Yahoo Lifestyle Flour Bugs Are A Real Thing—Here's An Easy Way To Avoid Them According To Food Safety Experts
It takes a lot to shock the internet at this point. After all, we're living in a world where people drain their ground beef with tampons and pancakes can be scrambled. However, one TikToker recently managed to horrify her audience nonetheless—by total accident.
While filming a video for her page @Jennaliveswell, the social media user discovered something...disturbing in her flour. She popped open the sealed container only to be confronted an infestation of bugs. "No," she gasps in the video, before zooming in on the crawlers. "What are they?... They're really cool, but really, really gross."
Jenna followed up the video with a series of questions in the caption: "Who TF R U? Where did you come from,” she wrote. "Last time I used normal people flour was this time last year so were they just chilling in my pantry all year?????"
"Where did my container not prevent this? Did I buy already infested flour?" she added.
Commenters were quick to offer their support and advice. "Apparently, all flour has eggs from those bugs in it but freezing the flour for a few days after buying it kills them,” one user wrote, while another added, "chances are it was already infested when you bought it."
"Girl you need to check ALL your pantry items now because they spread like the plague 😩😩😩," a third said.
So... what are these bugs? How do they get into flour? And what should you do if they infest your ingredients before your holiday baking season has even started? We tapped food safety expert Bryan Quoc Le, Ph.D. to explain the phenomenon, what to do if it happens to you, and how to avoid it altogether.
Le Quoc explains that infestations like this are usually caused by improper storage—but it's not necessarily something you can control. He clarifies that infestation can occur "further up the supply chain, such as during granary storage, distribution, and storage at the retailer."
In this case, the pesky bugs, which are actually called weevils, infest the whole kernels and lay eggs in the wheat grains before it's been milled into flour, Quoc Le tells Delish. "Kernels that contain insects may pass visual inspection during processing, leading to the growth of weevils in the downstream product."
To keep your flour safe from any weevils already present in your pantry, Quoc Le suggests using airtight containers made of glass, metal, or a strong plastic. "There should be no openings or cracks in the container," he says.
"As for flour that already contains weevils, the airtight container will not help protect the flour," Quoc Le says. "But it will help prevent them from spreading and infesting other food in the pantry, or becoming a problem in the future if they manage to lay eggs in the pantry.”
Quoc Le adds that you should also be careful to "keep your pantry clean from any leftover flour that may have spilled" because it can attract the little bugs. Weevils also are known to infest oats, rice, corn, corn meal, sorghum, and cereal, so you might want to apply the same practice you do to your flour as those items as well.
Finally, if you really want to make sure you don't open a new bag of flour to find it crawling with uninvited friends, yes, he assures, the freezing hack works: "Wheat flour can be frozen for one week and defrosted to kill weevil eggs."
Happy baking!
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