Comments on: “We Live In Little Houses Made of Beans”

By: Atomfullerene

Atomfullerene — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 12:21:15 +0000

Those sound like mung beetles. We use them in experiments in the intro bio lab I TA. They definitely dig holes in beans

By: Urban Interest

Urban Interest — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:02:59 +0000

Thank you for all the tips of getting rid of the bugs 🙂 I try to get rid of them for a while and it doesn’t work 🙁

By: Uncle Glenny

Uncle Glenny — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:02:17 +0000

As a poor college student I recall buying a 2 kilo burlap bag of basmati rice, …

At one point in my life I used to buy some fancy scented rice in 20 pound quantities quite regularly. It frequently came just slightly infested, but with time of course got worse and worse. The solution was to immediately transfer it to sealed jars immediately after purchase, so the uninfested portions remained so.

By: KeithB

KeithB — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:54:55 +0000

“The lesser of two weevils”, anyone? Sailors ate a lot of insects back in the day before walk-in freezers.

By: elle

elle — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 06:46:40 +0000

i’m pretty excited about the scorpions down at the local market here near Muping, Shandong Province, China. I’ll let you know…

By: Fuzzbutt

Fuzzbutt — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 21:07:23 +0000

I’ve always found it funny how some invertebrates are delicacies and others are vile.

I won’t eat something once it has a bad infestation. Pasta that’s been pre-chewed for me by some larva or other just isn’t appealing. When I buy a bag of rice it seems more often than not it has little insects that I call “bread lice” for their vague resemblance to head lice. When I see one in the bag, I’ll just spread the rice on a tray and pick them out, then put the rice I’m not ready to use back in the bag. You have to rinse it anyway…

By: daedalus2u

daedalus2u — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 15:27:22 +0000

Freezing is an excellent way of stopping an infestation. It is the actual freezing that kills them, several cycles are better than one cycle.

A technique they use in flour mills is heat. No insect can survive ~140 F. Humans can survive that if the RH is low enough. Lots of equiipment can take that if it is not operating. What they do is seal up the flour mill, crank the heat up, and monitor temperatures all over. If it gets high enough for long enough, then every insect is dead.

Another technique for preventing infestation of stored grain with insects is to mix a little bit of ash with it. Typically they used ash from burned dung. The ash is alkaline, alkali carbonates or free lime from calcium carbonate being calcined. When the insects try to move from one grain to the other they can’t tolerate the alkalinity of the ash they come in contact with. After storage you can wash it off, or even eat it since it is a small quantity relative to the bulk.

By: travc

travc — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 22:56:40 +0000

Greg,
Did you ever mention these sorts of observations with the Efe? I’m curious if they would find it amusing that many westerners are horrified by the idea of eating bug-infested food, but unknowingly do it all the time since they are normally disconnected from the growing and processing.

By: Jim Thomerson

Jim Thomerson — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 21:23:18 +0000

In Peru, for breakfast, we had “Quaker”; thin oatmeal with meal worms in it. Not bad. We also had Nescafe brand instant coffee, which I wasn’t too pleased with.

By: Charles Sullivan

Charles Sullivan — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:01:26 +0000

As a poor college student I recall buying a 2 kilo burlap bag of basmati rice, which was kind of spendy but it was one of the few foods I splurged on. Anyway, some moths discovered the rice, and soon there were dead moths and live moth larvae in the rice.

I continued to eat it, but I just rinsed it off the best I could before cooking. I figured the hell if any moths were going to make me toss out that expensive bag of basmati rice. Needless to say, it was delicious.