I had left a paper bag in my room with food stuck to the bottom. Ants find it, they create a trail. My mother sees, she is aghast and kills with fly-spray. She has killed but demands I clean up the trail of dead insects.
I look at the trail of dead insects and I contemplate. I Must eat, I think, to make their deaths sensible. I single out an ant. I press my finger to it gently, and it sticks. It is collapsed into itself, head curled into its body, legs point inwards. I perch it on the tip of my tongue and guide between my four front teeth. I bite in half and the taste is potent. Spicy and bitter actually. A lot flavour in something so small, is very surprising to me. I eat one more. And one other more. Delicious.
Hundreds of cultures eat ants. Animals eat animals without cooking. Lots of protein. It is healthy I assure myself. But then I remember the means of their death: poisoned. I have ingested fly spray. Enough to kill three ants at least, but I am a lot stronger than three ants, at least.
What if it was not the flavour ants I like, but instead the fly spray. My mother left the aerosole can with me. I am now thinking hard about how much I shouldn't eat the fly spray.
I encounter problems like this everyday.
