When Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air interviewed Douglas Emlen this week on his studies of dung beetles, he mentioned a colleague who in pre-Starbucks days would sometimes drive 45 minutes off a route to get coffee made from fresh-ground beans.

Having worked previously with cockroaches, he'd developed an allergy to them that could be triggered by drinking coffee made from pre-ground beans. Because the mounds waiting in factories to be ground apparently heave with the little critters. Now we know this revolting fact, will it lead to a new spin on coffee orders? "Gimme a skinny decaf, FDA-permitted amount of cockroach contamination, to go"?

I like testing the different coffees in colorful tins, like Bustelo, Cafe du Monde, Lavazza and such. No more?

Said Emlen, professor of biology at the University of Montana, “Preground - you know, your big bulk coffee that you buy in a tin - is all processed from these huge stockpiles of coffee … that get infested with cockroaches. And there’s really nothing they can do to filter that out. So it all gets ground up in the coffee.”

I've written about FDA-permitted - I hesitated to write "approved" - number of rat hairs acceptable in foods such as chocolate bars. Hair, schmair. The FDA publishes lists of permitted percentages of insect parts allowed in food that if you read them closely would put you off most manufactured food.

When I lived in Moscow, I was regularly woken by cockroaches taking a short cut across my forehead. And I learned to reach an arm into the bathroom to turn on the light before I went in, to give the cockroaches a chance to run off my toothbrush and hide.

They've already wrecked my faith in dental hygiene. I don't want them to have any relationship with the drink I gulp at the start of each day to turn it into a good one.