Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 68, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1915 — LOCUSTS AS DELICACIES. [ARTICLE]

LOCUSTS AS DELICACIES.

Ancient Greeks and Ethiopians Once Found Insects Edible. While the locust is essentially a plant devourer and famine bringer, there are many well authenticated cases in history showing that populations reduced to the last extremity, have utilized the destructive insect as food. Diodorus Siculas relates that an Ethiopian tribe were known as Aceridophagi (eaters of locusts), while Aristotle writes of a certain part of Greece where the people regarded them as delicious. Lavard, the explorer, found on the engraved monuments pictures of dried and preserved locusts on rods, presumably indicating their use as food. It is not believed that any race today eats them. They are regarded everywhere in the east as an abhor rent calamity, and the presence of vast swarms in Palestine is held to be a forerunner of complete crop failure, both of fruit and cereals.— Christian Herald.