I was in the Mission the other day and came across a market. They had good looking produce outside, so I decided to take a look inside to see if I could use anything. I found a box of INSTANT GRITS!!! Yummy!! Grits are GOOD!! So I bought them. I went home to cook some for dinner, and when I poured a cup full out, I noticed there were dead insects (about 4) in my grits. They were some kind of brownish, winged insect, about 1/4 cm X 1/10 cm. So I just picked them out with a spoon and cooked and ate my grits. I added some butter and salt and man, it was just like a partial, good ol’country breakfast!
The next night I made some more grits. This time about 10 of those dead flies came out. Some even made it to the pot. It was a bitch trying to catch them with the spoon as they came to surface when I stirred my grits.
I usually don’t eat bugs, but this time I just didn’t care. I was challenging Mother Nature to give it her best shot and try to infect me with some kind of parasite. I knew my stomach would kill anything (I go through a medium sized botle of garlic flavored Tabasco sauce in a week)!
So have any of you Dopers ever eaten contaminated food? Contaminated food, without your knowledge, from a restaraunt, friend’s, or family’s house, doesn’t count.
Well, does kraft dinner count as ‘contaminated’? At home, once, my brothers put Cat Food in my cereal (I feel sorry for them). I have never bought bad food tho…
What is a grit, indeed. I was born in Maine and even I know what a grit is.
When I was a little kid I once ate a bowl of Froot Loops even though an entire colony of ants had crawled out of the box when I opened it. I was that desperate for sugar cereal.
Until us kids grew up and moved away my family kept jams and jelly in the cupboard rather than the fridge since it was used so quickly. Bits of mold were quite frequently scraped from the surface before using it with no ill effects.
My mother had a science teacher in high school who once left a slice of bread (wrapped in plastic) on a windowsill in the class room for a month before shaking off the dust and eating it.
BTW, Stylus, careful about those bugs - if any are alive they could get into flour, rice, cereal, etc. and breed.
Speaker–grits are a form of corn. Their appearance is very similar to the following: you take a bowl of rice, chew it up to get some saliva in there, and then spit it back out…so it looks like a bowl of already chewed up rice. However it is corn. Just add water, simmer for about 5 minutes, add butter/salt/pepper, and you my friend are good to go!
Um…perhaps you could explain it to me? I’ve always been of the mind that mold=don’t eat, so when I find green fuzzy spots on cheese, I throw it out (if it’s just a hardened spot from being exposed to air, I just cut that part off & eat the rest–and seal it better when I put it away again). I am unfamiliar with how cheese is made. Is mold not bad when it comes to cheese? Can I just scrape it off & munch away?
Oh yeah–you must have been really hungry, Stylus, to be eating grits at all! Bleah!
You can eat molds persephone. Most molds have spores that are ubiquitous in the air. The green fuzzy mold you describe (though I’m not 100% sure) is the common contaminate Penicillium notatum (usually a white fuzzy border with green fuzz in the middle). Just brush them off or scrape them off and enjoy. Just stay away from slimy, mushy, moldy vegetables…they’re just nasty!
For anything except cheese, I definitely follow your rule of “mold = don’t eat.” But cheese wouldn’t really be cheese if it wasn’t for mold - it’s really fermented milk, after all. So yeah, I just cut off the visible mold and eat the good stuff (unless it’s really nasty because it’s been sitting in my fridge for a month or two, of course). Of course with some cheeses, the visible mold is the good stuff - like brie or camembert or any kind of blue cheese. I don’t understand people who buy brie and then don’t eat the rind. Might as well eat some “pasteurized processed cheese food” or some similar abomination.
I think the “mold=don’t eat” rule does apply to Velveeta, Cheeze Whiz, or other “cheese food” products. These do not qualify as cheese, IMO.
Umm…I ate broccoli once that had little worms in it…picked them out with a spoon when they floated to the top of the boiling water…there were only a few. But the next time it happened, there were too many to pick out, so I threw it out.
Grits are the ground kernels of desicated maize plants, boiled to the consistency of library paste and used as food by Southerners and as boat caulk by Yankees. The culinary usage is widely believed to be a practical joke perpetrated by the Native Americans on the transported convicts who originally settled the Southern States. Live insects are a traditional, if not required, condiment but any such additions should be no larger than bite size unless breaded and deep fried (known as hush puppies).
huh! I was going to post a thread asking if cheese was okay to eat if you just cut the mold off. you learn something new every day.
Stylus, most grainy type foods have bunches of bug eggs inside them. So comfort yourself in the knowledge that, instead of eating grits with bug eggs, you simply ate a grits and bug eggs which turned the grits into bugs. but it’s all the same shit anway.
You’ve heard of Cream of Wheat? Grits are just “Cream of Corn”.
People here in the south eath them with salt and pepper and butter. I personally like them with sugar and butter (like my Cream of Wheat), but here in the south that’s considered an abomination!
We don’t get grits up here very often but when I was working in the Bahamas my staple breakfast was corned beef and grits… the bugs just equal a little more protien.
I would figure that we eat a lot more bugs than we think in a variety of foods, especially grains.
At home, once, my brothers put Cat Food in my cereal (I feel sorry for them). I have never bought bad food tho…