Kill Fruit Flies at the Source

Every summer, they come back. We don’t necessarily have an infestation, but there always seems to be about two or three little buggers that magically appear out of thin air whenever I sit down to eat. After days of waving them away from my food, what started as a minor nuisance is now gettin’ on my last nerve. No one wants bugs skulking around their food, no matter how small or harmless they seem. Oh look, one just zoomed past my laptop screen as I’m typing. Aaaand there goes his little friend.

Google referred me to several methods, most of which required a disgusting clean-up after drowning the fruit flies in jars of vinegar or rotten fruit. Those methods may get rid of the already existing ones, but there’s really no point in doing them if you’re not cutting them off at the source (they tend to breed inside drains). They’ll just come back. Also, the mere thought of trying to dispose of a concoction with dead bugs floating in it made me gag, so I tracked down an alternative route where I won’t have to deal with the aftermath as well as prevent recurrences.

You will need: 1/2 cup white vinegar and 1/2 cup boiling water. That’s it.

Step one: Boil some water and pour into a measuring cup. It doesn’t have to be exactly 1/2 cup, you just need a 50:50 ratio of water and vinegar.

Step two: Pour in the vinegar, keeping the mixture at a 50:50 ratio.

Ready to roll.

Step 3: Pour in the mixture slowly and evenly all over the inside of the drain.

Side note: Kitchen sinks in Korea usually do not have a garbage disposal inside. You instead have a little metal basket-type container with holes that you stick into the drain opening. It catches all the food scraps which you later throw out separately. The basket is covered by a rubber top like pictured above, and you can also buy a separate rubber lid that covers up the drain completely. However, I don’t like using those lids because I feel like it seals in all the moisture inside the drain, not giving it a chance to air-dry and possibly breeding more bacteria inside. That could just be me being paranoid, who knows.

So now that I’ve poured in the elixir of death, I’ll wait a day or two for the already existing fruit flies to die naturally. My goodness, what a morbid post this was.