This New York Times op-ed detailing the FDA's admission that there are small amounts of insect parts in our food is a substitution of revulsion for argument. It's superficially gross that canned mushrooms may have “over 20 or more maggots of any size per 100 grams of drained mushrooms and proportionate liquid” and that "10 grams of hops could have as many as 2,500 plant lice," but this is natural produce grown, you know, outside. And the outside is a place with bugs in it. Totally eliminating the presence of insect contaminants would mean totally eliminating fresh food, or increasing the level of pesticides and sanitation to a point that the term "fresh" no longer has recognizable meaning.E.J. Levy, the op-ed's author, tries to connect this with food safety, though he doesn't do a very good job. Largely because there's no connection. Consumers, however, have less trouble. In his book The End of Food
, Paul Roberts details how the outbreaks of disease in fresh food have only increased the demand for processed food. The further we are from the natural food chain and the more insecure and confusing those items appear, the more trust we place in recognizable brands and vacuum-sealed goods. Oreos look safer, or at least less troublesome, than spinach. Of course, in the long-run, that's a much worse bet for our health: Rather more people die from heart disease and cancer and diabetes -- diseases that are negatively correlated with a diet of fresh produce and positively correlated with the contemporary American diet and its heavy reliance on processed food -- than die from fly residue on an apple. But when walking through the market, they think of the salmonella or maggot eggs that might be present now, not the atherosclerosis that will result later. 
