An early morning breakfast at a local homeless shelter turns into what some said was a nightmare for them after finding bugs in their breakfast on Sunday at the Salvation Army.

Some homeless people said they are upset after eating what looked like maggots in their cereal.

"The cereal had maggots and maggot eggs inside the cereal and roaches," shelter resident Renay Walker Wingfield said.

After noticing the little bugs, some people said many residents became upset.

“They ran straight to the trash can started throwing the food away and running up to the people in the kitchen and telling them they have roaches and maggots inside the food,” Wingfield said. “What I heard (is) that they knew there were roaches and maggots inside the food and they fed it to us anyway."

Salvation Army Development Director, Peggy Steele, said she wasn't too aware of the situation when walking into work Monday morning.

"We don't know a lot about it yet. I just know that there was a complaint and of course we would so much rather have them come to us and so we can try to resolve it ourselves but we have inspected it this morning and we have done everything we know to do.”

The Macon/Bibb County Health Department investigated the kitchen on Monday but Environmental Health County Manager, Donna Cadwell, said they didn’t find anything.

"We saw no evidence of maggots, we saw no evidence of roaches," Cadwell said
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However, she said not finding anything doesn’t mean it wasn’t there the day before

"If we're not there when it happens, we don't have the ability to know exactly what happened at that time and we do realize that,” Cadwell said. “We can only look at what we can see cause that's what's there."

However, for the people who eat and sleep at the shelter, they said this isn't the only time food has been bad.

"It's spoiled, it's old and I've heard people who work in the kitchen say that you know the food might be old but we have to cook it," visitor to the shelter Todd Rains said.

Steele said most people who work at the Salvation Army also eat from the kitchen, the health department does regular inspections and they try to have good food to feed people who come through the doors.