Red Ant Soup

I remember watching a documentary about Cambodia. People were being paid a few cents an hour to dig a trench by hand, with picks and shovels. Men and women dug side by side, covered with sweat and dirt. The trench was for a fiber optic cable. The woman the camera was following left the trench that night to cook dinner for her children on a campfire in the nearby woods where they were going to sleep. But first they had to find the food – red ant nests, which they boiled to make soup for dinner. And somehow that was enough, enough at least to sleep and get up and go back to the trench to make a little more money.

Making Red Ant Soup

Many years ago I visited a friend who was in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. The village where he lived was a tiny one. At night the stars were stupendous because there were no electric lights for a hundred miles around. Matt kept a bucket under the open tap in the tub because the water only flowed sometimes and you never knew when it would be. The underground water pipe leading to the building was broken, making a perpetual puddle in front of the building entrance. This is where people came, with buckets, to get their water, from the puddle on the ground. It had to be filtered and boiled before it could be used. Clearly this was enough for them, though, or wouldn’t someone have fixed the pipe?

There were little restaurants around the area, small buildings, with a few small tables. They all had hand-painted menus that covered whole walls – dishes made from chicken, goat, and beef with rice, bread and many other things. The first time we went to a restaurant, I made the mistake of reading the menu to see what to order. But when I asked for what I wanted, the man behind the counter laughed and shook his head. “Today we have chicken and rice.”  That was all. So I had chicken, cooked in tomato and garlic, with bits of tomato skin curled in the sauce, over rice. It was delicious. It was enough. I went there other times. Chicken and rice was all they ever had. I wondered if the menu on the wall was from a more prosperous time or if it was wishful thinking. Or maybe it was there just to tell customers how good the cook was because he could cook all those different dishes – could, if the ingredients happened to be available, which they never were. Other than in the capital, Dar es Salaam, in a hotel, every restaurant I went to in the country was like this -- long menus but only one dish on offer.

There were actually many remnants of a more prosperous time around Tanzania. We would be riding down long roads with fields of grass or sunflowers on both sides, and come upon an eighteen-wheeler or a large combine rusting in the field. They were from colonial times perhaps; when they had broken down, and no one from the west was there to fix them, they just sat and rusted. In Dar there were tall buildings, ten, twelve stories, with no glass left in the windows, and no functioning elevators. But people still lived there. The paved roads were worse than they would have been if they had been left as dirt because giant potholes had opened up, big enough to swallow a VW beetle, and no one had repaved. Yet now the Tanzanians were “free” from colonial rule, and the ones I met seemed happy enough. Perhaps it’s like Aesop’s fable about the dog and the wolf.

 

In the little village where Matt lived, in addition to the rundown apartments, were tiny huts that housed families. I often saw little boys outside the huts, thin wiry boys with very short hair. To a one they all wore pants, usually cut off somewhere around the knee, but with no seat. Where the back pockets should be, there was nothing but round, brown flesh. No one seemed to notice or care. The boys played or worked, wearing seatless pants. They seemed happy enough. They had enough to eat, though much of it was ugali, this thick corn paste that eliminated hunger because it clogged up the entire digestive tract for hours. I don’t think it had much nutritional value but it was good for holding a little bit of stewed vegetables, grown in a subsistence plot outside the hut. Perhaps some meat occasionally made it into the stew pot. I sometimes saw a skinny cow or goat in someone’s yard.

Livestrong.com says “The minimum survivable calories varies between individuals, with 600 to 1000 given as a standard range, according to the U.S. Army Survival Handbook. The less active an individual is, the fewer calories he can eat and still survive.”

I wonder if red ant soup meets these caloric guidelines. Certainly the glue Kenyan street children sniff instead of eating food does not. Meanwhile, back in Northern New York, my angst is over how much food we gather from our small garden every day and whether we will be able to eat it all. A refrigerator, full of leftovers, stresses me out because I don’t want to waste anything. Eating 1800 calories a day is being on a diet.

Remember when your parents would tell you to eat all your dinner because there were kids starving in India (Africa, or wherever)? I, and many other children, would say, “Send it to them.” Now that I have seen more of the world, I wonder how it is possible that I and this Cambodian woman and these Tanzanian children all live on the same planet. Now I truly wish I could send them the food. It's no longer just a smart aleck response to my parents.

(Making Red Ant Soup)