What you see: Little tiny bugs in your kale.
What it is: Aphids!
Eat or toss: Eat. Just rinse the kale and eat as normal.
A bunch of kale, fresh from the fridge, with bugs on it?!?
Even if you aren’t a gardener, you may occasionally have to deal with bugs hanging out on some of your fresh produce. Like these aphids, who apparently set up shop in my kale. While it’s not fun to find six-legged critters crashing in your veggie drawer, this doesn’t mean the kale isn’t still good for eating. Just make sure the kale otherwise looks good, trim off any damaged areas and prep as usual (and maybe cook if you’re worried; in my research I didn’t find anything linking aphids to the spread any human pathogens, but cooking will kill any pathogens that might be present, regardless of how they got there).
Peach aphids, plant lice and kale
Aphids are tiny and annoying, and, I’d argue, really earned their nickname: “plant lice.” Brian A. Nault, professor and program leader in the entomology department at Cornell University, said the ones in these images look like peach aphids, which feed on, yes, peaches, but also brassica vegetables like kale.
Aphids suck sap from plants, like kale leaves, and eventually their feeding can cause yellowing. Still, you need an huge number of them to do obvious damage.
“The plants would need to be heavily infested,” Nault, wrote to me in an email. “In other words, you would notice them very easily and many would fall off the leaf onto kitchen counters as well.”
Aphids can survive in the fridge
But if your kale is, say, only lightly infested, like the kale in these images (aka my kale), you might not see the aphids if you aren’t looking for them. I mistook them for bits of plant debris as I rinsed this kale. I actually didn’t see many of the aphids in these images until I looked at my photos later—these photos are zoomed in and it was only under that magnification that I noticed some of the little bugs in the folds of the kale.
Aphids can survive chilly temperatures, so they’ll keep doing their thing in the fridge. Nault explained that they’ll move more slowly in the fridge and would be unlikely to reproduce, but they could survive for at least a week. Speaking of aphid reproduction, here’s a fascinating set of aphid facts, courtesy of Nault: aphids are parthenogenic, meaning they do not need to mate to produce viable offspring. They also give live birth.
A green aphid near the central stem of a kale leaf.
Can you spot the mummy?
While we’re on the topic of insect reproduction, set your breakfast aside for one more, erm, haunting detail. While aphids don’t lay eggs, parasitic wasps do. In fact, some parasitic wasps lay their eggs inside aphids! When the larvae emerge, they eat the aphid from the inside, changing the aphid into a hardened shell, aka, a mummy. The larvae then pupates inside the aphid and emerges as a wasp. I found such a mummy among the aphids on this bunch of kale. I worried that a wasp could have been buzzing around in my fridge, but Nault assured me that it probably was long gone before the kale arrived in my home; the wasp would have been unlikely to emerge amid the chill of my fridge. Anyway, wow!
SOURCES:
- Brian A. Nault, PhD. Professor & Program Leader. Department of Entomology. Cornell AgriTech. College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Cornell University. Email correspondence.
- How to Control Aphids in Vegetable Crops. Charlotte Glen (last updated by Melissa Massing). North Carolina State University Cooperative Extension.
- Insects as transport devices of plant viruses 27.5.1.1 Aphids (Homoptera: Aphididae). Chapter by Muhammad Sarwar. Included in book: Applied Plant Virology: Advances, Detection, and Antiviral Strategies, 2020, Academic Press. Edited by L.P. Awasthi, Dean School of Agriculture, RNB Global University, Bikaner, Rajasthan, India
