I am a vegetarian and I eat bugs. I don't eat them on purpose, but I am living in Liberia and you eat what you get. The food for our 400 crew members gets shipped from both the US and Holland in large containers brought by ship. Often there are delays once it reaches the port and the container can sit in Liberia for weeks before we are able to claim it. Unless it is a refrigerated container (dairy and other cold foodstuffs) it is subjected to the heat and humidity of an equatorial country. Things like flour and pasta have bug eggs in them (one of the reasons we never ate raw dough in Kenya) and if presented with the right conditions they will hatch and multiply.
When I worked in the galley the first 3 months on board one of our jobs was to sort out the pasta. This entailed opening boxes of lazagna noodles to determine if the pasta was infested with weevils or not and if it was, by how much? The rarest nugget was a bug free box. Most common was a box crawling with bugs that could be shaken relatively free.
There were still cocoons as I called them, which remained embedded in the pasta, but were still deemed almost bug free. Then there were the boxes we would open that were mostly dust. These were usually crawling and were immediately discarded. Someone discovered you could shake a box before opening it and if dust came out of a corner the chances were pretty high that it was one of the completely infested ones.
The "clean" pasta was placed in large plastic bags that were then tied off and cooked as quickly as possible before the next batch of cocoons hatched.
With all this opening and shaking of boxes there were a lot of bugs everywhere. We stood right beside the garbage bin when we sorted them to try to confine the spread of crawling critters. We would often be wiping our arms free of crawling bugs who were desperate to escape their suddenly exposed worlds by making a beeline up our arms. The sensation of bugs crawling up my arms usually stayed with me for a several hours after these exercises and I kept brushing them away.
For infested rice it was much simpler. Measure out your rice and water and put into the appropriate cooking dish. Stir and sure enough the bugs float to the surface and are easy to scoop out.
Shell pasta was the hardest. We couldn't shake them out so we just cooked up the best looking bags. The black bugs were obvious on the white pasta.
Our cereal varies too. Apparently bugs like Wheatabix and granola, but not Honey Nut Cheerios or Rice Krispies. Unfortunately the bugs and I have the same taste. There are two techniques I use with these; either allow the bugs to float to the surface in your milk and pick them out or just eat it and don't look too closely. I choose the latter most.
Best trick I've learned: dried parsley sprinkled over food adds a speckled appearance that covers bugs and even adds a healthy appearance. Thanks Tyrone for that tip!
For another article on bugs on board click here.
With all this opening and shaking of boxes there were a lot of bugs everywhere. We stood right beside the garbage bin when we sorted them to try to confine the spread of crawling critters. We would often be wiping our arms free of crawling bugs who were desperate to escape their suddenly exposed worlds by making a beeline up our arms. The sensation of bugs crawling up my arms usually stayed with me for a several hours after these exercises and I kept brushing them away.For infested rice it was much simpler. Measure out your rice and water and put into the appropriate cooking dish. Stir and sure enough the bugs float to the surface and are easy to scoop out.
Shell pasta was the hardest. We couldn't shake them out so we just cooked up the best looking bags. The black bugs were obvious on the white pasta.
Our cereal varies too. Apparently bugs like Wheatabix and granola, but not Honey Nut Cheerios or Rice Krispies. Unfortunately the bugs and I have the same taste. There are two techniques I use with these; either allow the bugs to float to the surface in your milk and pick them out or just eat it and don't look too closely. I choose the latter most.Best trick I've learned: dried parsley sprinkled over food adds a speckled appearance that covers bugs and even adds a healthy appearance. Thanks Tyrone for that tip!
For another article on bugs on board click here.
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