OK, so, when I was younger, my dad would go to big aerospace conventions and take my mom along, and it was a nice vacation for them, away from us kids. They'd leave us with our grandparents, who did stupid sht like the eyedrop fiasco, but more often just did weird crap, like replacing all our grape jelly with strawberry jam and then wondering why we didn't want to eat the PB&Js they made.
I lived on the CT coast growing up, and for a couple of years, we had problems with meal worms and meal moths. Just like the earwigs now, there wasn't much to be done about them without extensive extermination, so we learned to check our food before we ate and generally keep an eye out so we could kill things.
So one summer my parents went away, and the g-rents came, and there was a moth outbreak. After finding a worm in the cereal, my grandma threw out all the cereal we had, bought new, and then put mothballs in the cabinet. (I don't know why buying Tupperwares never occurred to us; it might have been before they were readily available in the grocery store.)
Of course, then all the cereal tasted like mothballs. It was disgusting. Mom and Dad came home soon after, and were asking why we refused to eat the cereal. "Because it tastes like mothballs."
"Oh, come on, it can't be that bad," said my Dad, which is his standard reply for anything we kids report. ("The station wagon's transmission won't change gears"="It can't be that bad!" "It's raining brimstone and Satan has proclaimed no one gets out alive!" = "It can't be that bad!")
So Dad tries the cereal. And just like the burned soup and barbecued spaghetti incidents before this, looks at us with that single bite floating around in his mouth, frowning, and says, "Oh, OK. You're totally right. It is that bad."
Had to throw out ANOTHER round of cereal and buy new, not to mention then keep it on the counter for two or three weeks while we aired out the mothball cabinets.
And no, it didn't keep the moths or the worms out of the cereal.