I remember the termites in the frying pan. I was standing on a chair and watching an old man (my grandfather?) cook the insects. I was boy-excited by the sweet smell of fat that rose from the pan and filled the kitchen. I can also recall the rain beating on the kitchen window. The rainy season began that day. There was some grumbling in the clouds that approached the southern African city of Kwekwe (then called Que Que) in the afternoon. You smelled the rain before it started falling, and when it fell, it was loud and heavy and warm.
Right after the November sun set on the small city, a bunch of food appeared in the night air. It was a frenzy of male and female termites with transparent wings that flickered under the electric lights around the house and on the street. The termites were looking for mates. During their search, some were caught in nets and were now being cooked in the kitchen. Others were picked and eaten from the folds of shirts or dresses they had dumbly flown into. Others were killed by the windshields of cars, which collected their whitish gore in the rising and falling windshield wipers.
A few months after watching and eating those delicious and certainly nutritious termites (100 grams of termites contains 36.7 grams of protein, 34.3 grams of fat, and 23.2 grams of carbohydrates, according to the Nigerian scientists O. T. Adepoju and O. A. Omotayo), I moved to the United States. I was 5 years old. I went to my first McDonald’s. I stopped talking Shona and rapidly learned English. None of the white and black American kids in my Nashville kindergarten class knew I ate insects. The very idea would have made them barf.
