Insects that get into your food.
 

Insects. They're okay, I've learned to like them over the years. But I don't like it when a bug crawls into my food and I don't know about it. It's different if you see the bug, then you can grab it or stop eating or whatever, but when you're in the middle of eating something and run into your little friend in there, it's so icky poo poo.

I just made some pasta, and I have an ant problem apparently, because in the middle of my pasta consumption, well, lo and behold! A little ant critter has decided, unbeknownst to me, on crawling into the bowl and dying a garlicky death. So I pick up this piece of pasta and there's this crumpled thing that looks like pepper, but it's a little larger than a grain of pepper. Uuuuuhhhh!!!!! Ewwwwww! It's got legs, for crying out loud. I went through tremendous effort to prepare this special pasta dish, and this insect mo fo has to ruin it. God dammit!

I guess I'll call that dish "anty-pasto."

did you finish your food? now if it was a roach i would
have thrown it away but an ant scoop out the part where it lay and chow down!

Re: Insects that get into your food.
 

BOOO!!! GET OFF THE STAGE!!!

yes, I scooped out the part with the ant on it and finished eating the pasta. but it totally took the enjoyment out of it because I was thinking "that ant got mixed around for a while, a couple of his legs mighta come off in there" .............and I mean it tasted fine and everything but the idea of it was so grody.

it's disheartening because I CAREFULLY roasted the garlic and did everything so carefully, and I didn't see no ant when I was making this stuff. I usually see things like this. But NO! This ant got in there somehow, the little bastard.

I hate ants.

Flies...can't stand goddamn flies.
If I'm eating outdoors, and one of them so much as lands on the corner of a plate/cup/glass, I'll discard said implement and contents. I know...probably over-reaction, but I cannot continue to eat.
Roaches, not as big a problem for me...I mean, not a problem that occurs a lot anyway, I don't like to eat out much, and their chances of sneaking up on a plate I'm using are pretty remote.
However, if one DID make it, of course I'd have to throw away anything I was eating at the time.
I literally cannot bring myself to eat food that has had even remote-vicinity contact with pests to my knowledge.
In fact...I think pest potential (along with my all-time favourite, crowd hatred and the mistrust of the hygeine practices of the majority of people in the food service industry) is one of the larger reasons I don't like to eat out much at all...I guess studying food preparation/hygeine modules probably made this whole "phobia" deal even worse for me...
I'm pretty anti-contamination.
If I've seen a roach (even a small one) on my kitchen bench, I'll thoroughly wash and disinfect the whole surrounding area before so much as putting a cutting board upon it.
This kind of thing has been going on for a while for me...I think it's because my stupid-ass mother didn't pay the proper attention she should've while cooking this one time when I was 7 years old...she was making her regular "vegitarian" slop (not that there's anything wrong with vego food...but if you can't do it right, stick to salads, because 9 times out of 10, your vegitarian food WILL suck balls, bigtime...yup...she's the reason I started to cook for myself at around 8), and I hadda eat it...midway through this garbage, there is was, a roach. A roach in my food.
I suppose at least it was intact...but yknow what? I remember really hating her at the time for that...my only consolation (a small one, considering the crisis situation) was that this all happened in front of her (then) new boyfriend, and she seemed pretty damn humiliated and even started crying - which I've thought back to and laughed at many a time...
I don't hate her or anything, but goddamn, their oughta be a law against some people ENTERING a kitchen.
I think from pretty much that point onwards my food paranioa began...in fact, just one of many incidents and weirdnesses I visited upon myself - Once when I was 11 years old, I even turned myself off eating one of my favourite breakfast cereals for a few years (coco-pops, much like coco-puffs) because I successfully convinced myself in my paranoia that if there happened to be some kind of pests or rodents around, there could be either mouse/rat shit in there or roach eggs, and I wouldn't be the wiser about it...and examining each individual fragment of your favourite cereal? That there's a whole lotta NO fun.

That said, the only time ants have been a problem for me is when I was at college a couple months ago eating a sausage roll...had it kept in its paper bag and plastic cover still fully on and only opened at the end as usual...I was sitting on a low brick wall outside talking to the fellow chefs, and put it down for no longer than 2 minutes...picked it up and the thing was swarming with them...of course, then I had to throw that out too.

ok...that's all from me.

Ant are just one thing to worry about
 

Bread products some from where? You guessed it, flour. And flour comes from grain and grain comes from a field and a huge combine harvests the grain.

What is on the grain? You guessed it, bugs. So when the combine cuts and chops the grain the bugs are included. Of course, bug eggs are included also. Corn mill is the same hence the reason for keeping it cold so the eggs don't catch.

You can believe when considering the millions, maybe more, of pounds harvested they don't have the time or inclination to pick out the bugs and they become part of the grain.

Of course, the parts are almost too small to see after grain is made into flour, but it's there.

What do we make with flour? You guessed it, snacks, cereals, breads, pasta, etc.

So, I just can't worry about bugs in my food unless there crawling.

Well, from what I've read, there's plenty of this and that that gets into our foods. But I can eat that pasta, as long as I don't see distinguishable parts like insect heads trapped inside it. I mean, if the little buggers were ground to powder in the mill, then I'll never really see it or know about it...

There was this restaurant in Hollywood near a place that I worked at....and one day one of the work chums comes back with a horror story...he had ordered a salad and was just finishing the salad, lifts up a leaf of lettuce on the plate, and there, lying on its back, stuck to the plate with salad dressing, is a skinny orange-colored LIVING cockroach, desperately trying to unstick itself from the plate. It looks like it's breakdancing, you remember those guys who would spin around on their backs. The guy shows this to the manager, gets his money back and leaves, horrified.

This restaurant became known as "the breakdancing salad place" and we quickly found other places to have lunch.

My mom had just got a job at a brand new Waffle House in southern Georgia, and my cousin was there eating a bowl of chili. One of the last spoonfuls almost made it to her mouth, and then she realized there was a boiled palmetto bug WHOLE on the spoon. For those of you who don't know what palmetto bugs are, they're basically huge flying cockroaches.

I never ate there again.

That's pretty bad.
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Just imagine how the palmetto bug felt about it, though.