The Unappetizing Reason To Skip Canned Mushrooms

The fungi kingdom is separate from the plant kingdom, but in the kitchen, edible mushrooms are often paired with vegetables. These wonderfully weird beings are delicious, nutritious, and versatile. You can eat them raw or cooked, have them on their own or add them to a plethora of dishes, or use them as a substitute to meat. There's almost no wrong way to eat mushrooms. Almost. The one thing you never want to do is purchase them canned.

Sure, canned "veggies" are convenient and last long, but there are many canned products you want to avoid, including mushrooms. The canning process leaves this ingredient soggy and slimy, which are two of the most hated food textures. Rather than provide your meal with added flavor, they're more likely to completely ruin it. 

But the real reason to avoid canned mushrooms is even grosser: They may contain maggots and mites. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) actually allows maggots in the cans as long as they don't surpass an average of 20 per 100 grams of mushrooms. If the maggots are two millimeters or longer, there can only be four in the same amount of grams. Mites are also allowed, with a limit of 74 per 100 grams. Perhaps more disturbingly, up to 10% of the mushrooms can be decomposed. If your stomach is churning, you're not alone. 

Even if you stop buying canned mushrooms, you'll probably still end up eating maggots and other insects. The FDA has a long list of allowable "defects" for different products which it justifies because it's simply not economically feasible to produce food that doesn't have any issues whatsoever. This list includes other common food items with allowable insect limits like ground allspice, canned apricots, frozen broccoli, and peanut butter. Perhaps the saddest entry is chocolate, which allows for fewer than 90 insect fragments per subsample. It's worth noting that the FDA considers these limits to be safe for human consumption. This means you won't get sick from eating the bugs hidden in your food. In fact, if you get over the ick factor, bugs are a great protein source that might soon become more popular in the United States. 

Many places around the world eat bugs, including worms and maggots. Amazonian countries consume giant larvae, Italians love the maggot-filled casu marzu cheese, and Thai people enjoy plates of fried and seasoned silkworms. Since it looks like it's impossible to avoid defects in food entirely, the real solution might be to embrace bug eating. That said, we'd still recommend skipping canned mushrooms because the combination of a soggy texture, subpar taste, and the probability of hidden maggots makes the product unappetizing. If we're going to eat bugs, we'd rather it be in a delicious chocolate bar or an enticing local delicacy whose recipe has been perfected over the years.