Saturday, Mar. 01, 2003 - 6:14 am
i read another diarylander's thoughts on eating bugs just recently- not purposely eating them, but wondering if he ate them and didn't know. well i found a bug in my food too. in a surprising place, its a canned pasta and soy thing i love but from a company you would think wouldn't have this kind of problem, and i actually felt not just mad but sad.
its hard enough for me to find things i want to eat, this was easy,- even right out of the can it tasted good, and fast- i hate spending time here at home on food. i like to go out sometimes to a great place, but the whole cooking process here- things take so long and create so much mess for just something to eat for daily upkeep- i would rather spend that time elsewhere. i hate doing dishes too. in my previous place in brooklyn i had a a lot of space and a huge kitchen. i would make apple pie and muffins and buy cool cookbooks to try things out- but that feels like a lifetime ago. so of course you see its a space thing too. i live in NYC now not brooklyn and the kitchen here is an afterthought. although sometimes i look back and i am happy i know i am at least capable of positive domesitcation in case i one day do live in tha big sunny house with kids and they want something warm and freshly made not out of a tube...
our tub is in the kitchen- an iron tub like in a farmhouse- so even though i am in manhattan i get the funny feeling sometimes i am in a cottage/cabin in a mountain town.. (just looking out the window bursts that bubble, i can see the empire state building in one direction and its not mountain or hill shaped, but up the ave sometimes when its misty its a trick of the eye for a sec, like there are hills and cliffs..). the tub is up against the wall with the curtain strung 'round. for the inner wall lining i bought a shower curtain that looks like an amazing mountain vista from on high- like a sierra club photo that goes from sky to lake and is really wonderful. it would have been too corny to hang on the outside (i just hang a nice neutral cloth curtain so it doesn't seem like the tub is incroaching on the whole room), but its fun to step in there and feel like singing "tha hiiillss are aliiivve, witthh the souunndd of mewwwsic!" like you are some naked goddess in a rainstorm on a mountain aerie - then you can be silly and make yourself paranoid wondering if anyone is looking out of those trees down there, but i seriously digress..
the bug, in my canned pasta and soy meatballs, was some kind of aphid. i think thats what he is- i think when my mom had a wheat grinder and left the flour bits in the catcher too long these fellows would show up. digress alert- yes my mom used to grind her own wheat to make bread- i have baking powder in my blood. there was a time when we were very young that it felt like she was still trying to make a happy home even with a violent husband and four seriously depressed children. i think that if those days had continued i probably could have stood it and just looked back and said in my kindest explanation- "my dad was from another country and way of raising children, its not my way, but i lived and i still "love" him even though we are not close"... but something went wrong back then, probably having to do with his making a bad job move and losing everything he had earned gained attained in one hospital, and suddenly having to fracture his time in many different hospitals and start from the ground up. we were young, no one ever explained anything to us, i am only guessing this now, it just got worse and worse and then thankfully the trick of the mind does black-outs, i don't want recovered memories, i want it to stay buried, i can hardly handle what i do remember.
anyway the bug was black with a tapered nose area, he looked tiny and pathetic- dying in his dinner, i began to calm down some- if he is an aphid, and if i have mistakenly eaten his kin before unknowingly- i know he doesn't carry disease like other bugs. i love spiders and will leave them alone in corners, bookworms, who i encounter sometimes, i'll shoo under the crack in the wall under the sink- but roaches flies and mosquitos, i'll kill. luckily (knock on wood) this apt building is pretty decently devoid of creatures 'cept the occasional mouse (no i won't tell that adventure yet).
i wrote the food company an email to ask what the deal was with food purtiy etc- if the bug that i found was somehow cleaned in the canning process so if i accidentally came upon one again and didn't know it- is it okay to accidentally eat?
they have not written back- which saddens me again- i am not trying to "catch" them in anything. i had a huge dead moon moth in a salad once at an organic restaurant and the hippi-chickie waitress said- "its okay he can't have eaten anything poisones on our farm, he's protein".... i said no thanks, but whatever, i am sure i would not have gotten sick from moth meat. so i wondered about my favorite canned product, i still have two cans left. i want them to tell me its okay, the bug would have been purified, so if you don't mind that you are a vegetarian who might sometimes eat mini-bug-meats without knowing it, go right ahead. but then everytime i eat it i'll look at every spoonful, maybe wonder what ELSE is in there if bugs can fall in.
it just troubles me when things that helped make things easier become weird, and then being so hard-up for food choices i can stomach, i'll consider eating bugs unknowlingly just so i don't lose it. guess that makes me weird as well. haven't eaten any of the other two cans yet, i probably won't- i think this food source is gone.. that i keep pondering it is bothering me, you just don't eat bugs.. so why am i still thinking about this?
shallow weeping
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