TikTok exposes the bugs in your strawberries. That’s gross, but is it harmful?
Those strawberries you had with yogurt for breakfast were probably packed with protein.
As in bugs.
A number of videos on TikTok show users washing their strawberries in saltwater, and they are anything but clean, CNN reported. Leaving the berries in the saltwater for 30 minutes resulted in a bowl full of bugs, according to Yahoo!
Why? How? Apparently, strawberries aren’t the only fruit infested with really tiny creepy crawlers, CNN reported.
“If you’re eating fresh produce, you’re eating bugs,” Greg Loeb, an entomologist at Cornell University, told CNN. “Sometimes we entomologists joke that, hey, it’s just a little bit more protein.”
The Food and Drug Administration concurs, saying they are “unavoidable defects,” according to the New York Post. The agency also says “it is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects,” on its website.
Lisa DeVetter, an assistant professor Washington State University’s horticulture department with a specialization in small fruits, says the process of putting fruits in salt water is used by experts to find out if the produce is infested with insects.
“These salt floats are used to determine levels of infestation in fruit and assess whether pest management programs are effective,” DeVetter told McClatchy News in an email.
Even soaking your strawberries in saltwater won’t get all the bugs out of your fruit, CNN reported. But experts say this is no cause for alarm, according to CNN.
“The presence of larvae in fruit is not hazardous to human health, but of course people don’t want insects in their fruit,” DeVetter writes.
“Eating those bugs won’t make you sick,” Loeb said.
Most of the bugs found in produce are fruit-fly larvae, according to Cloud Mountain Farm Center in Washington state. Adult flies lay their eggs on berries and cherries while they’re ripening, but the company says “if you can get past the ‘ick’ factor, the fruit will not hurt you if it has a little extra protein.”
This story was originally published May 21, 2020 at 6:56 PM with the headline "TikTok exposes the bugs in your strawberries. That’s gross, but is it harmful?."