Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 August 1893 — Food Opportunities Wasted. [ARTICLE]

Food Opportunities Wasted.

A unique opportunity for eating an extinct monster was lost when the Siberian mammoth was discovered, incased in ice—the first Instance, we suppose, of frozen meat on reoord. But, in the matter of flesh, the proverb of 1 ‘ One man’e meat is another man’s poison" still holds good. We are glad to avail ourselvos of the fruits and vegetables of distant countries, but we cannot bring ourselves to eat their meat, any more than they can be Induced sometimes to eat ours. There is no real reason why a puppy, properly bred and fed, should not be as good as a rabbit; but what Englishman could eat a pappy ? Nor is It a merely sentimental prejudloe. It needed the terrible starvation of besieged Paris to induoe Europeans to oat rats and mice, which the ordinary Chinaman regards as daintios. It is said, with what truth we know not, that since the siege of Paris the taste of the Parisian has been attracted toward such strange moats as horse and donkey flesh, and that the price of horsemeat per pound is considerably higher now thau beef or mutton. The flesh of mares was always eaten by the Tartars, also by the South American Indians, and, to a oertuin extent, by their sucoessom, the Gauohos. The latter have a theory that horse flesh not only preserves but whitens the teeth. It is hard to imagine bow it can be preferred to beef, for, besides its disagreeWe color, it has a curiously astringent taste. We eat eels, but cannot be induced to touch snakes; shrimps, bat npt spiders. Other people—Bushmen and New Caledonians—are said to enjoy spiders; and we have heard of a German—a scientific German, of course—who spread them on his bread like butter; but the taste is not a European one, any more than a taste for caterpillars, cockchafers, ants, and wireworms, all of which aro eaten in different parts of the globe.—[The Spectator.