Eat a grasshopper

(I have no photo-evidence since I didn't know about RAS until fall 2006 and both of these incidents took place in years previous.  So I offer instead a detailed stories of the events).

Grasshoppers.

I was in Guatemala for 5 weeks studying spanish in november of 2005.  After a few days getting oriented in Guatemala City, I travelled to Antigua, the old spanish capital founded in 1543 (eventually abandoned due to volcanic activity that destroyed many of the old churches there), to begin my lessons.  Rather quickly I discovered an American bar on the other end of town called "Cafe No Sé", which had a second, tequila bar in the back.  The way to the tequila bar was marked by a sign on a door that said: "The way to perdition, is through the kitchen".  And so it was.  You walked through the kitchen, and into a tiny hallway that opened up to a cozy little bar with a creaky acoustic guitar on the wall and slightly too-short wooden stools everywhere.  The bar itself was backed by about 20 different kinds of tequila and mescals (including the potent scorpion tequila with actual scorpion in the bottle.. I eventually had some of that, but that's a story for another day). The rotating cast of bartenders kept a small keg of house mescal at the ready, shots of which were 5 Quetzals (about 75 cents USD).  The crowd there would come and go, so sometimes there was no one there, sometimes it was so packed you had to remove clothes to stay at a comfortable temperature.  Incidentally, there was a small library/bookstore right off the tequila bar, so if you got bored you could peruse various interesting books that people brought from other lands and deposited there.  

 My second time there a number of us travelling friends were back there getting silly on that ol' agave juice.  Dave, a brit who'd been working at one of the hostels, would pull the guitar down and launch into rather sweet renditions of "Wonder Wall", or Radiohead's "Lucky".  Usually the assembled drunkards would sing along too, it was fantastic.  The bartenders set out a bowl of sliced lemons, some salt, and a bowl of chili fried grasshoppers.  These suckers were fairly small, about an inch long at most, but quite obviously 'hoppers.  Figuring that I'd eaten ants in the past, and other people ate these things, I'd give them a go.  So I threw a few back.  They were alright, nothing to really write home about though.  The chili was a good idea, as the critters were a little woody-tasting and dry, and almost like eating edible splinters that didn't actually pierce your cheeks.  You could take a pinch of 6 or more easily and throw them back, washing them down with your shot of house mescal (which was rather tasty, having picked up more flavor sitting in the li'l keg there). 

 The 'hoppers became a regular part of my tequila drinking evenings there, as they were a nice bit of substance that helped soak up the alcohol in me belly when I forgot to eat dinner.  

Ants.  

 I was living in a student housing co-operative in my college days in Michigan.  We all had house jobs, and that semester I was the granola-maker.  (It wasn't an explicitely hippie co-op, but it was vegetarian.)  One day I came down to make the granola -- a rather simple process if you've never done it -- planning on using the honey as the sweetener for the oats and some other things. 

  But lo...  the huge gallon bottle of honey had been discovered by the resident ants!  They were drowned by the dozens, trapped like flies in amber, a swimming pool of death.  The trail back to the ant-nest was already cold.  Probably the others smelled the chemical stench of death and accepted their losses, not wanting to sacrifice more for their meal.  But I was in a bind:   What to do?  We didn't have any other sweetener around (usually apple or grape juice concentrate), and I didn't have time to get any.  Furthermore, honey is expensive, I just didn't feel right throwing away a full half-gallon of honey.  So I went ahead with it anyway and used the ant-laden honey.  I think I included almonds and some other things in the batch too, but I forget now of course.  Since different people in the house had different allergies it was necessary that I label the granola with all the contents, so I included the ants on the list along with everything else.  Then I had a bowl.  Not bad, actually.  Not bad.  

  The house erupted in a firestorm.  Several people thought I had been joking by listing 'ants' on that batch and were stunned, feeling that they'd been "tricked" into eating bugs. (I did make a second batch with no ants, however, for the truly squeamish.)  The debate raged for two or three days as people argued during each meal that eating ants was an affront to vegetarian ethics, or that they they were actually 'meat' since they were sort of animal, or that eating insects was an ok vegetarian food and a viable food source, since they make up so much of the earth's biomass (ants in particular).   In the end, all the ant-granola got eaten and the debates ended with no real consensus (I certainly ate my share, it was tasty!)  The little ants contributed a slight lemony flavor to the batch, and I never made ant-granola again.

The End