Woman Warns People After Noticing Something Odd Inside Quaker Oats Packet: 'I Almost Ate...'

Stripped from the tufts of wild oat grasses, the tan-colored flakes of oats are flat-bodied batteries of protein and fiber. But once they reach the market, they are squeezed inside packets, which are then dispatched and made to sit in the aisles of grocery supermarkets. Humans, most of whom are freakishly insane about their health, often stop by these aisles to pick up a packet or two for their smoothies, pancakes, or cookie dough, or perhaps use them to catalyze weight loss, as noticed in the TikTok's "oatzempic" trend. People pull out their bowls and pans and plates to chow down on these oats and manipulate them to extract ample fuel for their day’s tasks. This is what a woman named Bri (@briannafaiths) was doing when she realized a horrifying truth.

When Brianna tore the seal of a Quaker Oats packet, her plate got filled with some extra protein. Not the good original protein, but the one that crawled, like tiny little bugs. The maddening discovery prompted her to share it with others so they could be more cautious while eating these oats. Brianna’s video is an anecdote that teaches us that in the trenches of food safety, vigilance is the only cure.

“Count your day Quaker Oats,” Brianna wrote in the overlay caption of the video, which has garnered over 1 million views. The 16-second video opens with her tearing a strip of the Quaker Oats packet. She then spills the contents from the opened packet onto a white paper plate. At first glance, the footage shows only the groat of tawny yellow flakes spilling into the plate, forming a tiny assemblage. But as the camera zooms into the plate, viewers can see a bevy of tiny black dots scattered on the white of the plate. Soon enough, the dots seemed to be moving and crawling around the mound of the oat flakes.

In a comment, Brianna attributed the discovery of these tiny mites in the packet to her “X-ray vision.” “A different packet had them as well,” she shared. Hundreds of people who watched her video swarmed into the comments section to express horror and share experiences, some similar, some contradictory. “Don’t make me hate oatmeal again, I just started to like it again,” wrote @jus1emi. @kyshaunmckinley cooked up a horror story, “Now imagine you put that in a bowl [and] milk and did not look!” Many people joked that these little mites were simply “extra protein.” @jax said, “The same thing happened to me. And I didn’t realize it until I ate almost half of the bowl.” Many people who were eating or about to eat their oatmeal felt that Brianna’s video had unlocked a new fear in them.

In general, these tiny mites are called “weevils,” according to HexaFood. These bugs lay their eggs inside the grains, feeding themselves until the larvae hatch. They continue to live inside the grains, pupating and metamorphosing, eventually eating up the entire nutrition of the grain from the inside and growing into adult weevils. Even though these weevils don’t pose any threat in case the oats are accidentally eaten, still finding their feces, dead skin, and dead bodies floating in a bowl of mushy oatmeal wouldn’t seem like a pleasant experience.

You can follow Bri (@briannafaiths) on TikTok to watch more videos from her channel.