”Mustard” Bug
Location: Manhattan, NY, NY
August 8, 2011 8:17 pm
I bought a pretzel off of a vendor in Manhattan. He put it in a brown paper bag because I was going to take it to go. He didn’t have mustard packets available, but did have a warehouse sized size of yellow mustard on his stand. It’s August and has been consistently humid and a minimum of 85 degrees a day for over a month now. The bottle looked as though it had seen better days, but I figured, once I got upstairs to my office I’d wash my hands after touching it and eat my pretzel. So I proceeded to squeeze some mustard onto the side of the bag and carefully went upstairs, where I tore the bag apart to make a plate and mindlessly ate some pretzel as I worked on my computer. Half way through the pretzel I looked at my mustard and thought, ”what are those green things? Oh no, I hope there’s no dirt in the bag”….ugh! if only it was that good. I moved the ”green things” around and it turns out they were black worms or bugs or larva of some sort. with orange/yellow stripes, legs and antennas! I’m disgusted! I don’t know if it came from the mustard that’s probably been sitting on his cart since the winter, or if they originated from the paper bag and the mustard killed them. Please help me identify these things and let me know that I won’t get a parasite of some sort. I’ve attached pictures.
Signature: grossed out
Dear grossed out,
Your pretzel vendor is serving immature Cockroaches with his pretzels. We will be tagging your submission as one of the Worst Bug Stories Ever.