Help! What’s floating in the orange sauce? Indian meal moths are more common than you think (brrr!)
The orange sauce needed to be thickened with a cornstarch slurry, so I stirred a teaspoon from the bright yellow packet with a little juice. Strange, there were black specks floating in it. Maybe the bowl hadn’t come out of the dishwasher completely clean? So: another bowl, tablespoon, juice, stir. Those black specks again. And guess what? They were moving…
To my great horror, the cornstarch packet turned out to contain tiny black bugs slowly crawling through the powder. Yuck! The packet went straight into the gray bin. And while the orange sauce bubbled on the stove, I inspected the entire drawer. A packet of flour: sure enough, movement. And I also saw signs of life in the bag of spelt flour, the self-raising flour and even the powdered sugar. I didn’t check the pasta, panko, spaghetti and buckwheat anymore, but put them straight into the garbage bag one after another.
Eggs and larvae
What are they, these nasty things? Where do they come from? After a horrifying bout of Googling (definitely don’t look at the images!), I was wiser: I had seen the larvae of an Indian meal moth writhing around. They had hatched from eggs that a female meal moth had left in one of the packets.
Everything. Must. Go.
Normally I’m fascinated by nature and everything that grows and flourishes, but yippee, preferably not in my kitchen cupboards! The entire cupboard had to be emptied, and all opened packages that could be even remotely interesting to my invaders went into the trash. And that’s a lot, because Indian meal moths aren’t picky: pancake mix, plain flour, whole-wheat flour, rye flour—they turn their noses up at nothing.
Cocoon
It could have been much worse, I also read online. Because those black specks gorge themselves (on MY organic spelt flour, no less!) and then pupate. Then you find all kinds of little cocoons in the packets, from which they crawl out—when the time is right—as large and strong meal moths. Ready for life and to reproduce further. The circle of life! Sorry guys, hopefully my soapy water put a stop to that.
Sauce with egg, bread with egg
Can you prevent that more abundant fauna in your pantry? It’s difficult, because an Indian meal moth needs only a minuscule hole or gap to eat its way through your packets and bags. Sometimes the food is already contaminated at the supermarket, and those eggs are white and tiny, so you can’t see them at all. I’m trying to put out of my mind that I’ve probably already thickened sauce with cornstarch containing eggs, or baked bread with flour containing eggs, more than once—but it doesn’t feel great at all.
Ziplock
Have a good cry and start over. The clean cupboards are stocked with fresh supplies. And all the packaging that makes an Indian meal moth happy goes into airtight ziplock bags (merci Ikea); the most frequently used ingredients sit in neat, tightly sealed storage jars. No more moths getting in. And before I start cooking or baking, I continue to suspiciously peer into the bags and sift the flour. Do I see something moving? Is that a black speck? Because this must never happen again, how horrifying!
Read also:
- Eww! Apparently bugs come out of your strawberries when you put them in salt water
- 10x when you want to cook and the universe says: no
- Bye bye bugs!
