I have found these ugly little white bugs in my boxes of pasta in my food pantry. I also found some in cocoa and chocolate candy bars. HELP !!! What are they and how do I get them out of my food pantry? What will kill them so they don’t get in any other food?
Weevils.
I don’t know if that’s the real name but every time I’ve found bugs in food someone called them weevils.
At any rate you probably can’t kill them with chemicals without making the food inedible. Throw it out and anything of the same ilk – breakfast cereals, flour, etc.
If it’s a huge infestation you could throw out all the food that could possibly be infested and light off a bug bomb in your kitchen. Drastic, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Good luck. Pleasant dreams! LOL!
My Child Is An Honour Student At Hogwarts
I get these once in a while. My standard solution is to throw out infested food and put all stuff they might be interested in into plastic bags.
The weevils will come out right through the plastic, leaving nice little holes in the bag and escape, but they won’t smell food that is uninfested inside a sealed bag. The theory is you can quarantine your food and when bugs show up you toss it. Stuff sealed in the bags will not be infested.
This works exceptionally well, so much so that I believe if I weren’t too lazy to put all my grain type food in ziploc bags I’d never get them.
The trick is somewhere in the back of your closet you’ll have one unnoticed bag of granola or flour or something, and they will use that as a base of operations. Sometimes it takes me months to figure out what I’ve done wrong.
For some reason I remember hearing that products such as flour have a certain amount of weevil eggs/larve already in them. If you live in a humid environment they hatch. Supposedly if you put a new bag in the freezer overnight you’ll kill them off so they won’t hatch.
“I’m the luckiest man in the world, now that Lou Gehrig is dead.” Homer Simpson
Sometimes at the grocery store I work at, the night manager notices small maggots inside bags of brown rice. This is likely because the eggs are laid even before the rice is harvested and they hatch if they are left out too long.
Enjoy!
How could I charge full price to the man whose lust for filthy magazines kept me in business through that first shaky year. Oh, by the way, here’s your new issue of “Gigantic Asses.”
-Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
I suggest you eat the weevils. They’re an inexpensive source of high-quality protien.
It was just on the National News that the US Government permits a certain amount of larva eggs, etc., in our food. Of course, the government says ketchup counts as a veggie in regards to a balanced school lunch.
OTOH, maybe enough ketchup will hide the taste of the larva eggs???
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy - Hawkeye 4077th
All in all, I’d chose to just eat them. It seems to me to be the Lesser of Two Weevils. 
Cartooniverse
" If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel."
Dump the pasta into a pan of water and the bugs float to the top. Pour off the water and the bugs. Add more water and cook the pasta. Make pasta salad for that co-worker you really hate.
I’m only your wildest fear, from the corners of your darkest thoughts.
Ohh, and if they’re in you crackers, remember this slogan. Everything tastes better on a Ritz.
I’m only your wildest fear, from the corners of your darkest thoughts.
I had the same problem a few months ago. Take everything that can support bug life out of the cupboard and put it in the freezer. This will kill the bugs. After a few days take everything out of the freezer and pitch anything that shows contamination. Also clean out the pantry really good while the stuff’s in the freezer. I did eat (by accident) some macaroni that was infested and I lived.
“Hope is not a method”
-
-
- When I worked at a gas station, we found weevils in Hershey bars once every few months, likely because Hershey bars are one of the few candybars still just folded up in a piece of foil paper instead of sealed in a plastic bag. The bugs be on the outside though, where you could see them before you ate. (sorry if you love Hershey bars) - MC
-
i ate about half a bag of those mini reses peanut butter cups only to bite half of one, (they’re small so i had been eating them whole) to find about 3 little maggots inside. i suddinly felt very sick at the thought of having eaten around twenty of these cups, if they each had three maggots… i puked all over the floor. i never tasted the little guys, and im sure i did more harn to them than they did to me, bu i still won’t eat those little peanut butter cups.
eggo
The freezer suggestion is a good one. Also, bay leaves, or bay leaf oil, can be used to discourage pests.
It’s true that many pest eggs are already in the food we buy. Even more, uh, interesting, is that there is a quota for bugs, and rodents, that end up ground up in flour, crackers, etc. Yummy! Well, at least the heat in baking renders them harmless.