random thought (and don't read if you haven't eaten your dinner)

[gategrrl]

The grossest thing I ever saw in any kitchen of mine was when I looked into a burlap bag of rice from Thailand and saw little white maggots squirming around in it.   Guess what we didn't have for dinner that night?

What's the grossest thing you've ever seen in *your* kitchen (of food origin)?

Comments

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a hard meme. I've seen mold, maggots, fruit flies, weevils (I always had to wash the rice in Malaysia just to get the weevils out) but it's hard to decide which is the grossest!

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what weevils even look like, so I wouldn't know what to look for! Mold doesn't gross me out, but live squirming bugs in the food do. Ick.

Fruit flies...they're gross, but when they're little maggots, that's even worse.

[fantasyecho.livejournal.com]

Like that. Except much much much much smaller. They kinda dig into rice grains and lay their eggs there? Little black bugs. When you kill then, they make a little crunch sound. A bit like popping ticks and lice. They're more annoying than gross, I guess.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

Oh! I have seen pictures of these things before. I just didn't make the connection.

Lice? Are truly disgusting. I hate lice. The only time I got lice was on my trip through Nepal and India. Right around Bhuj I found myself scratching my head in my sleep. I woke up to the scratching. Had no idea what the little bugs were. The man who owned the hotel told me to go to a drugstore and get medicine (still without telling me I had lice). Needless to say, I shampooed my hair every day for a week with that poisonous shampoo they sold me. I ran into another traveler from the US who shaved all her hair off to get rid of them.

[khek.livejournal.com]

I opened a box of "boil in bag minute rice" once, and it was full of little black bugs. I still don't really know what they were.

I lived in graduate student housing in Rhode Island when I was going to school, and that kitchen had cockroaches. I tended to leave the lights on in there all the time, because I hated watching them scurry when the lights went on suddenly.

[gategrrl.livejournal.com]

Oh my god. You just prodded a memory out of my brain.

Back when I was a student at the School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I went out on a "date" with this painter. He lived on the Fenway, where there was a lot of student housing. He said he'd make me dinner, and when I went up to his apartment, sure enough, he had some cheap chicken cuts on a skillet on the range.

In the bright light of the kitchen, I saw black armies of cockroaches on the cabinets ABOVE THE OVEN and RANGE scurrying around. A few of them even dropped near the skillet. They didn't run into the dark corners. They stayed there, running around everywhere. OMG. It was horrifying. I don't think I ate that food because holy crap. ROACHES!!!!!!

[betacandy.livejournal.com]

EWWWW! And they were behaving like roommates rather than pests. GAH!

[betacandy.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you could call it "food origin" but once I bit into a Poptart, and the fucking thing had mildew INSIDE the fucking pastry. Guess what I never ate again.

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

Ew! That reminds me of the time I ate half an Oreo and then looked at the other half and saw some sort of worm/caterpillar/something in half a cocoon. :-( (This happened in 1980, package of Oreos bought in an independent convenience store. They'd probably been in the store for a long while.) To this day, I have to *see* food before I can eat it. This was reinforced to me a couple of years ago when I got to the bottom of a box of crackers in the car (in the dark) and, after we stopped somewhere and turned on the lights, discovered that they were covered with mold.

Another time, I bought lyraeinne a chocolate bar at the health food store, and it had a dead bug in it--sticking out of the smooth side, its back in the chocolate and all its little legs sticking straight up out of the back of the candy bar. I have no idea how it lasted in the package like that....

Another time, too, same brand of chocolate, I had eaten part of it, and then found a WORMy thing in it--eating the chocolate, too.

Until you mentioned that, I had completely forgotten about these incidences. *g*

(BTW, the chocolate brand was Tropical Source. I thought the worms came from the store as it was not well-kept, but after lyraeinne found the whole bug [different store]--some sort of beetle thing, and it was not small but maybe 1/2" in body size or a little less--we never bought chocolate bars of that brand again. I have still sometimes bought vegan chocolate chips of that brand, though. heh Tropical Source used to make the most delicious chocolate I'd ever had, and maybe they still do, but two bug experiences was enough for me. In my mind, the chocolate chips are totally different, even though that's illogical.)

[aizjanika.livejournal.com]

Years ago (like probably 1981 or so), I bought some Rice-a-Roni, and it had little worms in it. Weevils? These things were terrible. I have never bought Rice-a-Roni since then. The little bugs also kept coming back. I threw out all my flour, cereal, etc., scrubbed and disinfected my cupboards, and still...the little bugs came back a few months later. Now I think it's because I did not toss out all my spices, too. I've since learned they can live in spices as well. Ew!

I think the grossest thing I've ever seen, though, was rice I bought that had live moths in it!!! Still inside the bag, somehow they hatched and grew into moths in my cupboard. Double ew.

Since I've lived here, twice I've bought either rice or pasta that was in a box and it had bugs in it. Now I won't buy either unless it's in a plastic bag. Doesn't prevent it completely (as above), but I feel better. *g* The time it was in the rice (Near East brand flavored rice), I had a bunch of similar boxes of rice on the door in my fridge and the bugs got into every box. You'd think they'd die in the fridge, but no. Apparently not.

In my cupboards, I don't leave anything unopened. I don't even keep flour in original containers. I put the entire bag inside a ziploc bag or dump into into some other contained that can be sealed. Cereal or crackers or anything like that into containers or ziploc bags. I learned this from other military wives early on in my marriage. *g* I grew up in a house where we'd open the cereal and then just fold the bag down.

I've seen lots of other gross and disgusting things in my kitchen, but bugs are the worst.