U.S. FDA Regulatory Handbooks
The more I visit them, the more amazed I am at the amount of information available on various U.S. government web sites. They can be somewhat convoluted and often tough to navigate, with many lists of links to various publications whose very titles invoke a yawn (Thermally processed low-acid foods packaged in hermetically sealed containers, anyone?). On the other hand, if you poke around long enough, you’re bound to find something that’s at least curious, if not downright enthralling. Two such examples found within the FDA’s information labyrinth detail what is permitted to go into your bottled drinking water and what level of defects (amount of rodent fur, mamalian excreta, insect matter, etc.) are deemed intolerable for your food.
What ELSE are you drinking?
The regulations and requirements for bottled water, while not exactly best-seller material, do shed a very curious light on what may be in that overpriced plastic bottle. Is it “spring water?” If so, then it must have come from “an underground formation from which water flows naturally to the surface of the earth” and it “shall be collected only at the spring or through a bore hole tapping the underground formation feeding the spring,” whereas your artesian well water comes “from a well tapping a confined aquifer in which the water level stands at some height above the top of the aquifer.” If, as occasionally is the case, your water is no more than glorified tap water, somewhere on the label there must appear notice that it is “‘from a community water system’ or, alternatively, ‘from a municipal source,’ as appropriate.”
The real shocker in the bottled water regulations, though, comes in the form of what else, besides water, is permitted to be in your water. I suppose it makes sense—as many chemicals as we use during various industrial, agricultural, and consumer processes, it’s inevitable that any water source will have impurities that can’t be entirely filtered out. And it’s great that someone is checking to make certain that the impurities fall under a certain threshold. What surprises me is the variety of things that are regulated: inorganic substances, volatile organic chemicals, synthetic organic chemicals, residual disinfectants, even radiological quality! Among other guidelines, “The bottled water shall not contain a gross alpha particle activity (including radium-226, but excluding radon and uranium) in excess of 15 picocuries per liter of water” and “shall not contain uranium in excess of 30 micrograms per liter of water.” Who knew?
THE source to find out how much rodent hair is permitted in your food
Somewhat more compelling reading material is found in the FDA’s Food Defect Action Levels, which details “Levels of natural or unavoidable defects in foods that present no health hazards for humans.” This table lists levels of contamination at which the FDA must reject a food product as being unsafe, such as the amount of mold in your canned and frozen blackberries [average mold count is 60% or more], mamalian excreta in your fennel seed [20% or more of subsamples contain mammalian excreta OR average of more than 3 mg of mammalian excreta per pound], insect filth in your macaroni [average of 225 insect fragments or more per 225 grams in 6 or more subsamples], rodent filth in your marjoram [average of 8 or more rodent hairs per 10 grams], or drosophilia fly in your tomato puree [average of 20 or more fly eggs per 100 grams OR 10 or more fly eggs and 1 or more maggots per 100 grams OR 2 or more maggots per 100 grams in a minimum of 12 subsamples].
These pages, and many others like them, though not necessarily intended for the general public, provide valuable information for consumers. The industries that are regulated by these rules weigh in on them with the agencies that set them, often pressing for the regulations to be relaxed in favor of industry self-regulation. The only way that the agencies find out what the general public thinks is when we read the rule books and comment upon them if we think the rules are too lax. For instance, I have submitted a comment asking how/why it was determined that the objectionable level of mold in drupelet berries is 60% or more, because that sort of tolerance of mold seems excessive to me: were I preparing berries for the public, I would reject them at a lower level. Feel free to let them know what you think about their regulations, too—after all, they’re there to serve your safety interests.