Bugs? Bugs? What Bugs?

(I am not a halachic expert nor a rabbi and therefore cannot pasken.)

When in recent centuries rabbis discovered the existence of microscopic bugs, they had a dilemma on their hands. How could Jews eat vegetables or drink water that, upon microscopic examination, contained bugs?

Their solution to this problem could have taken several forms. They could have declared eating vegetables and drinking water to be henceforth forbidden. Or they could have investigated methods by which one can eliminate these bugs (using bleach, or what have you).

However, they chose neither of these options. Rather, they declared a new principle: Anything invisible to the naked eye does not exist halachically. (If this principle was not new, let someone please inform me and I'll delete this post. However, based on what I've read and my discussions with others, I believe it was new and couldn't, in fact, have been otherwise since as far as I am aware the rabbis of the Gemara did not know of microscopic creatures.)

Why did these rabbis create this new principle rather than finding methods of eliminating or avoiding these microscopic bugs? To those who know anything about halacha, it appears clear that they did so because they did not want to cast aspersions on the behavior of generations upon generations of Jews who consumed these microscopic bugs. They realized that to create new standards regarding eating vegetables would imply that Jews since the year 2448 were eating non-kosher, and they simply refused to believe that. (They also apparently did not accept Rabbi Tendler's logic [as quoted in The New York Times regarding bugs in the water] that consuming these bugs only becomes sinful once one knows about them.)

Now let us examine the current bug crisis. The bugs that so many Jews worry about are extraordinarily hard to see. Some claim that when they look extremely, extremely hard, they can sometimes, on occasion, see tiny black dots, which they then discover to be bugs under a magnifying glass.

I recently heard a story from a prominent kashrus agency rabbi who related that a restaurant called up his agency and claimed it could not find any bugs in its stock of raisins (or perhaps it was strawberries) after checking them. This rabbi replied, "Hold on," and immediately sent down an "expert checker" who after a special, expert examination found 15 bugs in the batch in question.

My position is as follows: Any bug which a normal human being does not see as a bug and requires either a light box or an "expert checker" to see should be classified as halachically non-existent. My motivation for saying this is the same motivation that impelled those rabbis who declared microscopic bugs to be halachically non existent.

It should be obvious that vegetables in America in 2009 are certainly no dirtier than vegetables in Poland in 1609. To think otherwise is almost absurd. And yet Jews have never known the types of complex rules propagated today in some communities regarding the consumption of vegetables.

To declare today that a Jew must use a light box or must learn new special methods of checking or must forgo certain vegetables altogether is essentially to say that our ancestors have been eating not kosher for thousands of years. The rabbis who discovered microscopic bugs refused to believe this and we should too.

By all means check you vegetables as your mother and grandmother did. Check even more carefully if you are aware of an infestation in a particular vegetable. However, the mesorah never required a Jew to drive himself/herself crazy in this regard. If you don't see bugs after careful examination, they don't exist halachically. Never mind what the expert finder will find.