By: Jy Hung Ong

At Taylor Swift’s sold-out “Eras Tour”, she suddenly fell into a coughing fit. After she was done, she told her fans that a bug had flown into her mouth. She declared that it was “delicious.” She also feigned embarrassment: “Is there any chance that none of you saw that?”

“So, I’m just gonna try not to do as many of those. There are a thousand of them. Anyway, this has been fun,” she continued after coughing.

Naturally, this incident went viral on social media, with many people posting videos about the bug’s luck. “Can you believe A BUG went to the Eras tour AND met Taylor Swift and I DIDN’T????” one fan wrote.

This is the one spot where we normal people and pop stars like Taylor Swift have something in common: we all eat bugs. Whether we want to or not, all of us eat bugs. Some of us inhale them, like Swift. Most will eat them, as it is common for humans to ingest bugs.

“Bugs are everywhere. They’re part of our lives. They’re not going anywhere, and we’re not going anywhere, so we must learn to live with them, even if it means swallowing them sometimes,” said Jerome Grant, an entomology professor at the University of Tennessee.

Most bugs are generally harmless, he says. Some people might have allergies to cockroaches or insect scales, but insects need to be consumed in large quantities to have any effect. For most people, eating a few bugs is fine.

Grant has seen many reports which claim that people eat 1 to 2 pounds of insects per year, which is repeated in publications like the New York Times and Scientific American. He finds these reports statistically impossible. If an average bug weighs between 2.5 to 3 milligrams, to eat 1 to 2 pounds of insects, someone would have to eat 300,000 more bugs per year.

He is also unsure about the estimates of people accidentally breathing many bugs while sleeping. “Do you know anyone who has eaten a bug in their sleep?” asked Grant.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also agrees. “It’s predicted that you’ll eat as much as 1 pound of insects in your lifetime — by accident, of course,” they said.

To prove this, the FDA has a handbook called the “Food Defect Levels Handbook,” which describes how much of a certain disgusting object, including insect bites, rodent hair, and cigarette butts, is allowed in a certain food. For example, in cornmeal, the FDA doesn’t mind if one whole insect or 25 insect fragments are in every 50 grams or about a quarter of a cup.

Citrus juices are allowed five fly eggs or one maggot per cup. Wheat flour can have 75 or more insect fragments in every half cup or so. It is important to know that this is the maximum permitted number of nasty things allowed in the food.

Grant says that Swift has made the perfect example of dealing with a bug that has found its way into a person’s mouth. “She made a joke and even turned it into something positive for her fans.”

He also notes that she seems alive and well. “She seems just fine now!”