I had a very nice dinner going. Pork roast in the Crock Pot. Cinnamon apples frying in the pan. And a bag of Success Boil-in-bag brown and wild rice in a sauce pan of water. Just as the water came to a boil, I looked at the rice, and thought, gee, that’s funny, the grains of wild rice seem to be moving. Then I looked closer. There were little dark brown bugs scurrying about in my bag of rice! Aaaack! I hate when that happens. Have you ever had a similarly unsettling food experience?
Many a time. Including the always unsettling “eat a sandwich, still hungry, make another sandwich, and this time notice that the bread is very, very moldy.”
There was a funny unidentifiable but definitely unpleasant smell in the kitchen, but I hadn’t been able to locate its source. Oh, well, figured, whatever it was would either decompose completely and stop stinking or I’d figure out where it was.
Then one day I noticed that all the potatoes had sprouted.
Huh. Oh, well.
Then I noticed that the sprouts were . . . wiggling.
URPPP!!!
Well I once reached the bottom of a cereal box to discover that mice can apparently get in and out of a loosely fastened box top without leaving any sign of their passage.
Except the ones they leave everywhere they go.
I once found a curried bee in my food at an Indian restaurant. It had been cooked with the food.
Rice Krispies look all too similar to the larvae of whatever-it-was that infested the box I ate from. I didn’t notice the difference between the pale-tan larval husks and the dark-beige Krispies until I was near the bottom of the bowl, and noticed one of each floating side by side in the milk.
UUUuuuuuuurgle… :eek:
Just yesterday I noticed that pantry moth larvae had apparently chewed small holes in plastic bags of rice residing in my pantry and were breeding prolifically. Ick. I had to throw out a huge amount of rice and grains-they were living high on the hog in there.
Once I had a rotten potato explode in one of my cupboards.
Another time I pulled a tub of still-sealed Brummel & Brown spread from my refrigerator only to open it and discover a furry carpet of green. I don’t know how long it had been in there.
I don’t keep up with my perishable staples very well.
One year, in a fit of housewifeliness, I made up a large quantity of my Freezer French Toast and packed all the individually wrapped slices in a large, expensive Tupperware container and put it in the freezer in the basement. Sometime later, while adding to and rearranging said freezer, the Tupperware container got left out of the freezer…for several weeks. Needless to say, the stench was tremendous when the lid finally unburped. Cleaned up the mess (only threw up once!) and could not get the smell out of the container. My husband said to throw it away, but the damned thing cost a fortune and I was determined to save it. Tried newspaper, baking soda, ammonia, charcoal briquets, lemon juice, everything anyone recommended. Let it sit in the sun. Finally the smell abated enough that I started using it for catfood. In the garage. After a few years of that, I realized that the smell was finally all gone, and it could be returned to normal household usage.
I am a patient woman.
Aah! I just had the same thing happen to me yesterday!!
Way to get all the kitchen cupboards sanitized after breaking sprinting records with the bag of rotten potatoes out to the back yard!
We always get some ants in the kitchen in the summer, and it’s not a huge concern to us. This year, however, they seemed to be a little too numerous. We began to look in the cupboards for possible sources of a problem.
There was a box of Rapidura sugar (it’s some variety of unrefined sugar.)
It was making noise.
The ants have been far fewer in number since we tossed it.
URGHH!! Spoiled food is one of my strongest irrational fears.
This is how my kids got off their Kraft Macaroni and Cheese kick. We didn’t notice the extra “grains” in the food until everyone was already eating. Ugh. On the bright side, for once that stuff had a little protein in it!
Two bad experiences, twenty years apart. No bugs, though.
Once, when I was six, I ate half a soft-boiled rotten egg. (Much worse than it sounds)
The other incident was about, oh, ten years ago. My sister was making oatmeal cookies, cracked an egg, and a half-formed bird embryo plopped right in the batter. Being sensible, she plucked it out and tossed in a fresh egg and made the cookies. Being stupid, she showed me the egg embryo while I was licking the cookie batter from the bowl.
Yes, I threw up immediately.
No, I don’t buy eggs.
Bleeuch, that reminds me of the Garfield strip where Jon cracks an egg into the pan and there is a beak where the yolk should be.
