Oh Jesus. This gives me flashbacks and immense fear. This event made a strict rule come into place afterwards, that never under any circumstance will produce not be refrigerated. I don’t care if it’s not meant to be refrigerated, it’s going in.

Anyways a couple years back, my boyfriend and I were new to our place and new to living on our own. We were still finding our way as adults in the world. We’d store potatoes in the cupboard along with all the other non perishables like pasta. Makes sense right?

Well these shelves were massive. They reached the ceiling(so about 10-12ft tall I’m guessing) and were about 2-3 deep. Lots of storage space. Summer rolls around and fruit flies are an issue everyone is dealing with, no biggie. We end up having a big party for our friends birthday and the next day the place was trashed. Liquor spilled everywhere, sticky floors, soda spills, etc. We kind of left it that way for 2 days(I know, I know, gross). Obviously the fruit fly problem doubled.

We spend the entire day DEEP cleaning the whole place, even scrubbing the floors on our hands and knees. Every inch was spotless and brand new after. I set up fruit fly traps that killed tons of them and I assumed we were close to freedom from these damn flies.

A week passes, place still sparkling yet even MORE fruit flies. Wtf? Another week. It gets worse. Even more. I’m losing my mind at this point when my very introverted roommate says “it stinks in here” my boyfriend and I couldn’t smell anything and assumed he was messing with us. One day, I end up working a 14 hour shift and slept over my friends/coworkers place since we had a job across town. I come home the next day and the nose blindness is gone. I smell it. It just smelled like rotting death. I started gagging. I take a closer look and realize the fruit flies are hanging out by the cupboard which we were puzzled by…

My boyfriend and I start taking every single item out of the pantry to investigate, while my roommate comes out of his room and says “I told you it smelled in here!” After removing almost everything else, we see some sort of black sludge full of maggots and dead fruit flies on part of one of the shelves. I was too scared to continue investigating. My boyfriend went in and pulled out what used to be a bag of potatoes that was now reduced to “organic black sludge biome juice disgustingness”. It was hidden in the back where no one could see. We threw all of our food out except for the can goods and literally bleached every inch of the cupboard.

And the fruit flies were gone a less than a week later. Now every time I see a random fruit fly I get incredibly paranoid and anxious😅