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Acid Ant Eggs Dressed with Sauce

In the Dai nationality villages of Menglian County, you can enjoy a dish called "Acid Ant Eggs Dressed with Sauce," which contains huge amounts of protein and tastes pleasantly sour, spicy, and refreshing, in summer. The acid ant, the main material of that dish, is a long yellow ant in tropical forests. The imago of this ant has a fairly strong acid taste and usually builds in bamboo and tree groves a round nest several times the size of a pumpkin. In later spring and early summer, there are a huge number of ant eggs, which are as big as a soybean and as white as a pearl, in any such nest. Deemed one of the smallest, sweetest eggs in the world, the acid ant egg contains a lot of protein, and is often used by the Dai people in Menglian County to feed their relatives and friends when they pay a visit. The dish makes it impossible for the eater to abstain from recollecting its pleasant flavor.