Where do the little varmints which infest grain products like flour stored a long time come from?
The worm thingies are the larvae of a tiny black beetle called a flour beetle.
As to where they came from, either they evolved over 2 billion years, or God created them on the sixth day. Take your pick.
God gave the bugs “every green plant for food”, which includes the Malt-O-Meal in the open box in your kitchen cabinet. If you have a problem with flour beetles, keep everything in Tupperware.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” - the White Queen
If you’re wondering how they got into your grain before you got it, they could have infested it while it was still in the silo being dried. They can infest flour at the mill, or even at the store, burrowing into the bags. Nasty little buggers.
My grandmother grinds her own wheat before baking bread, and she always shakes it in a collander beforehand, and afterward sifts the flour carefully just to make sure there are no unpleasant surprises in store.
This happened to me once. I had just started a big pot of matzoh ball soup, and had to make the balls. I had a box with two packets of ball mix in it, and I’d used one of the two packets a few months before. They were similar to packets of Lipton soup–paper, with foil on the inside. I opened it and poured it into a bowl that already contained oil and eggs, and mothy-looking things flew out of it. There were also green maggoty looking things in it too. This, out of a completely sealed packet. I checked it afterward to see if there were any holes that a moth might have managed to chew through, and found nothing.
For months now, I’ve been wondering how they got in there. Now I know that they were there to begin with. I’m never eating again.
My mother always put flour/grain products in the freezer for a week or so after buying them to nip this problem in the bud, so to speak. Seemed to work–we never had any problems with these when I lived at home. Then again, like many folk recipes we may have just been lucky.