IT looked like a huge omelet, so I took a generous serving, without an inkling of what was to come.

This was in the mid 1970s, when I was doing student volunteer work in the remote town of Paracelis, Mountain Province. It was an impoverished town so the food was simple and predictable. Eggs, and even more so an omelet, looked almost like a treat.

It was dinner time and since there was no electricity, I could barely make out what was in it. I noticed some bits and pieces of what looked like tiny twigs, but figured maybe these were residue from a previous dish cooked in the frying pan.

No one bothered to tell me, which happens to me a lot when I?m in rural areas. I grew up in big cities and people in rural areas could tell that. In the same way we love serving balut to foreigners, rural people would challenge me to eat the most exotic stuff, sometimes without telling me. (Dog meat was a favorite trick they?d play on me, to the point where I refused to eat any kind of meat because I had become paranoid.)

Rural volunteer work can be physically hectic so the volunteers were always famished when mealtime came around. I wolfed down the rice and the omelet and, as rural life goes, went to bed soon after dinner.

Halfway through the night though, I woke up wheezing. My fellow volunteers, who were mostly medical and nursing students, woke up too and when someone lit a kerosene lamp, they could see I had broken out in hives (pantal-pantal).

We did a quick medical history. Asthma? Nope, I?d never had an attack. A reaction to medicines? I knew I was allergic to aspirin and penicillin, but I hadn?t taken any of these on the trip.

Finally, the food. Crabs or shrimps? No, I wasn?t allergic to those foods but even if I were, we were in a mountainous area where even dried fish was hard to come by so there was no way we could have had crabs and shrimp.

Then suddenly it dawned on me. In the most miserable, I?m-dying voice, I gasped, ?...the o... me... let.?

The omelet, several of the students ominously whispered, like a chorus in Greek tragedies.

But, I protested, I?m not allergic to eggs.

Sure. I was OK with chicken eggs, duck eggs, quail eggs, but, my friends and I were to learn that night, the omelet I had came from... ants. Not those tiny ones you see swarming around in our homes, but large red ones found on trees. I groaned, realizing those little ?bits and pieces? floating around in the omelet were actually legs and bodies and heads... of ants.

It was almost like a medical conference that night and there could be only one grim conclusion: it had to be the ants? eggs. It wasn?t that difficult to explain. Whenever something enters the body ? usually through the mouth or the nose ? all our defense systems are mobilized to check them, much like immigration agents.

If the new arrivals are germs, an alert is sent out and ?soldiers? are rapidly dispatched to meet the aliens and to neutralize them through various means (including, to use the words of a student many years ago, "en-gulp-ing" (engulfing) them).

The body?s defense system includes a massive intelligence database of all previous ?visitors,? again much like our immigration agents, so the system knows ? like Santa Claus ? who?s been good or bad. That can include food. Sometimes, as in the case of the ant eggs, the visitor is so unfamiliar that the body decides to err on the side of prudence.

In this case, an allergic or hypersensitivity reaction is set off. The wheezing and the skin eruptions are actually side effects of chemicals released by the body to deal with the unfamiliar. Growing up in the city with a limited range of foods, I was probably being more sensitive to new stuff.

Unfortunately, these hypersensitivity reactions can also be harmful. As with asthma patients, the respiratory difficulties can even be fatal.

And so that night of the omelet, the students kept vigil over their ant omelet victim. The only antihistamine (anti-allergy) drug we had was Benadryl (diphenhydramine) and the hives subsided an hour to two after I took the medicine, but the wheezing continued, which worried the team, considering that the nearest hospital was seven hours away... on foot.

I thought, miserably tongue-in-cheek, what a way to die. I could imagine the tabloid headline: ?Ant eggs kill UP student!?

Obviously, I survived, but tales about the incident quickly spread through the town and were added to their local folklore about the adventures and misadventures of city kids from UP.

I?ve become more cautious about eating new foods ? but one never knows. I had another serious food allergy reaction a few years later, this time to ukoy (shrimp fritters), not exactly an unfamiliar food. Maybe I was just more stressed than usual, which sent my defense systems on super-alert status. Or maybe it was something in the ukoy... ant eggs perhaps?