[Avodah] FW: [Areivim] Chicago Rabbinical Council on Strawberries

[Chana Luntz]

If we are bouncing this to avodah, this post seems to me to more
logically go across there:

RZS writes:

> In products containing strawberries any insects that were
> present have been smashed up and are therefore batel in 
> much-more-than-60.  The problem with fresh fruit is that the 
> insects are complete creatures, and therefore not batel.

I would have said the same (it is the standard halachic answer), except,
except ...  The insects that they seem to be talking about are so small,
I confess I am sceptical that indeed they would be smashed up in a
normal (ie household) juicing process, not to mention the kind of mixing
used for jam making.  There is, of course, a limit to how fine things
can be chopped using even modern electrical equipment (even though this
must surely be a lot finer than our foremothers were able to achieve
without the aid of electricity).  Has anybody done any studies that
show, definitively, that a insect as small as the one coming out of the
strawberry in the video that was linked to areivim does indeed get
smashed up and is not a complete creature in any strawberry liquid or
jam?  Or are we just relying on some sort of chazaka?

I later clarified that my question is whether in fact *most* insects
this small get smashed up in the processing?  ie

My, perhaps naïve, assumption would be that if the totality of the bug
is smaller than the average grain size of the food once processed, then
the majority would in fact not get smashed up in processing, and at best
only a minority would.  Obviously if the total size of the bug is
greater than the average grain size of the food once processed, it is
reasonable to assume that any bug would get smashed up sufficiently so
its size is, at maximum, the size of the food particles, and therefore
we do no longer need to worry about such bugs.  But why does this logic
work when the bug size is smaller than the grain size?

Anybody looked at this question?

Shabbat Shalom

Chana