This Post Is About EARWIGS or God Doesn't Want Me Eating Peaches

At the beginning of the week I usually by fruit to eat at work the rest of the week. Lately I’ve been buying peaches. It’s a bit of a fine art, picking fruit that will be optimally ripe on each successive day of the week. At best, it’s a highly inexact science.

Now, if you’ve been following my XF Bite posts for this week you’ll know the events I’m about to recount.

The two ripest pieces of fruit I bought for the week were two white peaches. Upon diving into the first one on Tuesday, I realized: I really don’t like white peaches. They have no taste, or rather, they taste like slightly peachy water. The one I had was over-ripe in parts and under-ripe in others. All in all, it was not very good.

So Wednesday I skipped the white peach and didn’t have fruit at all.

Today, I decided to partake of the first of two yellow peaches I had purchased. By now they seemed appropriately ripe after spending the last two days in my designated fruit drawer. I moved the second peach to the fridge to prevent it from over-rippening.

I bit into it and it was a little mealy, but mostly juicy and delicious. As I chomped away I noticed that the fruit had seemed to grow free of the pit, leaving an empty space in between the fruit and the pit. As I continued eating I chomped into a part of the peach that was all discolored and bad. Taking a closer look, I discovered that the gap between the fruit and the pit was FILLED WITH MOLD. Fortunately I did not hurl.

So now it’s this afternoon. I’m wanting something to snack on and considering the two peaches I have in the fridge: one unevenly ripe white peach and one possibly internally moldy yellow peach. I decided to pull the white peach out and cut it up so I can look for mold and bad bits before I start eating it.

I cut it in half and the pit breaks in half too, but the fruit itself looks ok. I start cutting off wedges with some difficulty as this peach is clinging tightly to its pit. Then an earwig crawls out of the one of the pit halves.

EW!!!

I’m sorry, but that’s just gross. I couldn’t eat the peach and felt a bit of guilt about that. I mean I’m sure there are plenty of starving people in the world who would have loved to eat that peach earwig or not, but it would have made me puke. Does that make me a spoiled child of a decadent culture? I’m not sure I care. My sister had a traumatic encounter with an earwig when I was younger. I will not recount it, but I still don’t want earwigs anywhere near me.

Tomorrow I will cut open the yellow peach before I eat it. Stay tuned for updates.

(photos from Flickr Commons, taken in Colorado in 1940: link)