ACQUIRED TASTES.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1578, 25 February 1887, Page 3

ACQUIRED TASTES.

Since the use of insects as food has been mooted, many expressions of disgust at such an idea have been uttered. But, apart from unreasonable prejudice, there is really nothing to justify repugnance in the case. The locust, for instance, is a very clean feeder. It is built up entirely on sweet and wholesome vegetable juices, and must be infinitely purer as an article of diet tham many things which most people eat habitually. There is no fuuler feeder than the hop, for example, and the domestic fowl is scarcely more particular. Crabs and lobsters and Bbrimps fatten upon nameless abominations, and, moreover, all these crustaceans are exceedingly ugly in appearance. A dish of soft-shell crabs look very like a dish of large spiders. There is no essential difference between eels and snakes. And Charles Lamb thought that the man who first swallowed an oyster was better entitled to Horace's laudatory verses—illi robur et <.es triplex, etc.—than he who first tempted fate by going to sea. The truth is we are all governed largely by habit and acquired taste in eating and drinking. Sturgeon's roe is assuredly " caviare to the general" originally. The first taste of it is discouraging but few would take a second probably but for the force of authority in such matters.

The Australian native extracts from the bark (of a tree a huge fat white ma ßg ot » which he devours with exceedinggusto. TheEiquimanx's mouth waters at the appetising odour of decomposed of seal meat and whale blubber. The Fiji Islander, until quite recently, revelled in the human form divine, niniy baked in bq oyen, with

the face neatly blacked and all the crackling well browned. Out of a decent respect for the prejudices of his coutemporaries he called his favourite dish " long pig." Ia South America they eat grei-t lizards, and find them toothsome and delicate. In Africa baked raonkoy is accounted good though somewhat too liked a " Christian child" for the uneraancipated western taste. In dervishes are found who make a practice of digesting live scorpions and venomous snakes. Rats and mice and such small deer hare commonly boen used as food, from the markets of China to those of Paris during the siege. The people who live on the shores of the Indian Ocean make a food of the gigantic cephalopoda, one of which Victor Hugo immortalised under the name of piruvre. In Borneo, crabs which stands two feet high and look perfectly horrible, are eagerly devoured. In short, there is scarcely a living organism which has not at some time and in some parts of the world been used as food by men, and when the latter decline to eat the creatures themselves they very often do it at one remove by feeding upon animals that eat the rejected organisms. Men of the world and such as honour science wisely endeavour to overcome hereditary and acquired prejudices against strange articles of food, and such organisations as the Ichthyopagous Club, do some good in this direction, though the strength of prepossessions and antipathies is very great, and doubtless takes time and experience to remove. To a young I-ish girl a terrapin stew might easily appear a thing of unutterable horror and detestation.

It will probably not be an easy matter to introduce the locust as a regular article of diet in this country, but the few who had corquered prejudice, like Dr. Hartmann, may in time see the fruit of their teaching in the regular importation and marketing of the insects. Already the California Indians prepare them for food, preserve them as winter provision, and those who have tasted them in that conditio » «iy that they are palatable and nutritious. Of course, however, the taste must be acquired, and it is useless for nyone to try and enforce it.