Shopper Buys a Bag Of Broccoli For His Meal — Ends up Raising The 7 Caterpillars He Found Inside

While looking for a silver lining in every situation can be a challenge for many, to a few people the skill comes naturally. Sam Darlaston, a British TV and radio presenter, looked on the brighter side and managed to get the best out of a rather compromising situation. One night, planning to fix up some dinner for himself, he fetched a bag of broccoli he bought from Tesco. But his well-meaning effort was interrupted after he discovered a small green caterpillar curled up on one of the florets. Soon enough, Darlaston and his housemate collected a total of seven of these bugs from other broccoli bags, per Business Insider. 

Unlike others, the radio presenter did not yell or flick them out of the window. Instead, he kept the seven critters as pets, waiting for them to grow into beautiful butterflies. "I buy broccoli all the time, it's my absolute favorite vegetable. It's something that I've bought a lot, and this was the first time I've ever personally seen one,” he told Insider in 2020. Providing a shelter for his buggy pals in a Tupperware box with air holes punched in, Darlaston, a Londoner, made a virtual diary of the journey on social media. Speaking of his reaction, Darlaston recalled that he suspected the broccoli had gone bad when he felt something squishy inside the bag. He was taken aback when he discovered the caterpillar and thought, “What am I gonna do about this?"

The TV presenter’s sense of empathy took over as he considered the little caterpillar’s survival skills. He even Googled some information and realized that a caterpillar only eats the food it is found munching on. Without many options, Darlaston made the big decision to raise the caterpillar in his home. Interestingly, the bag of broccoli from the UK supermarket chain had blessed him with a new family member. To increase his knowledge, he also read a few wikiHow articles and ensured that the caterpillar was not an invasive species, since the broccoli bag was from Spain.

"My housemates were really on board and we named him Cedric. We were kind of excited and weirded out, all at the same time,” he said. In a series of X posts on his handle @samd_official, he documented the metamorphosis of his pet caterpillar into a butterfly which attracted thousands of views on the internet. “Hey @Tesco I was about to cook my favorite vegetable of all time (broccoli) and after unwrapping it, to my surprise, found caterpillars inside! They’re really nice and we’ve ended up keeping one as a pet and naming him but just as a heads up, some of your broc has c-pillars,” the presenter wrote in one of his initial posts in June 2020.

While he had planned to keep only one, he somehow ended up with seven of them, thanks to a few more broccoli bags from Tesco. Darlaston went out and purchased another broccoli bag with Tesco’s refund for the first bag. But fate had other plans for him. One after the other, he and his housemate took in more caterpillars, and before they knew it, Darlaston was raising a farm of caterpillars. "I thought, you know what, I've already got a house prepared,” he noted. 

The new members joining Cedric were Broc, Olly, Croc, Janine, Carlos, and Slim Eric. He documented everything, from love triangles to escape artists, and became obsessed with the creatures. Eventually, the bugs started cocooning and within a month six of them were in the chrysalis stage, characterized by the hard outer shell for protection. He enlightened the internet with his first pet butterfly, Cedric. Before he knew it, Darlaston was letting go of Slim Eric out in the wild, his last butterfly pet. "You see these butterflies are now free, even though we're still locked in," Darlaston marked. 

Follow @samd_official on X for more updates on the caterpillars.