Facts about the food you’d wish to not know

Packaged food has become part of our everyday life. Many of us solely depend upon packaged food preparations for our day to day meals. Even though there are government organizations to monitor the packaging of these products, there are still frequents reports about their unsatisfactory quality. Read on to know food facts that may make you dreadful of the food that you eat.

All of us carefully select and choose the food that we eat. But, are you aware that you may find unpleasing additives (to put it mildly) in the food that you buy? Here are some really disturbing facts about food that we must know to carefully pick these items in the future.

• Peanut butter jar may contain rodent hair. As confirmed by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), it is ok for a jar of peanut butter to contain an average of one or more rodent hair and 30 or more insect pieces in each 100g of the product before considering it unsanitary.
• Vanilla flavor may come from beaver secretions. It is something that you wish you never read, your favorite vanilla treat may be flavored with beaver secretions that are taken from the area closer to their anuses.
• Gummy bear candies are prepared using pig skin, bones and hide of cattle. The gelatin used to prepare gummy candies is a colorless and tasteless protein that is prepared from collagen. This collagen is usually extracted from the bones, skin, and connective tissue of animals, mostly cattle, and pigs.
• Most figs contain at least one wasp trapped inside. Figs are actually flowers and not fruits that bloom internally. So, for fig pollination, it is required that they are pollinated from inside of the fruit to outside instead of the usual pollination process. The female population of fig wasps lays their larvae inside the male figs and the babies burrow out with male fig pollen and continue the pollination cycle. The good thing is that we eat only female figs but sometimes the female wasps lay the larvae inside the female figs, which do not support the wasp’s reproductive cycle leading to the death of the fig wasps inside. Female figs use the enzyme ficin to break the wasp carcass so that we do not easily recognize the wasp remains inside the figs that we eat.
• Mushroom cans may contain maggots. As per the FDA, 20 or more maggots per 100g of drained canned mushrooms is allowed.

• Ammonia is used to kill bacteria in low grade beef. FDA has approved the use of ammonia as an anti microbial agent in meat products. Pink slime is formed after the meat is treated with ammonium hydroxide, which is sometimes added to ground beef to lower its fat content.
• Hot dogs may contain traces of skin, hair, and nails. Hot dogs have been tested to contain fragments of human hair, nails, and skin. Also, a few varieties of vegetarian hot dogs were tested to contain real meat.
• Glazed candies are usually coated in insect secretions. The candies which contain confectioners glaze or E904 use shellac that is secreted by a female bug, to glaze them and give the candies a nice sheen and a long shelf life.
• Red food color is made with beetles. The preservative carmine or natural red 4 is derived from crushed and boiled beetles called cochineal bugs.