The Lure of Bug Sex, Of Course.

This is a story that begins many years ago.  My girlfriend-now-wife and I lived in Belmont, MA circa 2001 in a two-family house with an outdated kitchen.  We quickly discovered that we shared our apartment with the moths also known as "pantry pests."  

It didn't help that my wife had seen a news segment on pantry pests not long before we moved in. Upon realizing what we had, she explained to me (with terror in her eyes) what we were dealing with.

The moths find their way into bread and cereals, lay little eggs which hatch, giving birth to little worms that eventually turn into winged 'nasties' that eventually fly around our kitchen.  The moths can get around cabinets, boxes, bags, and into and out of the food.  In fact, the eggs may have been in the food before we even brought it home from the store.

How did we fix our immediate infestation?  The lure of bug sex, of course.  Traps designed to capture the pests are laced with moth pheromones.  

According to the advertisement, the pheromones attract the pests who then fly into the trap and stick to it's glue-covered sides.  When we bought a package of the traps and opened them nonchalantly in the kitchen, we were swarmed by a dozen pantry pests within minutes!  They came crawling out of whatever cabinet, box, and container in which they were hibernating with high hopes of bug intercourse.  Despite having other pests flying about looking for sex, they were still more interested in the promise of better sex in that contraption.  One by one, they stuck to the glue.  How stupid they must have felt, lying there aroused and surrounded by available moths yet hopelessly stuck to a wall covered in adhesive and synthetic hormones.

What if this worked on humans? A cop car could simply pull up to a house where a criminal was believed to be hiding.  The officer could open a package containing human pheromones and watch the thug come running out of his house and into the cruiser where they would stick to glue-covered seats.  Of course the whole neighborhood might show up and citations would most likely be given for public indecency.  

We left the traps out overnight and were pleased to find more pests caught in the trap. The problem was solved for the time being.  However, we occasionally saw a pest fly about and we would promptly get out the pheromones. "

We began to take preventative measures by keeping cereals and bread in Tupperware containers.  When pests continued to appear from our cabinets, we moved these items to the refrigerator.  Eventually we bought a new house and moved 50 miles away.  They surely won't find us there, we thought.  And we were right.  However, we continued to keep our flour-based foods in the refrigerator.  After several months, I suggested to my wife that we remove the cereals and snacks from the fridge.  

"No. What is more air tight than a fridge? We don't want the nasties to come back, ok?" 

"Ok."

Since then, our bread-like foods and grains have only tripled thanks to hungry little kids.  Unfortunately our new house did not have a walk-in "cold room", but rather a kitchen cubby hole that was designed to fit only the smallest fridge on the market.  The current inventory includes:

• Seven boxes of cereal including a village-sized (as in it takes a village to eat it before it expires) Honeycomb box.  It's big enough to create the illusion of a solar eclipse when placed too close to the kitchen windows.
• Four open bags of pretzels: thin fat-free, minis, pretzel sticks, and peanut butter sandwich pretzels.
• One open bag of Veggie Booty.
• Two open bags of Goldfish.
• Two partial loaves of bread.
• One open bag of Chex mix.
• Two open bags of cookies.
• One open bag of sugar.
• One open bag of flour.
• One partially eaten Apple Cake.

Add to that everything else that normal families keep in their refrigerator, and you have a fridge that is always full.  Getting anything out, typically results in a Kellogg's Avalanche.  The light bulb is useless given the amount of items on the top shelf.

Because salt looks like sugar and is white and granular like flour, we keep it in the fridge also.  As my neighbor mentioned while pointing and laughing at it's fridge door location, salt is a preservative.  That's should be enough to explain how far we haven't come.

It didn't help that a couple weeks ago, we accidentally ordered too much milk.  We order some of our groceries online so when it arrived one Saturday morning, we had to make it fit.  Stop for a moment and re-read the inventory above.  Add normal people fridge foods. Now add 8 gallons of milk. 

This scene wouldn't normally frustrate me.  I would usually just have a beer and laugh it off.  However, I can't reach the beer past the milk and cereals.  In fact, I can't even see the beer thanks to a useless light bulb and a solar eclipse that occurs every time I try to move the Honeycombs out of the way.

(photo credit)