NOTE: If you’re really squeamish, I suppose you might want to avoid reading the link.
I’m pretty sure this news report just proves that I’ve been right to hate chocolate all along. Maybe now the rest of you will follow suit. 
Eh. As long as there’s not a human finger sticking out of my peanut butter cup, I’m not bothered by the kind of contamination that takes microscopy to analyze.
What that report tells me is that factories are dirty places and food is not sterile… but I knew that. Pass the Godiva! 
Heh. One of my grandfather’s favorite dinner table stories was of the time when he was a young lad working in a dairy in Chicago. His job was to stand next to a conveyor belt, on which rode a thick ribbon of butter. He would examine the butter for “inclusions” - hair, bugs, bits of bugs, boogers, that sort of thing. Using his ungloved thumbnail, he’d carve out a little bit of the butter around the offending item and chuck the bug butter into a big barrel, removing it from the butter line.
Pretty cool, right? I mean, a little gross with the ungloved thumbnail and all - a spoon might be more hygienic, but it’s nice that they removed the gross stuff before packaging and selling the butter, right?
Not so fast - the barrel full of butter and bug bits was sent to the chocolate factories in town for use in making their chocolate.
(*Now *can we finally get that pukey smile?)
I’m sure there’s gross stuff in things that aren’t chocolate. Like cereal.
And at least chocolate…is chocolately!
You should see what’s in your box of cornflakes.
The FDA has limits on how much of all sorts of stuff can be in what you eat: insect parts, rodent droppings, diseased or otherwise inedible plant parts. Food doesn’t grow in a vacuum; and it isn’t manufactured in one either.
I think that part of becoming a serious foodie is to understand how gross food really is and being OK with it.
In other words, you still have no excuse for not liking chocolate, except I think you know by now that my mantra is “more for me!”
:eek: I don’t mind a speck o’ ant antenna or so now and then, but what are they doing magnifying them? If I open up a pack of Peanut M&Ms and find a housefly head the size of a jawbreaker, I’m gonna lose it and go on a five-state killing spree!
Some people are just too disconnected from where their food comes from and what is in it.
They could grind up whales and dolphins for fertilizer and force toddlers into slavery to work the chocolate fields for all I care. Just keep it flowing.
News flash: Everything you eat has “gross” stuff in it. I really hate this illusion of hypersterility we’ve created for ourselves.
Sounds like dinner at my house. Cat hair is insidious stuff… we’ve just grown accustomed to the fact that we ingest so much of it by accident that one of us will probably hork up a furball someday.
Anyone who is grossed out by this deserves to have their chocolate privileges revoked and reassigned to me.
I thought the news report was pretty silly, honestly. I mean, let’s make a story specifically designed to gross people out about chocolate during the biggest chocolate-giving time of the year while at the same time (quietly) telling them that this is completely normal.
However, since it helps forward my life’s work trying to tear down chocolate’s grip over humanity, I’m not complaining in this case. 
Chocolate’s grip on humanity is here to stay, hon. You’re the freak.
And yeah… that stuff (and worse) is in everything we eat. Best to just not think about it.
Hell, I’d keep eating chocolate even if the only supplier was the Wizzo Chocolate Company.
You’d be surprised at how often I hear that. Maybe.
I scoff at your suggestion that I need an excuse. Good day to you!
There is no reason not to love chocolate. 
There might be impurities in a faulty manufacturing process, but pure chocolate is (and always will be) the best.
There has been a few countries of origin that have had extreme contamination. I always check food for origin. I saw some fancy imported chocolate from one of the source countries selling for real cheap. No thanks, somebody else can risk the bugs.
You don’t actually expect to make a post like that and then not name the icky countries of origin, do you?
…do you?
When I was in college, I had a friend who worked at Krispy Kreme. She said that they used to leave the big vats of glaze open at night and when they’d get there in the morning, there would be a coating of tiny green fly-like insects on the top. They’d just skim them off and get to work.
Do I think about this every time I eat a donut? Yes.
Has the thought ever prevented me from putting a donut in my mouth? Not even once.
I didn’t want to say a country without the links, and I didn’t want to search the 300,000 I narrowed it down to.
Here are a few links on the China ripoff of a name brand sold in South Korea. There were other places where other chocolate made in China was nasty and China has been on my caution list for years. The last year cinched it for me. I buy no food imported from China. That soy sauce made with contaminated hair debacle was nasty to.
http://current.com/items/77064062_wormy_chocolate/
This article on China and adding melamine to animal foods is a good one on the China mentality. It seems to be if you can fool the inspectors with a cheaper inappropriate ingrediant, then do it. Health risks aside.
The places like Cadbury that had a problem I’ll buy from, because they don’t continuously have those problems, they correct the mistakes.
Wait-you mean cat hairs aren’t condiments?
To me, chocolate isn’t good. In fact, it’s kind of repulsive. I’ve wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the chocolate factory, and an Oompa Loompa killed my dad.
Nah, I love chocolate.