The Popular Pizza Ingredient That's Legally Allowed To Contain Insect Eggs

For most people, some things are simply dealbreakers when it comes to food. If you're served undercooked chicken at a restaurant, send it right back. A fly in your wine? Perfectly fine to ask for a new glass. Insect eggs on your pizza? A respectable pizza joint would likely remedy that situation for you, but if it were run by the FDA, you'd be out of luck. The government organization tasked with ensuring our food is safe to consume has some interesting ideas about what can be present in certain products and it turns out there is an acceptable amount of insect eggs that can be in pizza sauce.

Be warned, this information is not for the faint of heart. The FDA says it's acceptable for ingredients such as tomato paste to harbor a specific number of Drosophila fly (more commonly known as fruit fly) eggs and maggots. The exact amount that's tolerated depends on the ratio of maggots to eggs. Drosophila fly contamination only concerns the FDA if there are 30 or more eggs per 100 grams of sauce, 15 or more eggs plus one maggot, or no more than two maggots if no eggs are present.

To put that in context, your average jar of pizza sauce is roughly 14 ounces which equals roughly 400 grams. That means in one jar the FDA will look the other way if inside there are, for example, 100 fruit fly eggs or six whole maggots. Yummy.

The Drosophila fly is a menace in the hospitality industry. They can quickly proliferate in hotels and restaurants, and they wreak havoc on farms and in food processing facilities. Tomato canneries in particular have a hard time keeping these pesky bugs away.

Flies, insect eggs, and maggots are all appetite killers, but ingesting a small amount isn't actually harmful, according to the FDA. Because the Drosophila fly is so challenging to keep away from fruit processing, the oversight organization considers it economically unattainable for companies to completely prevent them from contaminating food products. Given that a small presence isn't harmful to humans, the FDA opts not to add to the list of major marinara sauce recalls by setting a maximum amount of fruit fly eggs that can legally be present in tomato sauce.

It's not just sauces that get an exemption from being taken off the market due to fruit fly contamination. Juices, purees, and canned tomatoes also have a set amount of Drosophila fly eggs and maggots that can be present in the product. Does this mean every can of tomatoes you pick up from the grocery store has insect eggs? No, probably not. But it could, and given that it's considered a non-issue by the FDA, there isn't much you can do about it besides growing your own tomatoes and trying to keep fruit flies from infiltrating your own crop.