Multiple Insects Found in Food

Q. Is there any difference if three insects or four insects are found in a pot of soup?

A. Shulchan Aruch (YD 84:9) writes that if three or four insects were found in a food, it is assumed to have more insects, and the food is forbidden unless it can be carefully inspected. The Taz (84:16) asks, if food is forbidden with three insects, why does Shulchan Aruch write “three or four”? He answers that Shulchan Aruch wanted to teach us that even if four or more insects are found, the broth can still be filtered and served. The Minchas Yaakov (46:30) offers a different answer. He explains that the number of insects that establishes suspicion that there are more is dependent on the size of the pot. If one finds three insects in an average size pot of soup, the soup is forbidden, but if one finds three insects in a very large pot of soup, the soup is not forbidden until one finds a fourth bug.

An application of this concept would be a situation where a person bought a case of 200 apples. While cutting half the apples, he found 3 wormy pieces. Must he check the rest of the apples? Perhaps not, because finding 3 worms in 100 apples is a miyut she’aino matzui (an uncommon occurrence).

Rav Belsky zt”l gave the following example to illustrate this principle. If a reservoir of water with its billions of gallons of water is found to have 3 insects crawling in it, would we conclude that all the water in the reservoir is forbidden to drink without filtering? Certainly not. We would say that this is within the parameters of what we would expect to find. If we check a large enough sample size, eventually we will always find three insects. This does not indicate anything more than what we knew before we began checking. If anything, it reconfirms that the level of infestation remains at the level of miyut she’aino matzui.

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The Gerald & Karin Feldhamer OU Kosher Halacha Yomis is dedicated to the memory of Rav Yisroel Belsky, zt"l, who served as halachic consultant for OU Kosher for more than 28 years; many of the responses in Halacha Yomis are based on the rulings of Rabbi Belsky. Subscribe to the Halacha Yomis daily email here.