The One Thing To Eat Now If You Hate Mosquitoes And Midges

I don’t like to take absolute stances on much, but I’ll stand firm on this forever: September is, almost objectively, the best month.

There are the garden bounties. There’s the beautiful light. There’s the blackberries. But it just so happens that, this year, there could be a load of midges and mosquitoes too.

An unusually warm late summer might lead to a boom in their populations, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Professor James Logan told ITV recently. This is especially true in Scotland, where the critters are more commonplace to begin with.

And, per the Chronicle Live, the same rule could apply to mosquitoes. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to repel the bugs ― and one of them involves a common pumpkin spice latte ingredient. Well, why not fight one seasonal force with another.

We’ve written before about how midges and mosquitoes prefer dark, humid spots to hide out, so wearing a light-coloured T-shirt could help to repel them further.

And both of the creatures hate garlic, alongside a variety of other plants.

Professor Logan told ITV that other anti-mosquito methods include covering up, avoiding early mornings and late nights, staying in motion around the bugs, wearing repellant, and lighting citronella candles.

But another hack could be a little tastier (and nicer-smelling): the bugs hate cinnamon.

I know what you’re thinking: a harmless spice? But yep: there are whole studies written about how effective the sweet-smelling substance is at banishing pests.

“Cinnamon acts on pests mainly as a repellent, although in higher doses it has a biocidal effect and prevents egg-laying,” the study found.

This was done with cinnamon essential oil, which is more concentrated than the regular-degular powder you might spot on your coffee. Nonetheless, “Four compounds — cinnamaldehyde, cinnamyl acetate, eugenol and anethole — exhibited the strongest activity against A.aegypti [a species of mosquito] in 24 hours of testing,” Peter Shang-Tzen Chang, a professor in the School of Forestry and Resource Conservation at National Taiwan University, wrote when speaking about another study on the topic.

So, the cinamon-ier, the batter, basically, And while cinnamon essential oils and candles might do you a little better than your fave autumnal coffee order, I reckon I’ll be ordering mine with extra gusto now.