On Food and Fungus

While writing and not writing a paper, I took the time to read a fascinating article on Shane Battier [Really and truly fascinating, even if Battier did go to Dook]. Having finished that article, I went to look through the next items on the Times's Most Popular Top 10. This article caught my attention: "The Maggots in Your Mushrooms".

Excuse me?

EJ Levy continues:

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.

Canned mushrooms may have “over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or “five or more maggots two millimeters or longer per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” or an “average of 75 mites” before provoking action by the F.D.A.

The sauerkraut on your hot dog may average up to 50 thrips. And when washing down those tiny, slender, winged bugs with a sip of beer, you might consider that just 10 grams of hops could have as many as 2,500 plant lice. Yum.

The moral of the story? That it's worth thinking about how we draw boundaries around our bodies. We tend - or at least, I do - to think that our bodies are inviolate: Our body is our home is our castle, so to speak. There are always Lysol adds on television telling us that Lysol disinfectant wipes can leave a counter spotless, and the aerosol sprays that somehow make all the bugs and germs disappear. The larger idea behind all of this is that we can treat foods as pure - and this is the advantage of chemical analysis, it lets us work through questions of purity, lets us set a molecular threshold that establishes what is clean and what is not. The problem comes when we have to figure out where to set that threshold. Clearly, what Levy is trying to point is the very arbitrary way that these borders are defined in the first place (or perhaps too much reading of Butler and Bodies That Matter). In other words: Our foods are never simply what they are - borders blur, things pass through. The world is permeable, and so are we.