A minor cabbage horror.

So, at the last farmer's market of the year, I bought a head of cabbage for cheap, and I threw it on the top rack of my refrigerator to pull out and chop up and make sauerkraut, whenever the next time arrived that I needed to make sauerkraut.

And, it sat there for like 2-3 weeks, a bit dirty, and with the very outer leaves starting to turn a rotting dark yellow-green.

Then, when the day finally came when I needed to make more sauerkraut, I pulled out the head of cabbage and set it on a plate so that it would get to room temperature, by the time that it came to washing and chopping up the head, for the making of the sauerkraut.

And then, later that day when I had gotten out the chopping board and went to go grab the head, I noticed an inordinate amount of dirt on the counter and up by the cabbage-stem, and I look, and it's like small pieces of dirt, but they're all kind of the same size, like specks of push-open thick plastic coin-wallets, fat in the middle, but tapering to a point on each end.

I didn't even look too closely since it disgusted me so much, but somehow I knew that they were all small insects that must have been inside the cabbage, and then when I went and put it in the fridge, they began to freeze to death, and so emerged from inside the leaves and huddled on the stem for warmth, where nevertheless they ultimately perished.

I wiped the counter right away, and I took the plate and dumped the "dirt" in the sink and washed the plate, and then I cut off the stem and removed the outer leaves as best I could, throwing them in the little plastic bag that I keep in my sink for vegetable waste.

Only, when I cut the head in half and began peeling away the good leaves, occasionally I'd see one of those specks inside, usually a few inches up from the bottom.

So, I got out my spaghetti drainer and set it in the sink along with the two halves of the cabbage head, and then I took one half and peeled away the leaves one at a time and washed them each under running water carefully, before putting them on my cutting board, and I kept doing that until I got down far enough to where the leaves grew so densely together that there was no risk at all of a bug worming its way inside and still being there.

And, I did that for the entire cabbage, to wash off all the insects but still salvage the cabbage for use.

Like, even though it was weird and freaky and disgusting, I mean, it's not like I was going to throw that away.

Afterwards, too, I began to think of all the fruit and vegetables that I eat each day, and I began to think about all the insects that have walked across each bit of every single one, and it was like this overwhelming feeling of personal contamination, to the point where I got mildly sick and had to stop thinking in that direction about it at all.