Holy Foliage... there's a bug in my lettuce!

Bugs in lettuce are nothing new. One of the pillars of orthodox Jewish belief is that bugs are everywhere---in food, in water, in sheitels*. Since I was a little girl, I've spent hours of my life inspecting vegetables and sifting through grains to find those insidious little creatures. I don't ever buy raspberries, and I only buy triple washed frozen broccoli with a hechsher. I even bought a water filter when the copipods in tap water were a question. But just like I almost never find blood spots in raw eggs, bug sightings are rare and far in between, despite all my vigilance.

This weekend everything changed--I hit gold. It began this Friday night during my typical salad routine, which involves first rinsing the lettuce leaves, scrubbing the stems under water, and putting them aside to dry... then cutting all the veggies into the bowl-- tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, peppers, avocados, you name it-- and finally holding each lettuce leaf up to the light and checking it on both sides for bugs. I'll often find a few unidentifiable black spots which I rub out with my fingers, but the leaf usually passes my scrutiny and gets cut or torn into the salad. End of story. But this week my efforts were finally rewarded. My two heads of lettuce were infested with microscopic black dots, many of which had legs. For a minute I considered trashing the whole bowl to avoid the unsavory job of nit picking the greens, but I was expecting a full table of hungry guests, so I had no choice but to persevere. It's then that I discovered that these tiny little things do not wash off under a normal stream of water--their legs are clawed into the flesh of the leaf. In other words, the only way to take off the bug would be to cut it out with the surrounding leaf--something which can't be done on shabbos. Luckily I had a few endives in the fridge, so I pulled a quick substitute. But the saga was not yet over.

Today my daughter decided to be extra difficult and refuse any offer of dinner that wasn't chocolate. She rejected everything and anything I put in front of her and insisted I give her chocolate, not for desert but for dinner. I bribed, I cajoled, and I finally gave in, because I couldn't send her to bed hungry. In my infinite wisdom as a mother, I set out to prepare a semi-healthy bowl of oat bran with a few chocolate sprinkles to make it attractive. I opened a brand new box of HO steel cut oat-bran only to find a box of HO steel cut oat-bran with bugs. What first looked like extra toasted pieces of grain were crawling, that's right crawling, around my daughter's polka-dotted cereal bowl. Again using my infinite wisdom as a mother, I jumped back and shouted "Oh crap! Bugs!" at the top of my lungs in front of my very alert, apt to repeat, sponge of a toddler. Oh great!

I bit my tongue and braved the pantry again, choosing a sealed box of snowy white farina (which I put through a sieve just to be sure). After preparing it, I sprinkled the obligatory chocolate sprinkles on top so that my daughter would consider eating it. When I finally sat her down in front of what would be any kid's ideal dinner, she took one look at the brown sprinkles floating in her farina and hollered, "Oh Crap! Bugs!"