By a contributor who almost said no, but asked for seconds instead!
I’ll be honest, too. I held back when Mama Achieng opened that woven basket and declared, “This is our beef.” Now, I wasn’t being rude. I had eaten ugali and smoked tilapia like a member of the family for the past three days, but what was inside that basket was a far cry from food.
A dark crumbly patty. A slight sheen on it. A nutty aroma – dried grass and beeswax.
“Mou-Steak,” she said with a smile. “Mosquito steak. From the swarm on the water at dusk.”
What happened was, around the edges of Lake Victoria, particularly western Kenya and Uganda, when there was a shortage of fish, a shortage of beans, basically a shortage of anything, what people did was: they fought off the mosquitoes, but they also ate them.
Here's the way it works: as the sun sets, enormous swarms of non-biting midges (often confused with mosquitoes, but actually chironomids, colloquially referred to as “mou” or “flies of the lake”) erupt in big, spinning clouds above the shallow water. Women and children splash out into the water with broad, mesh nets. Old mosquito nets, actually, repurposed. They swoop them through the air like ghost-catchers. One pass can net thousands.
The catch is then washed, dried in the sun on a mat for a day, and ground to a coarse flour. It is then mixed with a little water, salt, and perhaps cassava paste, which is then shaped and pan-fried.
Taste: earthy. Dense. A bit like lentil loaf mixed with toasted sesame seeds. The consistency is maintained: not soft, not sloppy. And yes, you think about it. But then you remember that this is not novel cuisine. This is resistance on a plate.
“God provides millions of them every evening,” said one fisherman, Juma. “But why should we just stand by and watch as they blow away? We are thankful for the lake and take what they provide, and that is with respect,” Juma said.
Nobody eats it on a regular basis. It’s not a craze. This is not “entomological protein of the future.” This is “what there is.” And when someone’s got five kids, and their fish nets come up empty, “what there is” is holy.
I ate two. And I've always dreamed about that second one.
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