'Never eating again': Revolting pantry find exposes common bad practices in most kitchens

Ask me anything about weevils. I bet you, I can answer anything. But the question I want you to ask yourself, before we proceed, is, do you want to know everything about weevils?

Because a lot of this information is revolting.

All of my new-found knowledge is hard-won. Because I have spent the past two days battling a severe weevil infestation in my pantry. And I'll never be the same again.

It started with one packet of white rice, which I didn't realise was infested with weevils until I saw them floating up to the top of the pot. Part of me thought it may have been because I'd chosen the cheapest brand of white rice possible, and maybe that stock was a bit old, and that's why it had weevils in it.

I tossed it all, of course, and wrongly assumed this was the source of the weevils in my pantry. A couple of open packets of pasta that were on the same shelf had a couple of weevils in them too.

I threw them all away, wiped down the shelf, and moved on with my life, ignoring all the advice to do a thorough inspection of my entire pantry and wipe down all the packets and shelves with white vinegar to kill all the eggs.

I just didn't want to think about it anymore. It truly turned my stomach.

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I finished making dinner, using some 'safe' sachets of microwave rice, but I did give dinner a miss myself that night

The kids were none the wiser to how close they had come to having some extra protein (gross) in their casserole that night.

Fast-forward to two weeks later, and I was cooking some pasta and saw more weevils. This time I was very confused because it was a relatively new packet of pasta.

How on earth did weevils get in there?

It was then that I realised the rice likely wasn't the source, and so I started pulling everything out of my pantry, and discovered a major infestation at the back of my pasta shelf.

The weevils had chosen the highest quality pasta they could find and made elaborate homes in both my Cucina Matese and my La Molisana.

Interestingly, they had given all of my daughter's gluten-free pasta a miss.

I commenced a major pantry clean up, and as I started pulling packets from shelves and inspecting them, finding more and more of the little buggers, I knew I had a couple of major challenges on my hands.

1. My partner Shamus is a bit of a food hoarder. He buys way too much of one thing, and then never wants to get rid of it, and gets annoyed when I do. He's even like this with leftovers.

2. If my kids found out we had weevils, they'd blame me, and never eat again.

Shamus wandered out and when I told him what I was doing he said, "They'll only be in the open packets".

I responded firmly with, "No, they are in closed packets too. Unless you want to do this yourself, just let me do what I need to do."

Then, when my daughter came down for a snack I said, "Just throwing away some of the old food and giving the shelves a wipe", which she seemed to accept. She was also on the phone to her best friend so was thankfully too distracted to look too closely.

I made a rookie error by starting my cleaning on the middle shelf, the pasta shelf, where I first discovered the weevils, not realising that I really needed to have started from the top down, so any other weevils and eggs that fell onto the lower shelves would then be cleaned up afterwards. So I was up and down and back a forth a bit.

I threw away anything I could see weevils in, anything that was out of date, and anything that had packaging that made it difficult to see if there were any weevils in them.

Then I opened a packet of bay leaves and placed it on the pasta shelf as a deterrent.

You'd think I was done by then, right? Not at all, because I spent the rest of the night finding weevils running for their lives away from the bay leaves which they clearly hated the smell of.

I realised I hadn't gotten every last one after all, and resolved to repeat the cleaning process again in two days time, just for extra measure.

I also learned quite a few revolting facts about weevils.

For example, did you know that weevil eggs are in a lot of dry pantry products already? They only hatch in certain circumstances, leading to visible infestations.

It was advised to place any products without visible weevils in them in the freezer, to freeze/kill the eggs so they wouldn't hatch.

But then, I'd be eating weevil eggs, which, by the way, most of us do, regularly.

Apparently to hatch they like warm, humid conditions, which they have had plenty of lately, giving them perfect hatching windows.

Some Google searches even suggested that instead of throwing products away, I freeze the weevil-infested packets, and then pick them out either before or during cooking.

Perfectly safe, they said. That was a big nope from me.

For me it will be buying less, using it faster, regular cleaning, and air-tight containers for anything that will be in the pantry longer, like flour.

I am going to spend the remainder of this week trying to forget about weevils and weevil eggs and any other gross food facts so I can enjoy my meals again.

I haven't dealt with something this disgusting since the pantry moth incident of 2012, or the kitchen gnat outbreak of 2019.

Sometimes, yucky food things happen, through no fault of your own.

The trick is to jump on the problems as soon as you can and then implement regular cleaning practices to help prevent them in the future.

I've only had one pantry month infestation, and one kitchen gnat outbreak. I'm hoping this is my only weevils experience as well.

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