Q&A: A Common Minority
A Common Minority
Question
Hello Rabbi,
How does one determine whether a particular species has a common minority of worms? Regardless of whether you define a common minority as two percent, ten percent, or something else, when checking, for example, rice: do you measure ten percent out of all the individual grains, or out of a bag of rice that people normally buy for home use, or out of a larger sack, and so on? Because this simple question could create a major difference in the halakhic ruling.
Thank you
Answer
I don't know. The question is whether finding them is a rare occurrence or not. If you checked five bags of rice from the same production line and found no worms at all, then it is clearly not common in that type. But for other types, you have to check what the facts are. If you check several types and find nothing in any of them, one may assume that in rice generally this is not common. I don't have a criterion.