After reading the recipe, bringing the butter to room temperature, preheating the oven, and choosing the right baking pan, I’m finally ready for a marathon weekend of baking. But then I discover flour bugs living their best lives in the finely milled, refined, and bleached bag of flour. Even the whole-wheat flour is not immune. The flour bugs love the natural oil in the bran and germ found in whole-wheat flour even more, as if they know it contains more fiber and vitamins.
“What to do?” I think. I grab a tissue and peck at each bug one by one, like a woodpecker searching for its next meal; the death count continues climbing. Sometimes the bugs fight back. They burrow under the top layer of flour. They stick, lifeless, to the sides of the brown paper bag, playing dead. I poke one, only for it to spring to life and land with the other flour bugs, on the outer surface of the flour.
I do not know how the flour bugs infiltrate our bags made of several layers of polymers and oxide-resistant material, introduced to add strength to the structure and keep the powder inside fresh longer. I do know that they will always find a way. Once, after uncorking a brand new, never before opened bag of “stone-ground artisan bread flour”, I found that the flour bugs had already bypassed the seal.
Adult flour bugs can live up to one year, long enough to multiply. The females lay a few eggs each day in the wheat kernel, depositing about 450 eggs in total. Once the eggs are laid, we have five to twelve days to finish the top section of flour before the small, slender, white eggs hatch. At some point, I really need to research whether flour bug eggs are fit for human consumption. Then again, my sister maintains that they are high in protein.
Months will go by without any sign of our flour bugs. But then I’ll see a black speck in the corner of the flour bag. When I catch and crush him, I almost feel bad, but the fear of them multiplying and creating a storm of black spots leads me to crush him anyway.
And then one day they are gone again. No blemishes hiding in the shadows and crevices of the flour bag. No wispy cobwebs clinging to the surface. No bugs playing dead on the side of the brown bag – tranquility at last.
“What to do?” I think. I grab a tissue and peck at each bug one by one, like a woodpecker searching for its next meal; the death count continues climbing. Sometimes the bugs fight back. They burrow under the top layer of flour. They stick, lifeless, to the sides of the brown paper bag, playing dead. I poke one, only for it to spring to life and land with the other flour bugs, on the outer surface of the flour.
I do not know how the flour bugs infiltrate our bags made of several layers of polymers and oxide-resistant material, introduced to add strength to the structure and keep the powder inside fresh longer. I do know that they will always find a way. Once, after uncorking a brand new, never before opened bag of “stone-ground artisan bread flour”, I found that the flour bugs had already bypassed the seal.
Adult flour bugs can live up to one year, long enough to multiply. The females lay a few eggs each day in the wheat kernel, depositing about 450 eggs in total. Once the eggs are laid, we have five to twelve days to finish the top section of flour before the small, slender, white eggs hatch. At some point, I really need to research whether flour bug eggs are fit for human consumption. Then again, my sister maintains that they are high in protein.
Months will go by without any sign of our flour bugs. But then I’ll see a black speck in the corner of the flour bag. When I catch and crush him, I almost feel bad, but the fear of them multiplying and creating a storm of black spots leads me to crush him anyway.
And then one day they are gone again. No blemishes hiding in the shadows and crevices of the flour bag. No wispy cobwebs clinging to the surface. No bugs playing dead on the side of the brown bag – tranquility at last.
