Not for the faint hearted.

I have a bad case of the creeped-out crawlies. You know the ones. The goosebumpy, spiderweby, bugs-on-me tingly ones; the sight every little speck with a gasp, and approach with caution, poking with stick or fork or toe until it's been determined that said speck is in fact a speck--a part of a leaf, a crumble of turkey, your housemate's daughter's cereal--and not the goosebumpy, spiderweby, bugs-on-me thing you were hoping it wasn't.


I went to the cupboard for quinoa today. I have some four gallons of turkey broth from last week's feast, and I wanted to use some to boil up a bowl of grains. Grains. I know. But it's finals week, and it's turkey broth, and it's quinoa and--I wanted some.

So I went to the cupboard and started fishing for quinoa. First to the big tupperware full of bulk bags and half-useds. Near the bottom, I spotted a bag of little pearlies so I grabbed it--millet. Darn. But wait--millet with little pieces of sand. Little pieces of sand, and silky looking webs...pale beads of millet sticking to the soft plastic in clumbs... and WORMS! Just writing it sends those shivers back up my spine.

Ok. So worms in the millet. But wait--there were worms in the oats, too. Not just the open bag of rolled oats I used in cookies not three days ago, but in the sealed paint-can of a tin of steel-cut oats. And in the glass jar of rye--I didn't dare open that jar. The top inch was clouded over with web, and the bottom eighth full of telltale crumbles. And in the quinoa. Just barely--but barely enough.

I do believe I was infested with our friend the Indian Meal Moth. Ewwww.

I mean it's cool and everything--the shimmery webs, the way the larvae are these neat little, white, parasitic looking worms who spin as they eat, clumping the grains together as a way of saying "look who's home!" before cocooning into a cranny to morph into the triangular gray moths I found in the deep crevices of some of my bags--but EWWWWWWWWWW.

This prompted a full-scale investigation. My findings? Gross!


The the lentils, the coconut, the instant oatmeal (pathetic, I know, but I really was hoping these were clean). The raisins. The raisins were probably the worst. Hell, I even had one in my parchment paper box (I'm so glad I checked).

Graciously, I think my newly purchased bags of Namaste pizza crust and muffin mixes were spared. There was a wriggling worm, wrapped in its own web and tucked into the paper bag crease of one--but no evidence of anything getting inside.


I guess it had been a long time coming--I'd needed to purge a lot of that from my life, but didn't have the heart to toss it and most of it wasn't donatable. Some of those boxes and bags traveled with me from California, two years ago--a few of them lived in my dorm room for even a year before that. The pantry looks a lot better. I just wish I hadn't had to throw away so much food!

and I kinda wish I had some quinoa to boil in my turkey broth.