TRUE STORY
Back in the 60s when I was in 7th grade, my mother brought home some chocolate covered ants shaped like Hershey’s Kisses from a local gourmet store. I ate them just to enjoy the chocolate; didn’t really taste the ants, though they added a bit of a crunch. I figured since it didn’t kill me, I could eat ants from the playground sidewalks at school to gross-out my friends. Over a few days of this, it exploded into a sideshow of lunchtime gawkers. Then I realized if I charged each person a quarter, I could buy all the Captain Crunch Ice Cream Bars I wanted from the school cafeteria. So it endured for a while, and a school legend was born. Years later, at my North Carolina high school graduation awards day, as I walked down the auditorium aisle to pick up my award for “Most Likely to be Committed,” I heard someone in the audience say “Ewww, that’s that dude who eat flies.” The ebonical commentator had mixed my legacy of 7th grade ant eating with my 6th grade hobby of slamming flies in my notebook, arranging them neatly into rows, and labeling the flies with my classmates names, much like a yearbook. (That one was so popular it became a status symbol to be in my fly “yearbook.”)

But I digress. Here’s an interesting and hilarious video of raw food guru David Wolfe talking seriously about eating ants to get vitamin B12. His earnest demeanor makes me laugh, though he’s likely correct. I’m considering getting back to my old gig, but now I have a moral dilemma: is it morally reprehensible to eat conscious beings, small and segmented that they are? Science has proven plants are also sentient and able to read the minds of humans (see The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird), so really I have no moral high ground. Thought I was a vegan but now I may become a vegetarian alkalarian insectivore. Guess I’ll have to re-read what Gandhi said about it all.

Enjoy!

— Ken Rohla