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Journalism of Courage
Strawberries are a delicious treat, but a recent video has some people questioning whether they are clean enough to eat. The clip, which has gone viral on social media, shows a strawberry under the microscope and teeming with tiny creatures.
The insects seen crawling inside the strawberry could be a type of fruit fly and one such fly is the spotted wing drosophila. Unlike common fruit flies that target overripe or damaged fruit, spotted wing drosophila can lay eggs in healthy berries. These eggs hatch into larvae, which are very small and wouldn’t be noticeable in a typical store-bought strawberry.
“These larvae are so microscopic that even if you ate a quart of strawberries, you’re still consuming a minuscule amount of extra protein,” Jennie Schmidt, a registered dietitian and farmer in Sudlersville, Maryland in the US, was quoted as saying by a health content website Everyday Health.
“As gross as it might be to someone if you pull a carrot out of the soil and eat it, it will have microscopic insects. Healthy soil has an abundance of bacterial life and fungi. It doesn’t make it bad for you,” Schmidt was quoted as saying.
One user wrote, “It’s well known that strawberries have bugs, soak them in water with either vinegar or baking soda or salt for 20+ minutes.” A second added, “Better than micro plastics, plus probably good for the gut biome, likely organic too with all the critters crawling.” And a third wrote, “If I was worried about micro organisms on my food I’d starve to death.”
