Insects. They are what we’re told we’ll all soon be eating if we care about the planet. For Wendy Vesela-Ntimbani, born in Limpopo, the mopani worm has been a culinary favourite since she was a kid. Now she is sharing them with the world. A cash cow disguised as a caterpillar? Squeamish about what you eat? “Get over it!” That command came my way as I was about to bite into a mopani worm for the first time. It was Travel Indaba 2011 in Durban. The Limpopo stand, where a chef had cooked up a mopani stew. I was pondering whether to start by biting off the head or the tail. My face had apparently spontaneously squished into an expression of mild revulsion. The guest house owner, to whom I had confessed that I had never tried a mopani worm, was not going to have me worm my way out of this “opportunity”. “Don’t scrutinise and analyse. Just eat it,” she barked. Then added: “They’re nutritious. They have protein and the skin gives you roughage.” Suitably reprimanded and a little ashamed even though her clinical description did nothing to whet my appetite, I took a deep breath. Then a bite. Into what could best be described as kind of like a well-cooked but not crispy prawn. Inside it was juicy with what looks like black blood and entrails and my stomach threatened to topsy-turn. Until the chef told me what I was experiencing, which had a gently smoky flavour, was tomato, onion and spinach. The worms had been gutted, boiled, salted, and sun-dried long before they had been kind-of reconstituted in the stew. Fast-forward to Travel Indaba 2022, which was on in Durban last week. “Will you have a worm?” my friend, Kathy, visiting Durban from California, asks. We’re at the Indaba opening night welcoming party, drinking our R55 a “glass”, small and plastic, of red wine. Kathy had come across the Limpopo stand and told me about this woman doing all kinds of interesting things with mopani worms. Kathy, no surprise, hadn’t heard of mopani worms before this encounter during her wanderings around the Indaba halls and stands. She has a couple of tiny three-worm sample packs. “Sure,” I say. Probably because they are the colour of biltong and are kind of chewy like biltong and salty-tasty like biltong, it strikes me that this is a really good bar snack. Very tasty. Very good to ...