Bleah.

[hummingwolf]

Though my cabinet space is limited here, I've been keeping a decent store of food in my room, what with canned veggies & dried beans & rice & such. Well, my food store is a bit diminished now, since I just threw out three bags full (and I do mean full) of rice, barley, beans, and peas because there were little bugs crawling around in there. Because of the way those particular bags are made, all the bags have holes in them through which the bugs could pass on to new food; so while I didn't actually see bugs in every bag, I'm pretty sure they're there.

Yes, I believe the bugs are harmless. Yes, I'd bet I've already eaten a few of them. I don't care. I do not want to eat more of these nameless insects than I have to. As much as I hate throwing out food I could still be eating (somebody's still eating it, after all!) and which I spent perfectly good food stamp money on, I've gotta get this infestation out of here.

Argh. Must clean bugs out of boxes now. And I was hoping for some bean & barley soup, too.

Gyah.


Edit: Does anyone have advice on how to keep this from happening in the future? Some of the bags of beans & grains had been in my room for nearly a year, yet these bugs are a very recent thing. Obviously if I didn't have a problem till this week, the insect invasion is not an inevitability--so how do I avoid this in the future?

Comments

Catch-22

[mystified13.livejournal.com]

It's a catch-22. . . the only way to get rid of the bugs would be to spray, but then you would be eating dead, poisoned bugs. It's too late to put the food in another container-- the only recourse would be to pick the bugs out by hand. Probably not feasible. . .

Re: Catch-22

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Well, in the case of beans, you should be rinsing and sorting them to begin with before eating. But since we're talking about quite a few pounds of dried beans I had, the bugs would have plenty of time to feast, excrete, breed, and die before I got around to every bag in the lot. There was a bag of barley I had transferred to a zipper bag in the counter downstairs a few days ago which was full of bugs and what I presume was digested barley today.

I'm really disappointed that I have to get rid of so much food here. Especially since I'm hungry right now.