In its (falsely) reassuringly subtitled booklet “The Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans,” the F.D.A.’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition establishes acceptable levels of such “defects” for a range of foods products, from allspice to peanut butter.Among the booklet’s list of allowable defects are “insect filth,” “rodent filth” (both hair and excreta pellets), “mold,” “insects,” “mammalian excreta,” “rot,” “insects and larvae” (which is to say, maggots), “insects and mites,” “insects and insect eggs,” “drosophila fly,” “sand and grit,” “parasites,” “mildew” and “foreign matter” (which includes “objectionable” items like “sticks, stones, burlap bagging, cigarette butts, etc.”).
Tomato juice, for example, may average “10 or more fly eggs per 100 grams [the equivalent of a small juice glass] or five or more fly eggs and one or more maggots.” Tomato paste and other pizza sauces are allowed a denser infestation — 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.
Here's that happy-fun FDA publication: "The Food Defect Action Levels - Levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans."
New Scientist reports on the research of Princeton University's Alexander Todorov, who finds that "snap judgments are based on an 'overgeneralization' of an evolved need to read facial expressions for signs of danger.
The National Union of Journalists, in association with British Journal of Photography, has called for photographers to make their voices heard at a rally on 16 February as a new law is introduced that allows for the arrest - and potential imprisonment - of anyone who takes pictures of police officers 'likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism'...The NUJ has teamed up with Mark Thomas, a writer, broadcaster, comic and political activisit, along with Chris Atkins, who is behind the documentary Taking Liberties, and BJP for a 'photo opportunity' outside New Scotland Yard on Monday 16 February. 'The plan is simple, turn up with your camera and exercise your democratic right to take a photograph in a public place,' says Marc Vallee, an NUJ member who will be there on the day, and who himself clashed with police over the right to photograph public events
