The Variety of Foods

There are tens of thousands of species of plants and animals that humans can eat and thrive on, but only a very small proportion of these are really used as food. Different cultures accept, enjoy, and relish particular species as foods and reject others as either alien or disgusting. The ancient Romans liked to consume 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 another. In some societies enemies are eaten, but in other people individuals eat their dead relatives and buddies as a gesture of friendship, believing, as 1 South American Indian put it, that 'it is much 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 reality that many of their species live on clean vegetation and include everything we need for a wholesome diet. Lightly fried termites as eaten in Zaire, have much much more protein than beef, and dried locusts have even 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 consume 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 consume up each blessed green thing that do develop and us farmers starve. Nicely, eat them and develop fat!' Holt's case is logical, but food likes and dislikes have little to do with logic.

Any child 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 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 place a great deal of effort 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 accessible on our supermarket shelves than British individuals would to consume the cats and dogs relished by the Chinese. Yet the same newborn child could learn to appreciate consuming any 1 of these (or, certainly, all of them).

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