One time I was making a cheese salad sandwich. I am ready for the lettuce so I get it from the fridge and take a huge bite out of it apple style so I have something to chew on while making the sandwich. I start slicing lettuce and notice hundreds of tiny greenfly crammed into layer upon layer of the lettuce. The thing was crawling with life. I spat out what was left of my mouthful of lettuce. Now I know why you are supposed to wash lettuce before eating it.
These are some truly inspiring stories, guys. But why oh why did I feel like reading it while eating breakfast??
I once stayed with the parents for a couple of days. In the morning I went to get myself some cereal. As a placed the cereal box on the table a dozen very tiny creatures leapt from it and scurried off. “Huh?” I thinks. I shake the box and more appear. I take out a few other cereals, they all have the same lodgers. Tiny, tiny little insects. “You do know you have an infestation here” I ask my mother. “What!?” she asks. My mother is very houseproud. “Look”, I say, shaking a few boxes and pointing at the fleeing invaders. “What?” she repeats, looking puzzled.
The thing was; these monsters were so small that neither my mother or father, no longer exactly equipped with 20-20, could see them. Even with their glasses. If I hadn’t been there to assure them that there was indeed tiny sets of legs scurrying across the table they would have been none the wiser. My father remains sceptical I wasn’t seeing things. And we have no idea how long they may have been in residence.
The contents of that cupboard went into the bin that morning and the cupboard got a scrubbing.
Not a story, just some reassurance: the grain moths that get into rice, etc. are perfectly edible, if not very esthetically pleasing. They can also be killed by freezing the bag of rice or flour or whatever. If you get them a lot, store grains, nuts, etc. in the freezer or in airtight glass jars. Moths can chew right through plastic bags, and get around the lid of a non-airtight container.
I tend to gleefully watch them boil alive when I find bugs in my rice (but tighten up storage as well).
However, I’ve had a few Finagle experiences. Uh… penecillin is good for you, right?
I hate to tell you guys, but the moths aren’t chewing into the plastic bags, they’re chewing out. Most grains are sold with the moth eggs mixed in. If you eat the grain quickly enough, you’ll never know that the moths were there. Leave it sit long enough for them to hatch, and there you have your moths.
I’ve read that freezing the grain first is supposed to kill the eggs, so any grain you buy should be popped in the freezer for a few weeks, and can then be moved to the cupboard.
Thanks for the heads up on the freezer trick! I never heard of that but now I’m going to throw in my sealed containers of flour into my freezer for a few months.
Rice though, I never had a problem with. I always wash rice and let it sit before throwing it into my rice cooker. I find the little bugs (strange little 6? legged little mini-ant like things) float to the top.
Any idea of what those creatures are and where I might look up some info on them?
Wow. It takes me sometimes a YEAR to get through a big burlap bag of bismati. (say THAT 3 times fast) I’ve never seen a bug or moth, and I always rinse every grain. But even so, I’m doing the freezer trick as soon as I get home with the new bag. Horrors.
I am a Certified Pancake Junkie. Once, while visiting friends I offered to make breakfast - so of course I whipped up pancakes. Every thing went well, until we all sat down and started pouring the syrup. Huge black carpenter ants had trundled their way into the big plastic squeeze bottle and drowned because the nozzle wasnt snapped shut. (They hadnt used the syrup in months) I poured a healthy dose on my stack and at first I thought = Raisins?? In Syrup?? You’d think this would have cured me of my Pancake Addiction, but I didnt even hurl. I just shuddered a bit and got a fresh plate.
Once I bought a box of Rice a Roni at the drugstore that had obviously been there for a while. It was dusty - that should have been my first clue. But it was cheap and I was hungry. So I took it home to cook, and yeah, the rice had wiggly friends. They were having a little party until I ruined it by pouring them all into the hot skillet. Then into the garbage bin. Yick.
Funny… when the kids were younger, whenever we would have Uncle Ben’s long grain & wild rice with dinner, they would always complain about how it looked like it had bugs in it. So for years now we’ve been referring to it as “bug rice”. 
I once had a bunch of moths (or some kind of flying bug) come flying out of a brand new box of raisin bran when I opened the inner bag. I closed the box back up and wrapped it tight in a plastic grocery bag and threw it in the trash, but it was still several days before trash day, at which point there were little maggoty larvae crawling all over my trash can when I dragged it out to the curb. Eeewww.