WEEVILS GOBBLE BUT THEY WON'T FALL FOR MINUTE RICE

Saturday, August 17, 2002

A couple of weeks ago, I made a terrifying discovery about my food supply.

Weevils don't eat Minute Rice.

I'm a little bit uncomfortable admitting in print that there are weevils in my kitchen, though really I hardly ever see them; just their cast-off skins, or whatever it is one calls what insect larvae cast off. It's a little like admitting that one's child has lice, though actually that happened to us once too. My son was combing his hair and a louse fell onto the table in front of him.

``Peter, you have lice!'' I said in horror.

``Oh,'' he said. ``I knew they were there but I didn't know what they were.''

Sheltered child. Of course we convulsively treated our hair and washed every textile in the house and never saw another one, but I still get squirmy thinking about it and that was more than 20 years ago.

Where was I? Oh, yes, these may not actually be weevils at all, though that's what my mother used to call them. Barbara Bloetscher of the Plant and Pest Diagnostic Workshop at Ohio State University listened to my description and her best guess -- until I catch one and send it to her -- is that they are probably larvae of either sawtooth or merchant grain beetles, though we can't figure why I never see the adult beetles.

Weevils, it turns out, live for most of their lives inside single grains and only the adults emerge. So much for thinking whole grains are healthier.

I acquired these creatures, whatever they are, during a sojourn in Southern California. I thought it might be because the climate there is more benign for many creatures, including the ones with exo- skeletons, but Bloetscher said most of them are widespread. Then I thought I'd finally got rid of them here in Colorado but when I moved a couple of years ago I discovered a forgotten container of Parmesan cheese that had evidently offered them refuge.

I suppose I could use weapons of mass destruction on them, but between the health risks of suffusing my food-preparation area with insecticide and occasionally ingesting a weevil skin, I think I'd rather take my chances on the weevils.

After all, it's not as if they are likely to do me any harm. I have a mental picture of Horatio Hornblower, tapping his ship's biscuit on the captain's table to get the weevils out while he plots yet another daring raid on Boney's minions. Or am I thinking of Aubrey and Maturin? Well, whichever.

With cockroaches, now, you never know where else they've been. When my husband and I lived in graduate-student housing in Evanston, Ill., in the early '60s, we had little cockroaches that flocked to drown themselves in saucers of jasmine tea. We left a sample for the exterminator, and he left a note saying they were oriental cockroaches, though we were never sure whether that was a real name or whether he was just making a joke about the tea (the tea, in any case, was more effective than whatever he did). When we lived in Shanghai, our building had huge cockroaches. They were so big that they couldn't get into the roach traps we brought back from Hong Kong.

But then, the people who lived closer to the center of the building had rats, so we consoled ourselves with the thought that mere cockroaches weren't so bad. And again, it's a geographical thing; Shanghai's climate is subtropical. People who live in Florida often have cockroaches, they just call them palmetto bugs so it doesn't sound so bad.

Where was I? Oh, yes, I don't think the weevils are harmful, it's just the ``yuck'' factor. I recall reading once that Jains, members of an Indian religion who are very strict vegetarians, flourish in India but come down with vitamin deficiencies when they move to England. It's not much of a stretch to suspect that the flour available in India might be protein-enriched in ways not necessarily apparent to consumers, no matter how carefully they sift it.

When I find a larva skin in food, I throw it away, and I keep the replacement supply (in plastic shopping bags) separated from the shelves where I have seen insects. That should eventually take care of the problem, though one of the two beetle species Bloetscher proposed can fly. But the Minute Rice was a box that had not yet been segregated, so I was quite astonished to see that my weevil-whatevers had apparently turned up their little snouts at it and passed on by for more nourishing fare. As I said, it's a terrifying thought.