The Unvegan

It’s not often you get to eat one of your favorite characters from childhood, but on my trip to South Africa and Zimbabwe, that’s exactly what I did. I took down Pumbaa, at the first possible chance. And I didn’t just do it once, it was so good I kept coming back for more.

Since the warthog is a relative of the pig, I expected it to be porky. It turns out I was right, except that it might even be better. Seriously, I tried warthog ribs and was immediately hooked. They were bigger than your average pork ribs, but packed some delicious flavor.

At my next chance, I had some warthog filets. That’s the picture from above and they were equally delicious compared to the ribs. There was a sort of beefiness about them in addition to the porkiness, but the most important takeaway was that they were just delicious.

Finally, I tried a bit of warthog barbecue. This was from a “traditional” Zimbabwean restaurant. It didn’t quite compare to the ribs or filets, but was still quite good.

Perhaps the only difficult part about eating warthog is that menus like to list it as “Pumbaa.” It makes you think twice before ordering, but after realizing it tasted so good, they could have called it “Human Baby” and I would have ordered it.

So to quote my little friend Pumbaa, “hakuna matata.” It means “no worries” and I can tell you that the warthogs I took a bite out of need not worry about how delicious they are.