Is Your Chocolate Laced with Insect and Rodent Hair?

Is Your Chocolate Laced with Insect and Rodent Hair? Well, unfortunately the straight answer is Yes!

How Many Insect Parts Are You Eating?

Every 100 gms chocolate you eat, it can have 60 pieces of cockroach/insect fragments in it, that means each small byte has about 5-6 insect fragments (Oh gosh!)

How Many Rodent/Rat Hair Are You Eating?

Every 100 gms chocolate you eat, it can have 1 rat hair in it (Yuk!)

What FDA says about filth/rodent hair and insects in Chocolates?

Lets understand; as the findings are quite shocking! – anything that contains cocoa powder or cocoa press cake, i.e. chocolates in any form including chocolate liquor may have traces of insects and rodent hair (yes I mean it)….yuk! US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows chocolate, cocoa powder, cocoa press cake, or chocolate liquor to have insects and rodent hair – yes that’s true!

Check out this article on FDA site, and this one for more details. FDA uses OMA (Official Method of Analysis) which is provided by AOAC INTERNATIONAL a globally recognized organization which is an independent, third party, not-for-profit association and voluntary consensus standards developing organization. OMA has documented a method called “Filth in Cocoa, Chocolate, and Press Cake” to analyse Extraneous Materials/Filth, which in simple terms means any “disgusting external materials”, here is link to the OMA method 965.38 in case you are interested in knowing more click here.

It is Important to Understand How is Chocolate Made?

Source of chocolate is ‘Cacao Beans’ from trees that grow in the tropical zones near equator. These trees are short statures with fruits hanging on their trunks. The fruits’ inner pulp is roasted, cooked and fermented. Then, very bad smell emanate from that substance. After that refined flour, sugar, certain fragrant chemical essence are added to this fermented pulp and it is further processes. Only then, the bad smell disappear and it starts smelling good. Tons and tons of such lumps of chocolate are exported all over the world.

But during the phase of processing in large vessels, the smell attracts millions of cockroaches and they fall in the process vessels in great numbers and get mixed. So the chocolate companies requested approving authorities that it is impossible to avoid or remove the cockroach body parts from the chocolate, so give us permission to market it along with body parts as it were. The organization that protects the quality of food FDA of USA approved this as they noted that due to “unavoidable” circumstances the insect body parts will make their way to chocolate.