today's moment of ick

[ratcreature]

Discovering that the unopened bag of mung beans in my storage drawer was crawling with tiny black beetles when I wanted to use some. On the bright side, as far as I could see in my quick check of the rest of the drawer they hadn't yet managed to gnaw through the plastic and infested the rest of my food stores. I guess it can always happen that some egg or beetle slips through in the processing and the bag had been in my drawer for two months or so, so they had time to multiply, but still, gross!

Since I only noticed after I opened the bag, I also had to rewrap the thing in a new plastic bag I could tie closed before throwing it away to lessen the likelihood of beetles venturing outside the trash bag before I can take it out. I still think I'm going to take that thrash bag out even though it is not yet full to get rid of the crawling cohort that turned my kilo of mung beans into their habitat. Obviously the beetles have been there for quite some time, and not in the trash even, so it's kind of irrational to feel so grossed out now, but vermin always feels worse once you become aware, I guess.

Comments

[ratcreature]

I try to watch out for things like this, because I don't like loosing the food, not to mention the grossness, but the bag wasn't expired (according its date it was supposed to be good good until well into 2014), and the black beetles weren't particularly visible against the dark green mung beans, so from a cursory look at the drawer nothing seemed amiss. The first thing that looked odd was that there seemed to be more crumbly/dusty bits in the bag when I took it out, but it took me opening the thing and noticing the movement to connect the dots, i.e. that the crumbly bits were due to gnawing. At least the beetles stayed in the bag, rather than flying out at me or something.