Like some 3,000 ethnic groups around the world, the Lao eat insects: more than 1,400 species are said to be eaten.In Laos, life still follows the rhythm of the world’s early mornings. Under the thatched roofs of Khoc Saat, salt is drawn from the earth as the ancestors did it; in the markets around Vientiane, everything that moves gets eaten; on the upper Mekong, between the capital and the Chinese border, people search for a sunken treasure in a river that is running dry. Three reports for Faut pas rêver, three ways of earning a living by the sweat of one’s brow, between legend and trade.
In Khoc Saat, the village gets up shortly after eight, with the heavens for an alarm clock. Water from an ancient sea, pumped up from 250 metres underground, is spread out in large basins; after three days, the sun has drunk it and the salt appears. Phèng, thirty-three, has taken over from her parents and her ancestors. Since a company dug the wells, it is the boss who allocates the basins according to the size of each family; she earns her living “with the sun”, and would like to pass hers on to her children. At ten o’clock, the shift changes: in the sheds, some forty women see the salt through to the sacks, and a foreman counts the year’s 5,000 tonnes. The only hazard is nature: when a storm threatens, they run to protect the salt pans. To keep producing despite the monsoon, the men have learned to replace the sun with fire. Under the thatch, in nearly 45 degrees, the water boils in vats eaten away by the years. A Christian worker prays there every day for more salt and more buyers. People sometimes fall into the vats, and he fears them “like long journeys”. For his two-year-old son, he wishes for an office.
The wood that feeds the fires is taken from around the lake, in a forest already showing signs of exhaustion.
The head of the production units admits it: what he likes best is sitting keeping the accounts and signing papers.At Dongpakhai market, twenty-five kilometres from the capital, Lèm sells bugs, worms and grasshoppers. Before, it was fruit and vegetables, but they rotted too quickly; she buys the insects alive, fries them herself and keeps them four or five days. Her water bug, fat and crunchy, is said to make you clever. Christophe tries it: crunch, salt and lemongrass. To trace the supply chain back, one follows the dance of the sun to a forest earmarked for the future Vientiane international airport, where women hunter-gatherers walk for kilometres every morning. Cicada larvae pay well, and in a good spot you can find 800 or 900 at once; red ants too, at the cost of a few bites. Nearby, a farmer raises grasshoppers at the back of her farmyard. She grew up in town and would not know how to hunt in the forest; proud to watch them grow, she scalds them without regret, “even happier” to be earning money. In Luang Prabang, Joy draws the spirits of the mountain, who guide him to the bugs. Some call him mad; he, at least, talks to them. And the hunt is not done en masse: you have to go about it in silence, gently.
Crickets are caught at night by lamplight, in the rice fields or in the forest, and crunched with an aperitif.
By the kilo, cicadas sell for around twenty euros, and ant eggs for a little less.
They must be fed constantly and protected from spiders, lizards and mice; her hens she tends only morning and evening.
Joy predicts that one day bugs will rule the universe, and that insects will raise us in turn.A thousand kilometres of rapids separate Vientiane from the Chinese border, and somewhere in the riverbed, forty metres down, a golden Buddha is said to lie, the treasure of La Grandière, a French gunboat. But in places the Mekong has only a few centimetres of water left, and cargo boats wait on the sand. So we follow those who still make a living from the river. A diver, called out for every shipwreck, can stay three minutes under water and goes down to eighteen metres reciting incantations; the day he dived outside his area, the spirits made him ill. At the landing stage, monks in a hurry board a speedboat: the slow boats are full of drinkers, singers and women who brush against them. Against fear, they carry amulets. Then the boat races along at eighty kilometres an hour between the rocks, towards the sapphires of Houay Sai.