SC - kind of icky - Little Mites in Flour Products -

[James Prescott]

At 13:27 -0500 2001-03-12, KallipygosRed at aol.com wrote:

> I asked the docs about it in Iran...and other docs since then. We were told  
> to sift them out. Not to worry about it, and use the flour. It wasn't going  
> to hurt any of us.  
>  
> They used to joke is was just added protein.... 


This may be a "sailor's myth", though if it is it's a good one.

In the old sailing ships 'bread' was provided as barrels of 
double-baked ship's biscuits called 'hard tack'.  At the start
of a voyage the sailors would discard any biscuits that had
weevils in them.

During the middle part of the voyage the sailors would rap the
biscuits sharply on the table to dislodge any weevils, and
then eat the resulting 'protein-reduced' biscuits.

Towards the end of the voyage the sailors would discard any
biscuits that did _not_ have weevils, on the reasonable grounds
that if the biscuit wasn't good enough for weevils, it certainly
wasn't good enough for sailors.

Thorvald