I've long been aware of the FDA's mandatory maximums for certain substances in mass-processed foods, but I never thought much of it. It's probably impossible to juice five thousand tons of oranges daily without getting a few fruit flies in the mix - up to seven per serving, by federal law. And they allow exactly one-point-seven maggots per four-ounce serving of tomato juice. It's an interesting factoid that's acutely fun to bring up over breakfast, especially if you've the misfortune of dining with a snobby vegetarian (and who can be one and not the other?) who gives you a heavy dose of attitude about eating bacon.

... like pigs are good for anything else?

Thing is, government-imposed limits tend to become standards. Minimum wage is set so that even a mop jockey can make at least enough to give his wife and fifteen kids a subsistence-level living - but most end up making exactly that much. Likewise, the maximum amount of fecal matter in hamburger is meant to ensure that a quarter-pound hamburger (notice I didn't say "Quarter Pounder," so you can just go McSue somebody else) contains no more than 1.5 grams of bovine fecal matter, but - as you've probably guessed - they contain exactly that much. Giant meat-packing operations employ a team of engineers to test and tweak every batch of ground beef to ensure it contains exactly the right amount of excrement, no more and no less than federal standards.

... like biology majors are good for anything else?

It makes sense in only the kind of way an accountant, or perhaps a vegetarian, could understand: If the cost of beef is $1.89/lb, and if Americans consume thirty billion pounds of fast-food hamburger each year, then the corporate burger industry can collectively save $204 million by meeting federal guidelines. And so, while the good government intention (ha!) behind all of that was to make sure that the meat-packing industry went to great lengths to ensure cleanliness, what it really turned out to be was a license to feed the American public about 180,000 metric tons of fecal matter every year.

And that's a lot of sh*t if you ask me!