The rain can suck and make the city muddy and dreadful, so what a consolation that in November it also comes with grasshoppers! Just stand on any busy street and look left, look right and you will see grasshoppers. I have been eating them for years and I still cannot describe the taste…I won’t even try.
As a child we used to eat them with no additives but these days the vendors add onions and green pepper and chilli…and they have gotten better.
Like ground nuts and other small ready to eat things on the streets, the buyer is allowed a taste, jaribu, to assess the quality of the merchandise before the purchase. It also gives you an out before committing to fake stuff. This is a good thing because grasshoppers have become sooo expensive.
This is a pack of 1000shs. See how hilariously small it looks in an adult hand?
I wish this was the amount of jaribu you’d get but its not. It’s more like 2 or 3 grasshoppers.
Anyway, you really don’t need the Jaribu because unless you are perennially unlucky, you will get tasty grasshoppers. It is really just an excuse to eat more. Also, you really do not need to eat so many grasshoppers anyway, if you do, they will make your stomach sick…but that might also be a myth like in the olden days when they said it was taboo for women to eat them.
The sights and sounds of other people eating grasshoppers consist of satisfied grunts and antennae sticking out of their mouths as they chew and node their heads. If this mild disturbance stands in the way of you enjoying your snack (it doesn’t for me), then take the grasshoppers home. There you can add all the onions you want and munch, away from prying eyes.
But I will warn you, as anyone who has ever made a rolex at home knows, it never tastes as good at home as it does off the street.
If you’re still a nsenene virgin, consider taking the leap, November is winding down.