Jungle stories

“Are these flying ants?” I asked, looking at the photo of two waspy looking insects crawling on an Ecuadorian tabletop. The ants had been placed beside a teaspoon and the body of each was easily as large as the spoon head.

“They sure are”, Norma replied cheerfully. Norma Hedlund was a missionary and had spent over 30 years in this isolated Amazon village of Makuma. She could skin and gut a cow, make mayonnaise, and cook ants. She popped out of her chair and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll fry some up for you, you’re going to love them. It’ll be fun.”

In about 5 minutes flat a bright yellow plate appeared with large winged ants a nice crispy brown.

“You just have to pull off their wings and legs, and then the head”, she instructed as she followed suit and quickly consumed three to four making a nice little pile of body parts on the table. “They’re nice and buttery, she said, “we just love them.” The buttery morsels made delectable crunching sounds as if she was eating corn chips.

I had just managed to pull the appropriate body parts off a large queen and was finding it difficult to imagine the delicacies inside.

“Do the insides squirt out when you eat it?” I asked.

“No, not really. It’s just kind of crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.”

I looked at my decapitated ant. It had a soft furry body and segments along its carapace. There was a bit of white goo peeking through the hole that used to hold it’s head. I held the segmented body up and poised to enter my digestive system. Norma retrieved more frozen ants from the freezer. She was looking for the big ones. Apparently the queens had more flavor then the males because of all the eggs they carried. Now she was consuming them like popcorn. “These are better, she said, they’re more fresh.”

I decided to eat mine quickly before she started giving me frozen ones. I tossed the bug into my mouth and crunched down before I could feel the furry bits. I could taste a nutty flavor not unlike a toasted pecan. The outside crunched and the soft inside blended with the exoskeleton.

“Not bad”, I said.

Norma was now holding freezer bags of fat white grubs a good two inches long “These are good too, do you want to try some of these?” I thanked her profusely but thought we should probably save those for another day.

Like the day after I left, I thought.