A recent writer speaking of human diet says, ‘it is a remarkable circumstance, that man alone is provided with a case of instruments adapted to the mastication of all substances,—teeth to cut, and pierce, and champ, and grind; a gastric solvent too, capable of contending with any thing and every thing, raw substances and cooked, ripe and rotten,—nothing comes amiss to him.’
If animals could speak, as Æsop and other fabulists make them seem to do, they would declare man to be the most voracious animal in existence. There is scarcely any living thing that flies in the air, swims in the sea, or moves on the land, that is not made to minister to his appetite in some region or other.
Other creatures are, generally, restricted to one sort of provender at most. They are carnivorous or graminivorous, piscivorous, or something ivorous; but man is the universal eater. He pounces with the tiger upon the kid, with the hawk upon the dove, with the cormorant upon the herring, and with the small bird upon the insect and grub. He goes halves with the bee in the honey cell, but turns upon his partner and cheats him out of his share of the produce. He grubs up the root with the sow, devours the fruit with the earwig, and demolishes the leaves with the caterpillar; for all these several parts of different vegetables furnish him with food.
Life itself will not hinder his appetite, nor decay nauseate his palate; for he will as soon devour a lively young oyster as demolish the fungous produce of a humid field. This propensity is, indeed, easily abused. Viands of such incongruous nature and heterogeneous substance, are sometimes collected, as to make an outrageous amalgamation, so that an alderman at a city feast might make one shudder; but this is too curious an investigation, it is the abuse of abundance too, and we know that abuse is the origin of all evil. The fact should lead us to another point of appreciation of goodness and beneficence. The adaptation of external nature to man has often been insisted on; the adaptation of man to all circumstances, states, and conditions, is carrying out the idea. The inferior animals are tied down, even by the narrowness of their animal necessities, to a small range of existence; but man can seldom be placed in any circumstance in which his universal appetite cannot be appeased. From the naked savage snatching a berry from the thorn, to the well-clad, highly civilized denizen of the court, surrounded by every comfort, every luxury; from the tired traveller, who opens his wallet and produces his oaten cake beside the welling lymph which is to slake his thirst, to the pursy justice, ‘in fair round belly with capon lined,’ who spreads the damask napkin on his knees, tucks his toes under the table, and revels in calapash and calapee,—what an infinite diversity of circumstances!
Man, with all his natural and artificial necessities, all his social and domestic dependencies,—more dependent, indeed, upon his fellows than the fowls of the air, from the grand exuberance of nature, and his remarkable adaptation to it in the point alluded to, finds subsistence under circumstances in which other animals might starve.
Perhaps we might properly urge the advice of a recent writer.—‘Make use of every material possible for food, remembering that there are chemical affinities and properties by which nutriment may be extracted from almost every organic substance, the greatest art being in proper cooking. Make soup of every kind of flesh, fish, and leguminosæ.—Every thing adds to its strength and flavour.’
Man eats to satisfy his hunger, and to supply warmth to the body; but the lover of good things, who finds a pleasure in eating, may also be told that there is a beautiful structure of nerve work spread out on the tongue, which carries upwards to the brain messages from the nice things in the mouth.
Moderation in food is, however, one of the great essentials to health. Sydney Smith, in a letter to Lord Murray, tells him that, having ascertained the weight of food that he could live upon, so as to preserve health and strength, and what he had lived upon, he found that between ten and seventy years of age, he had eaten and drunk forty-four one-horse wagon loads of meat and drink more than would have preserved him in life and health, and that the value of this mass of nourishment was about £7,000.
Sir John Ross tells us that an Esquimaux will eat twenty pounds of flesh and oil daily. But the most marvellous account of gormandizing powers is that published by Captain Cochrane, who in his Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary, says, that the Russian Admiral, Saritcheff, was told that one of the Yakuti consumed in twenty-four hours, ‘the hind quarter of a large ox, twenty pounds of fat, and a proportionate quantity of melted butter for his drink.’ The Admiral, to test the truth of the statement, gave him ‘a thick porridge of rice, boiled down with three pounds of butter, weighing together twenty-eight pounds; and although the glutton had already breakfasted, yet did he sit down to it with great eagerness, and consumed the whole without stirring from the spot; and, except that his stomach betrayed more than ordinary fulness, he showed no sign of inconvenience or injury!’ The traveller I have just quoted also states, that he has repeatedly seen a Yakut, or Tongouse, devour forty pounds of meat a day; and he adds, ‘I have seen three of these gluttons consume a reindeer at one meal.’
It has been well remarked by Dr. Dieffenbach, in the Transactions of the Ethnological Society, that the labours of modern chemistry have thrown a new and most interesting light on the food of the various races of men, or inhabitants of parts of the globe which are widely different from each other in their geographical and climatological relations. The substances which serve as food, or the quantity which is taken, appear to the superficial observer often of a most extraordinary nature, because they are apparently so heterogeneous from what we are accustomed to; so that travellers relating such facts, do not withhold their astonishment or reprobation.