistleblower.org/campaign/hormel-hogs/#affid...

It's utterly evil; that is why major religions like Christianlity, Islam etc. prohibited its consumption. I really dislike even tasting it!

Thanks, _______ Administration!

soylent green is people

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