Mary cleaned out the kitchen cabinets, which entailed sorting out all the various spice jars. She thought the Chili Powder looked a bit odd and, indeed, it did: a whole colony of beetles and their larvae was a-squirm in there!
The label states:
All Natural
non irradiated — no preservatives
Frankly, I don’t see any particular problem with food irradiation.
If you’re the sort of person who cooks your meals, as we are, then you’re eating plenty of denatured proteins and broken DNA anyway. In this case, snuggling that jar up to a nice warm Cobalt-60 slug for a few minutes would have been a great improvement.
The main ingredient, of course, is “chili peppers”. The remainder doesn’t sound particularly life-sustaining, though: oregano, cumin, garlic, sea salt, and spices. Anything that can live off that brew must have a bad attitude, the way I see it.
Being that sort of bear, I’d written the date on the label: 19 Aug 08. So, in round numbers, we use two ounces of Chili Powder a year. Obviously, we shouldn’t buy that stuff in bulk…
Those are millimeters on the scale it’s crawling on, so these are little bitty bugs.
[Update: Useful advice from the UC IPM folks.]
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
On the one hand, ya think, dude, those have got to be some badass bugs to live in pure chili.
On the *other*… it appears to me that only mammals are really suseptible to the hot in chili. I came to this conclusion when I had a couple cockatoos. They’d eat incredibly hot peppers without concern: they loved them. So, if your bugs don’t have receptors for hot, it was probably a big bottle of nummy organic goodness as far as they were concerned.
Soooo when are you going to build a particle accelerator and treat your own food?
Mmm, let’s see…
Clear!
No carrier…
Well that just put me off of food for the day.
I just found the same bugs in my chili powder yesterday!! I’ve owned it for two years and had it in a plastic zip bag, but the bugs were not obvious until today. It was red chili that came from Mexico. Those cheap spices caused a bettle infestation in my kitchen. Yuck.
owned it for two years
You’re obviously not using enough chili powder, either!
We tucked our new jar in the freezer, where it’ll stay until chili season returns: a few months below freezing should kill off whatever’s living in there…
I just saw these little bugs in a powdered chili jar that’s been closed for a year now! It’s crazy how they can live in such a small space for so many generations.
I suppose until they’ve eaten the last speck of food, there’s no problem… reminds you a bit of humanity, doesn’t it? [sigh]
Folks are so picky nowadays…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_marzu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surstr%C3%B6mming
Meanwhile, back in civilization, we know enough to not eat stuff like that and to very gently drop swollen cans in the trash. [grin]
Thanks for the update, though. I needed that…