I just learned a lot about pantry pests. I see them so infrequently that I have never taken the time to figure out what they were. Today, I learned that some of the most common found in Utah are the Rice Beetle and the Sawtoothed Grain Beetle. Fortunately my food storage doesn’t ever get to the beetle stage. Ok, it did once- I bought a couple of bags of Lundberg Farms brown rice from Costco and put it in a bucket in the garage. A couple of months later I pulled it out and I could see the black rice beetles through the opaque walls of the bucket! I was utterly disgusted and Costco was kind enough to take it back. Unfortunately it sometimes happens that I find the little babies in my food storage. Fortunately it doesn’t happen often. Sadly, it happened today.
This morning was a misty, grey, amazingly beautiful fall morning…one of those times when you feel like you can reach out and hold a piece of air in your hand it is so moist. I went outside and noticed some elderly men in the ward using a big noisy machine to split our even more elderly neighbor’s wood and stacking it into a perfect wood pile. I decided to acknowledge their kindness by having the kids bring over some hot chocolate. A few years ago we bought a HUGE bag of hot chocolate powder and have been using it each cold season. This was the first time this year we had pulled it out. We are hot chocolate pros around here (usually). We have the disposable hot cups with the cool lids, and even spray cream to top it off. So, I made the hot chocolate, enough for the men and for the children. William and Lizzie brought it over and then came back to drink theirs.
A few minutes later Lizzie pulled something out of her mouth and handed it to me asking me what it was. I saw to my horror that it was a larvae. Dead, of course since it had been boiled (for some reason the fact that it was dead did not lessen Lizzie’s discomfort or disgust!). Suddenly it dawned on me that those men were drinking our wormy hot chocolate! What should I do? If I go over there to tell them and they have already drunk it, or worse yet they were in the process of drinking it, what do I say? Or what if I said nothing and they realize it is wormy??? They would never be able to trust anything coming out of our kitchen again!! (A vision of future church social functions passed before my eyes of people whispering warnings to each other about the unsanitary nature of my food.) After much deliberation (and a call to Grant for advice), I walked next door and talked to the first man (we were yelling over the noise of the machine) and said, “Don’t drink the hot chocolate, it isn’t good.” (I didn’t use any words like larvae, worms, infestations…) He said it was fine but too hot to drink so he had put it in his truck. I approached the next man and gave him the same warning. He said he had drunk about half and assured me that it was really good but hadn’t had time to finish it. I looked around and found two cups still full, snatched them up and raced home. I thoroughly inspected each one and to my relief found nothing amiss.
So here is the question in all of this:
Why couldn’t I have just had the satisfaction of doing a good deed without the mortification? Maybe I felt a little pride in the idea of serving and having people think well of me? I know that I am often too concerned with what other people think of me. I am trying so hard to root out this need I have to seek approbation from friends and family. Why not just allow myself to make mistakes and laugh about it? Why did I need to warn the children, “Tell no one about this!” What kind of message was I sending them? I know, it was, “If you make a mistake just don’t tell anyone”. (The warning didn’t work anyway, the moment another neighbor, Lois showed up Anna announced, “Guess what, we have worms in our hot chocolate!”) I think I will have a little talk with the children tomorrow about owning our mistakes and the power of a sense of humor in times like this. I think that being able to laugh about this would be a good thing. Perhaps I will be able to laugh someday, but not today. And perhaps someday my children will trust me to not give them bad food because right now they certainly don’t!
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