the blog of Mar. 10, 2006 (1)

death by peanut butter

One morning this week I decided to pack a banana in my lunch. No sooner had I grabbed one of the organic bananas I'd purchased at Safeway a few days earlier than I noticed that a very flat bug had been hiding between bananas. It looked like a cockroach but it was whitish-yellow and therefore unlike any insect I'd ever seen.

It was a bit too exotic to overlook so even as the kettle boiled I scrambled for some kind of container. The only one available was an unwashed peanut butter jar in the sink. I had no intention of killing the thing but death by wet peanut butter was its fate.

I was going to take it to the cooperative extension at the Ag Department, but Lisa assured me that the nurse at Del Rey elementary school was an accomplished amateur entomologist. A few days later she identified it as a Cuban cockroach, which makes sense since the bananas were from Ecuador and had no doubt spent time bouncing around the tropics.