Bridget's Bunia Blog 40

Friends of the Kitchen

Ostensibly, I’m cooking supper. But in reality, I’m extracting little black creatures from the food. While weevils conveniently disappear in a pot of beans, they retain a high profile in a dish of white pasta served to guests.

'A weevil', I am told by Grolier’s encyclopaedia (the MCMXCI edition I presume to still be a valid source of information) 'is a specialized beetle with an elongated head and a protruding, often curved snout that bears the mouthparts and antennae. Most weevils are less than 7mm long. More than 40,000 species of weevils constitute the family Curculionidae of the beetle order Coleoptera. Almost 2,000 species of long, slender, primitive weevils, found mostly in the tropics, make up the family Bretidae.'

I think our kitchen must be host to Calendra granaria and Calendra oryzae because those are the granary and rice specialists. But how do they come to be in the hermetically sealed pasta pack or the jar of beans or the sack of flour? Maybe it’s because 'the legless, often blind larvae frequently burrow into seeds, buds, fruits or underground roots' and stay there. The encyclopaedia entry, alas, doesn’t list the protein and vitamin content of the creatures. But given the fact that they have ingested the wheat (and the container plastic) and they disappear from view in a generous shake of black pepper, it’s probably OK to leave the weevils in the dish of pasta. Sorry, guests.

However, I’m not so well disposed to live and let live when it comes to cockroaches in spite of reading that 'roaches are actually very clean insects, even though they eat garbage. They are called the custodians of nature. They only live in houses where there are crumbs to eat or the garbage can is uncovered. They lay eggs inside the house's hollow walls.'

I wonder who had the wit and wisdom, time and patience, to discover the following information about this strange creature: 'The roach is also one of the hardiest insects on the planet, capable of living for a month without food and remaining alive headless for up to a week. It can also hold its breath for 45 minutes and has the ability to slow down its heart rate. Cockroaches also have a very high resistance to radiation. The cockroach has super regeneration powers that allow it to regrow lost limbs. They also will never die if they get proper amounts of food and plenty of sunlight and water. This is the only species on planet Earth that is known to have these powers.' !!! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockroach)

So now we know. Crunch! No regenerated limbs allowed here!

What I do find enchanting are the geckos. Whether a few centimetres of translucence straight from the hatcheries or the bolder, knobbly ones, they are friendly little fellows who pop up when you open a drawer or scuttle away when you put on a light, scurrying up, down or across the wall. Watchers from another world hurrying away to share their observations with a vast colony of creatures in some invisible location.

Blessings,
Bridget

[I’m at a loss to find a verse of Scripture to fit this commentary on life here!]