Tourists visiting Kumarakapay, a remote village in Venezuela’s Gran Sabana region, a vast grassland area within a national park, are in for a spicy treat. Villagers there make a unique hot sauce called kumache. As the National Geographic video shows, making the sauce is a lengthy process, starting with a base of boiled-down yucca, various hot peppers, and a sprinkling of large red ants and termites.

Restaurant owner Kendall Donals, who sells his sauce to tourists along with roasted chicken, forages the insects, breaking up the tiny hills they build on the plain and exposing them with a flat shovel. The process of gathering the ants and termites is rooted in his ancestors’ survival, Donals says. “Because as you can imagine, in the Gran Sabana, it’s almost impossible to even find fruit.”

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