You buy a 25 lb bag of long grain white rice you bought from Costco. You’re about half-way through it. After a long time eating non-rice meals, you pull the bag out of the bottom of the pantry, grab a measuring cup, and pull out three cupfuls of rice.
There are these little potato bug things in there…roughtly 4 in the three cups that you can see. You get most of them out in rinsing the rice, and the act of cooking will definately disinfect them and turn them into protein.
Do you pitch the rice, or continue eating it…hey, it’s 12 lbs of rice!
You know, in an abstract sense I know that there are bugs in the rice that my rice came out of, I know that those bugs are not only not going to make me sick but probably good for me, and I know that people all over the world eat infested rice all the time and it doesn’t kill them, but I’d still throw it out.
Incidentally, I was deeply amused by the recent recall of Similac (infant formula) due to “insect parts.” I guess it’s possible that babies’ GI tracts are sufficiently less developed than adults’ such that they actually “could experience symptoms of gastrointestinal discomfort and refusal to eat as a result of small insect parts irritating the GI tract,” but couldn’t find a single cite to support the idea, and strongly suspect that this recall was all about the ick factor. I mean, you feed babies formula using a bottle with a nipple with a pinhole in it. Are these beetles made of barbed kryptonite-fiberglass or something that a few particles that size could have any effect at all?
The “no” option in the poll is a little too emphatic (I wouldn’t report you to anyone), but I still chose it, anyway. Rice is cheap; it’s no great loss to throw some out. I might, though, use it for some non-food-purpose, like making one of those neck-warmer bags you throw in the microwave.
I throw the rice away. Fortunately, I’m not so bad off that I have to eat food with visible bugs living in it, and wouldn’t feel bad about getting rid of it.
What I did at that moment would depend on how lazy I was feeling and how badly I wanted rice. I think my most likely response would be to pick out the bugs on that batch, cook it, eat it and throw out the rest of the uncooked rice – and buy some new rice, in a smaller bag this time, the next time I’m at the store.
In actual practical terms . . . not that I speak from experience or anything . . . you usually get flour-moth larvae in cupboard dry goods like rice. Those little critters do indeed look much like rice – same size and shape, only stripier. And wigglier. So you can’t sift them out. But you can pick them out by hand if you’re sufficiently motivated and have time.
However, it’s safer to freeze the foodstuff first, then pick out the extras. They’re not as wiggly then and therefore harder to see, but if you don’t take action as soon as possible, they might spin webs and cocoons and transmogrify into their adult moth selves, filling your foodstuff full of sticky nasty webs that you really can’t eat around, and going forth to infest everything else in your pantry. The warmer the pantry, the worse the infestation can get.
Yeah, I’m currently suffering from a moth infestation, so I have to throw out all my open cereals and seal whatever’s unopened. And I had to throw out about half a pound of uncooked rice last week:P This is why I have to buy small bags of rice and other cereals from now on.
Despite my username and burgeoning reputation, I’d sling it and get some more rice. I know that insects and their components are pretty routinely included in food, but at the moment at least, I don’t actively seek to eat insects.
I’m also a little skeptical of the claim that so often arises in SDMB threads about flour - that there are always bug eggs in it. I doubt this, or at least, I doubt there are always viable eggs in there. If this were true, surely any flour I stored for longer than a few weeks would be crawling with them - and I’ve often stored them long beyond their best before date. Only twice have I ever observed living insects appearing in the flour/meal - and it’s not that I don’t inspect it closely enough.
I accept that insects, their eggs, dirt and other stuff gets harvested with grain, and is not removed before milling and thus becomes a component of the flour, but I don’t think whole, viable bug eggs are a common inclusion.
In Cameroon, rice was far too precious to use as an everyday grain- it’s more like something you’d get for a special birthday meal. So people were amazed that I could eat rice pretty freely. One day, I found out a bag of rice had become heavily infested with quite a lot of black bugs- it was pretty bad. I put it in the trash, but my neighbors found it and scolded me for being so wasteful. So, together, we spent the entire afternoon picking bugs out of rice. That night, I cooked us all a small feast. This remains one of my best memories of my time there.
I don’t know whether the bugs come in with the harvest or not – I’d actually be suspicious that they don’t, since they seem to like conditions not commonly found on wheat farms – but I am certain that they can be introduced in the storage process, whether at the warehouse or the retail level. I had to stop buying flour-moth-prone items at the little new-age grocery nearest my house because they have an infestation they don’t seem to be able to deal with.
BTW, Lucky 13, I’m sorry to warn you that the little fuckers are perfectly able to (chew? poke?) make holes in regular plastic bags, and of course able to scootch their tiny, squishy bodies through small spaces like an incompletely sealed cardboard box. That is, your unopened cereal isn’t necessarily safe if you have a vigorous enough infestation. (If you only have a few of 'em, they’ll stick to the easy stuff and leave unopened things alone.) You may wish to invest in a bunch of big jars or other sealable, hard containers if you don’t already have some.
I don’t doubt this at all - I won’t buy flour from the local mill - not because it’s ancient and dirty, but because it’s also a feed shop and has loads of open containers of animal feeds, that are guaranteed to be a reservoir of bugs.
I’m pretty sure the two instances of bug infestation I observed in my own kitchen will have been caused by bugs arriving, getting into improperly sealed containers and laying their eggs there, rather than from eggs that were there all along.
Something else: I keep my rice and flour and sugar and Cream of Wheat and oatmeal and cornmeal and all that sort of stuff in the freezer, because I just don’t like wiggly things in my starch.