The Variety of Foods

There are tens of thousands of species of plants and animals that humans can consume and thrive on, but only a very small proportion of these are really used as food. Different cultures accept, appreciate, and relish particular species as foods and reject others as either alien or disgusting. The ancient Romans liked to eat doormice and kept them in cages ready for the kitchen. Cannibalism has been practiced in many countries, even though who eats whom varies from one culture to an additional. In some societies enemies are eaten, but in others people eat their dead relatives and buddies as a gesture of friendship, believing, as one South American Indian put it, that 'it is better to be inside a buddy than to be swallowed up by the cold earth.'

Insects are eaten by many societies our distaste is partly explained by our ignorance of the fact that many of their species live on clean vegetation and contain everything we require for a healthy diet plan. Lightly fried termites as eaten in Zaire, have much more protein than beef, and dried locusts have even much more. In Laos and New Caledonia spiders are eaten as a delicacy. In 1885 a British eccentric, V.M. Holt, published a book entitled Why not eat insects?, in which he argued the case for insects as food. He included menus for dinner parties based on insects and summarized his thesis therefore: 'The insects eat up every blessed green thing that do develop and us farmers starve. Well, consume them and grow fat!' Holt's case is logical, but food likes and dislikes have small to do with logic.

Any kid could at birth be brought up to speak in any of the world's thousands of languages and to adopt it as its mother tongue in the exact same way almost any child could be brought up to accept and thrive on any of the hundreds of cuisines that exist. Similarly, the adult who has to put a fantastic deal of work into learning to speak another language can find it just as difficult to accept and consume the food of another society. The Eskimo, who regards the nose of the caribou as a delicacy, finds it no simpler to eat many of the foods available on our supermarket shelves than British individuals would to consume the cats and dogs relished by the Chinese. Yet the same newborn kid could learn to enjoy consuming any 1 of these (or, certainly, all of them).

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