Eating Ants

I may have eaten a couple of ants today.  There’s really no way of knowing for sure. 

Ants seem to have a presence in every room in every building on this island.  They’re the tiny little sugar ants that form thin lines in your kitchen sometimes, when you spill juice and forget to clean it up.  Here in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, they march along the walls of the bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and anywhere else you can imagine.  You see them outside too, along the edge of the patio or pool, filing one after the other in perfect formation, on a mission to bring crumbs, dead bees or flies back to a crack in the concrete, where their queen is surely waiting. 

Today a few unfortunate little soldiers got stuck in the peanut butter and died there.  I discovered their bodies when I went to make a sandwich.  I tried to scoop out as many of them as I could before spreading the peanut butter on my bread, but there’s really no way to be sure I got them all. 

If I did indeed eat some ants, it wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve eaten on this trip.  Two days ago, in Port-au-Prince, we stopped at a fast food place that serves white people food like hamburgers and French fries.  Frankly, I enjoy eating the local cuisine when I travel.  And a lot of times, a foreign attempt on an American classic like the hamburger misses the mark. 

I chose my order carefully.  I figured the quality of Haitian beef couldn’t be all that great, so I ordered the dish I thought would be the most difficult to foul up: chicken nuggets.  Boy was I surprised.  But maybe I shouldn’t have been.  One of our hosts had previously informed us that because North Americans eat so much more white meat than dark meat, countries like Haiti take a lot of the leg and thigh leftovers.  But it wasn’t the dark meat that killed my appetite.  It was the fact that they were so processed and pressed into spongy little patties and then deep fried in oil that looked like it hadn’t been changed in a week or more.  The fries didn’t help either.  They could’ve been good, if they’d had about half as much salt.  

All this is not to say I haven’t eaten well here on Hispaniola.  In fact, the home cooking of our hosts has been delicious.  And I’m incredibly thankful for that, especially considering what millions of people here eat.  Or don’t eat, for that matter.  We’re lucky to have plenty of peanut butter and chicken and other varieties of foods, whether they include ants or not.