How Much Filth Did You Eat Today
How Much Filth Did You Eat Today?
By Elton Camp
What can a title like this one possibly mean?
Isn’t food inspected by the FDA perfectly clean?
No, Food Defect Action Levels the FDA has set
They only limit how high insect fragments can get
There may be up to ten fly eggs in a tomato can
Or else up to two maggots is the alternate plan
Consumers who might eggs to maggots prefer
Cannot know which of these happened to occur
A hundred grams of peanut butter is able to contain
Thirty insect parts or else one rodent hair may remain
Popcorn may have twenty gnawed grains per pound
Or else the standard is that two rodent hairs are found
There’s scant comfort that mushrooms can pass exams
If a tin contains up to twenty maggots per 100 grams
Actually the taste of the food they won’t hurt at all,
But the squeamish factor may make some folks squall
Thirty fruit fly eggs in 100 grams of ketchup are okay
Two maggots per hundred blueberries FDA does say
None of these contamination levels should cause alarm
To our health they are believed not to cause any harm
Exactly what it is that we are eating it’s best to ignore
If perfectly clean, the food we couldn’t afford anymore
So just forget about this and enjoy as you gulp it down
And hope that, in it, not a single mouse pellet was found
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