Caterpillar or Termite?

I've eaten a few strange things lately so I thought I should provide an update on my recent swallowings.

Awhile ago I had fried termites - known as inswa. This was actually pretty tasty. The primary taste is oil and salt with a little crunch. These I had absolutely no problem eating and actually quite enjoyed myself in the process.

More recently I had caterpillars. These are bought dried, then soaked and fried. They were really chewy and almost reminded me a little of black licorice. I didn't particularly enjoy them although they weren't horrible either. I was a little disappointed though, when after finishing my first helping of caterpillar, my host dad gave me a second helping.

One not particularly Zambian delicacy that I have eaten a lot of lately is soy chunks. I guess this isn't exactly a weird food as such but it is something new to my diet. At work the staff is provided lunch and often it is nshima with soy chunks. These chunks look kind of fleshy to the point where the first time I ate them I thought for awhile that it might be chicken and then thought it might be mushroom. Once again, salt is the primary flavour and they actually taste alright. They had better be healthy too, and are presumably quite cheap considering they are being used for large scale staff feeding. It was certainly a step up from the dried fish we had the first week.

Now compare my list of weird eating items with the responses given to my be the kids in my Bible/games club when I asked them if they had ever eaten any weird foods. Almost all of them said that the weirdest food that they had ever eaten was pig. Pig?! They also almost all declared that pig was their least favourite food. I guess this shows the contrast - for me pork products are completely normal and caterpillar is quite bizarre whereas for them it was the opposite.