For all the talk about “eating the bugs” that’s been going on lately, few have mentioned the fact that we’re already drinking them. That’s probably because most people simply aren’t aware of it. Go ahead and ask your partner how they would feel about drinking tea brewed from ground-up cockroaches, and you’ll soon find yourself kicked out of that relationship.

But the truth is that your pre-ground coffee is more than likely filled with ground up cockroaches. The crazy thing? People only tend to find out about this when they have an allergic reaction to a certain kind of coffee.

In a recent viral post on X, one user wrote “It turns out the little allergy I started having to drinking coffee pod coffee is a cockroach allergy! Apparently the FDA allows a certain percent of ground insect matter into coffee pods and that percentage isn't zero!”

Another person added, “did you guys know people with shellfish allergies consistently react to ground coffee because all ground coffee has a non-zero amount of ground up cockroaches which cross react with shellfish allergies? anyway that's how my boyfriend convinced me to buy whole bean.”

These people aren’t lying. According to Food and Wine, cockroaches often make their way into the coffee that’s ground up for pre-ground coffee mixes. Since prevention is incredibly difficult, the FDA simply sets a standard for how many bug parts are allowed in ground coffee. They set this standard at between 4% and 6% — which means that 1 in 20 little bits of coffee ground you see could (legally) be ground-up cockroach.

Of course, the actual amount of ground-up cockroach in the beans is likely much, much smaller than that. Still, given this information, I think I’m going to stick with buying the full beans.