Choosing the lesser of two weevils

Unlike that great scene in Master and Commander, the weevils were not on a plate, they were in my pantry. And actually they weren't even weevils, they were meal worms. Frankly I would have chosen the weevils. I had weevils once in my pantry in San Diego, and they weren't anywhere near as disgusting. They were also relatively easy to get rid of.

I discovered on Sunday, as I was getting ready for guests to arrive, that the sprinkling of flour beside the bag of dark bread-flour that I hadn't used since winter was not caused by a scratch in the paper bag. Ewww, bummer, I thought and shoved everything back in place.

On Monday, I began cleaning the pantry. This was a significant task because I've become quite the food hoarder. I justify this in that while there's a small grocery store in the local town, I'm 20 minutes away from a real supermarket, and with gas at $6 per gallon, you don't just run to the supermarket for one item.

I threw out a lot of stuff: the infested bag of flour and those that were adjacent to it on the shelf, open grain products, and a few things I found that had been in there entirely too long. Each item remaining in the pantry was thoroughly inspected: under the rims on cans, in the joints of cardboard boxes, under the flaps of folded plastic, inside the small paper booklet hanging from a bottle, inside the layers of rolled up mylar from a half eaten bag of chips.... Those disgusting meal worms had found their way into all sorts of places. Everything packaged in cardboard, paper, or thin plastic got bagged. This pretty much wiped out my collection of hand-imported ziplock freezer/storage bags, but I was so glad I had them. They've finally started selling ziplock bags here, but only the quart/liter size, and they're expensive (no Costco-packs).

But my battle wasn't over. I wiped down the shelves with alcohol to disinfect, but the meal worms had crawled into the holes that are pre-drilled in all IKEA furniture which allow one to adjust the position of the shelves. There they had made cocoons, and I fear, laid eggs. Q-tips do not fit into these holes, not even the hard Swedish variety with not enough cotton on them. Toothpicks fit, but they were not particularly effective, and the results really turned my stomach. My solution: I took a syringe and squirted ~1 ml alcohol in each hole, then I took the appropriate sized drill bit and by hand (not on the drill, less I drill through the walls of the cabinet) reamed out each hole. The inhabitants got thoroughly mashed, and any eggs got scraped up in the grooves of the drill bit which I would rinse off between each hole so as to not cross-contaminate.

It took me two days to finish this process, but I now have a neat and tidy pantry, a good idea of what's in it, $ 20 in coupons from the flour manufacturer whom I called and complained to, and the faint odor of alcohol which reminds me of the labs I used to work in. I find the smell clean and somewhat reassuring. Unfortunately my husband hates this smell, but then he doesn't spend much time in the kitchen anyhow. So far, no new signs of meal worms or other creepy crawlies. Let's hope this worked.