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

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

oh yuck. i once bought a pretty little bag of cornmeal in a small grocery up on the mountain my inlaws live on. within a couple of weeks, my cabinets were full of the little wigglies that hatched out of the bag. it took a long time to get rid of them in the rice and pasta and so on, but i never really completely cleaned (slapdash till the end, me). i will not use sprays. :(

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

I say again, Bleah. I'm going to have to completely clean, methinks, simply because I'll be paranoid about any other food I buy if I don't. Not quite sure how I'm going to approach all these boxes, though. Also not sure if I've got beans in one of the newer bags or not, and if so, are there bugs in those beans too?

Argh. I want to know how to keep my food as bug-free as possible. Since the bags do get little holes in them from any kind of handling, I suppose there'll always be a chance that any bag I buy at the store will already be infested. But I would like to come up with a good way to keep new bags from infesting older bags.

And I want bean & barley soup I can't have. :-(