How do maggots get into the fridge if food has been left there too long with the power off?

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Are the eggs already in the food? Are they sitting elsewhere in the fridge? Do they sneak in through some unsealed part of the fridge?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Leave fruit in a sealed container. Watch it rot into a nest of fruit flies.

The eggs are already on the food. Normally, it doesn’t matter, your digestive system destroys them and/or consumes them and/or excretes them, so it’s really not that big a deal.

But if you let them grow, that’s what happens. Everything you eat, no matter how sterile you think it is or what food standards it conforms to, has had an insect of some kind land on it at some point in its life, and if it laid eggs, those eggs wait for the ideal conditions before they hatch. Fortunately, those ideal conditions are normally long after a human would ever touch that food, when it rots.

Unless your food was produced in an entirely insect-free laboratory-sterile environment (something that we’ve found almost impossible to do on Earth… even the “simulate Mars” or “attempt to leave in a bubble” experiments are often contaminated by living insects getting in), it’s going to have something on it, whether that’s bacteria, mould, eggs, parasites, or whatever else.

And, to be honest, trying to grow food in such a perfectly sterile environment is not only incredibly expensive such that you’d never try to do it, but also not conducive at all to growing produce – those insects, bacteria and moulds are a vital part of the process.

It’s one of the biggest problems in space travel: You can say what you want about propulsion, building cities on other planets, powering them from the sun, etc. but the fact is that no human has survived even a day solely on food that has been grown in space (only by sending food to space from Earth). Because it’s almost impossible to grow sufficient quantities due to the expense, very difficult to make them grow well because of the sterility, and propagating food forever more needs enriched soils, nutrients and the same moulds, bacteria and insects.

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