Tips and/or a sense of perspective on plum maggots please?

Hi all,

My mum and I recently found some lovely yellow wild plums, and my mum made them into lovely jam. No dramas.

A week later I found loads of wild plums, all colours and sizes, and set about washing and soaking them. HORROR. Some of the damson like ones split open slightly, and big maggot creatures were in there. On closer inspection, I could see the holes they got in by, and see them spitting out maggot poo overnight. Grim.

I broke open a few of the small plums and found nothing, so threw them in some brandy and the freezer. I cut open every single damson-like one, and even ones with no holes or no marks on the outside, even some of those had maggots in them. I threw everything maggoty away, but now I'm majorly paranoid about maggots in plum type things. What if my freezer, and brandy, is full of maggots I didn't spot??

Fast forward to yesterday, I went and picked about 4.5kg of wild sloes. These won't have maggots in, I thought. Left them to soak. A few floated. I wondered why, split them open... maggots. I tried a sloe that sunk, but still seemed to be more buoyant than the others. Maggot. I tried a non-floating sloe - no maggot. Another non-floating sloe. Maggot. ARGH.

I assume they're plum moth maggots, but it doesn't really matter as this isn't about preventing them, as the fruit is wild. It's about what on earth you do when you have a sink full of wild fruit, and seemingly no way to know what is and isn't full of maggots?

Does anyone have any clever diagnostic tests, besides cutting open every single fruit? Not all of them float, not all of them have obvious holes.

Or failing that, can anyone lend me a sense of perspective that eating maggots and maggot-poo probably doesn't really matter? Sure, I'm a vegetarian, but I don't really have a moral standpoint on not eating maggots. It just creeps me out. And maggot poo. What even IS maggot poo??

I'll spare you the photos. Any advice very very welcome as I've got a sink full of sloes and I'm losing my mind.

Thanks in advance,
waiting for the weather