Essay: ONE MAN'S FOOD IS ANOTHER MAN’S POISON

Essay:       ONE MAN'S FOOD IS ANOTHER MAN’S POISON

 

OUTLINES :
1. Introduction.
2. Different tastes of individuals in the matter of food.
3. Antipathies to butter and milk, mushrooms, eggs, etc.
4. Diversity of tastes for all kinds of pleasure
5. There is no use disputing about tastes.
This proverb takes variety of taste in food as a typical illustration of the difference between man and man in susceptibility to various pleasures. We may first treat the question collectively and show^hat one nation’s food is another nation’s poison. Almost every country on the face of the earth has some peculiar delicacy, which would be rejected with loathing by the rest of the world. Some savage nations are or were cannibals, and it is said that, wherever this horrible custom prevails, human flesh is preferred to all other meat. The Savages of Australia eat insects and grubs; those of Tierra del Fuego, the putrid blubber of whales. The Esquimaux also live upon whale blubber, and supply themselves with vegetables out of the stomachs of dead reindeer. Herodotus, the Greek historian, mentions a tribe that subsisted upon lice or fir cones.
Among the great varieties of castes and tribes to be found in Pakistan, some are known to eat serpents, and one low caste devours greedily the flesh of cattle that have died of disease. The Chinese are said to relish rotten eggs, and they certainly regard soup made of a particular kind of bird’s nest as a great delicacy. The ancient Romans were found of edible snails, and highly esteemed, fish that were caught in the Tiber where the main drain of Rome flowed into the river. In modem Europe the Frenchman’s taste for frogs seems horrible and unnatural to the ordinary Englishman.
If we now turn from the consideration of nations to individuals, we find the same diversity of taste in the matter of food. What is harmless and nutritious to ordinary men act like poison upon some peculiar constitutions. Thus there are persons who have such a "strong antipathy to butter and eggs, or mushrooms, or milk that when they eat a dish partly composed of whichever of these is their particular antipathy, they become sick, even if they do not know beforehand what they are eating. These strange antipathies may be regarded as exaggerated forms of the likes and dislikes that manifest themselves whenever a party of human beings sit down to a social meal, though they may all being to the same country and the same class. Some like highly-seasoned dishes, Others prefer plain food. It is not every one who could relish boiled pork and veal pie with plums and sugar, although these were the dish'es that Dr. Johnson was especially fond of. Nearly every man has his own favourite fruit, vegetable, and drink. Some are too fond of wine, whereas others regard wine as poison and enjoy a cup of cold water.
There is the same diversity of tastes in a far more extended sphere than that of eating and drinking. The hunger delights is spending the whole day in the chase of wild beasts, and his pleasure is in comprehensible, to those who have not natural inclination for the chase, and cannot understand why a man should go tramping over hill and dale in the hope of inflicting sever bodily pain on animals that have never done him any harm Some have a taste for intellectual pleasures, other prefer active out-door games. Some love public life, others are so constituted as to prefer to live in seclusion.
Even where there is a general similarity of tastes, there are strongly marked special differences. What a variety of taste, for instance, we find among the lovers of books! A few great writers have won the need of universal admiration; but with regard to second-rate authors, numberless volumes have been written by critics in support of their own especial favourites. Much of such controversial writing is wasted. Difference of taste generally depends upon permanent mental characteristic, which cannot be altered by reasoning or eloquent pleading, so that there is a great deal of truth in the adage, De gustibus non est disputandum (there is no use in disputing about tastes).