Subsection 3 Habit in diet, pleasure, appetite and necessity How they cause or prevent melancholy

No rule is so general that it admits no exception. Habit therefore takes something away from, and qualifies, what has been said so far—otherwise I would deprive most people of their meals—and the harms arising from the substance of foods or their excessive or ill-timed use. As Hippocrates says in aphorism 2.50, things to which we have long been accustomed are less harmful, even if they are bad in themselves.

Otherwise one might well object that living by medicine’s strict rules would be sheer tyranny. Habit changes nature itself: for people used to them, it makes bad foods wholesome and unsuitable mealtimes harmless.

Cider and perry produce wind, as all fruits do in themselves, being mostly cold; yet in some English counties, in Normandy in France, and in Guipuzcoa in Spain, these are the usual drinks and cause no harm. In Spain, Italy and Africa, people live chiefly on roots, raw vegetables and camel’s milk, which agree with them but would cause a stranger much trouble.

In Wales, “they feed on dairy produce,” as Humphrey Llwyd, himself a Welsh Briton, acknowledges in his elegant letter to Abraham Ortelius: they live chiefly on dairy foods. In Holland they live on fish, roots and butter; and in Greece today, as Belon observes, they much prefer fish to meat. With us, “the greater part of the diet consists of meat”: we feed chiefly on meat, says Polydore Vergil, as all northern countries do.

It would be very harmful for us to follow their diet, or for them to follow ours. We drink beer, they wine; they use oil, we butter. We in the north are great eaters; they are extremely sparing in those hotter countries. Yet both they and we, following our own customs, are content.

An Ethiopian in ancient times, seeing a European eat bread, wondered “how we could live by feeding on dung”—how we could eat such food. So different was his countrymen’s diet from ours that, as my source concludes, “if anyone among us wished to imitate their diet,” eating that way here would be as nourishing as hemlock, aconite or hellebore itself.

In China today the common people live almost entirely on roots and vegetables, and the wealthiest find horse, ass, mule, dog and cat meat as pleasing as other food, according to Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who lived among them for many years. The Tartars eat raw meat, most commonly horseflesh, and drink milk and blood, as the nomads of old did.

“And he drinks curdled milk with horses’ blood.”

They mock our Europeans for eating bread, which they call the tops of weeds and horse fodder, unfit for human beings. Yet Scaliger considers them a healthy and intelligent nation, living a hundred years. They do this even in their most civilised country, as Benedict the Jesuit observed while travelling overland from the Great Mogul’s court to Paquin, which Ricci argues is the same as Cambulu in Cathay.

In Scandinavia dried fish generally takes the place of bread, as it also does in the Shetland Islands. Their other food, as in Iceland, says Dithmarus Bleskenius, is butter, cheese and fish; they drink water and sleep on the ground. In many parts of America roots replace bread, and their food consists of palm hearts, pineapples, potatoes and similar produce.

Some of them habitually drink salt seawater throughout their lives and eat raw meat and grass with pleasure. Some eat fish, snakes and spiders; in various places they eat human flesh, raw and roasted—even the emperor Montezuma himself.

On some coasts, again, a single tree supplies coconuts, food and drink, fire and fuel, clothing from its leaves, oil, vinegar, roofing for houses and so forth. Yet these people, naked and living on coarse fare, commonly live a hundred years and are seldom or never ill—all on a diet our physicians forbid.

In Westphalia they mostly eat rich meats and cabbages, knuckle-deep, calling it “Jupiter’s brain.” In the Low Countries they eat roots; in Italy, frogs and snails. The Turks, says Busbecq, delight most in fried foods. In Muscovy garlic and onions are ordinary food and seasoning: harmful to people unaccustomed to them, delightful to others, all because they have been brought up on them.

Farm workers and other labourers can eat fatty bacon, heavy salted meat, hard cheese and so forth—“O tough stomachs of reapers!”—and coarse bread at any time, and can go to bed or work on a full stomach. This would mean immediate death to some inactive people and is against the rules of medicine. So habit is everything.

Our travellers commonly find this when they reach distant countries and adopt the local diet: they are suddenly made ill. Our Dutch and English sailors, for example, when they call at the coasts of Africa and those Indian capes and islands, are often troubled by burning fevers and diarrhoea and made very ill by the fruits. “Foreign foods, though pleasant, commonly cause serious disturbances in those who eat them”: unfamiliar foods, however pleasant, cause marked changes and disorders.

On the other hand, practice or habit lessens the harm or puts everything right again. Through repeated use, Mithridates was able to drink poison, which amazes Pliny; and a girl sent by King Porus to Alexander, as Curtius records, had been brought up on poison from infancy. The Turks, says Belon, book 3, chapter 15, habitually eat opium, a dram at a time, whereas we dare not take even grains of it.

Garcia de Orta writes of someone he saw at Goa in the East Indies who took ten drams of opium in three days and yet “spoke coherently”—spoke with understanding. Such is the power of habit. Theophrastus speaks of a shepherd who could eat hellebore in its solid form.

Cardan therefore concludes from Galen: “Habit must, in any case, be tolerated unless it is very bad.” Habit should be maintained, unless extremely bad. He advises everyone to keep to their old habits, citing Hippocrates himself: “Some allowance must be made for season, age, country and habit.” They should therefore continue as they began, whether in diet, bathing, exercise or anything else.

Another exception is pleasure, or a liking for particular foods. Though they are hard to digest and produce melancholy, Fuchs makes this qualification in his Institutes, book 2, section 2, chapter 6: the stomach readily digests and willingly receives the foods we like best and find pleasant, while rejecting those we dislike. Hippocrates confirms this in Aphorisms 2.38. Some people cannot bear cheese because of a hidden antipathy, or even the sight of a roast duck, which others find delicious.

The last exception is necessity: poverty, want and hunger often drive people to do, and gratefully accept, what they would otherwise dislike or could not bear—as with the drink aboard ships, or eating dogs, cats, rats and even human beings during sieges of great cities. Three outlaws in Hector Boece, left to fend for themselves, ate raw flesh and the flesh of whatever birds they could catch, for a few months on one of the Hebrides.

These considerations qualify or overturn what has been said about foods that cause melancholy, and make such food more tolerable. But those who are wealthy, live in plenty and ease, and can choose what to eat or abstain if they wish, should avoid these foods if they are prone to melancholy or suspect it in themselves, as they value their health. Otherwise, if they eat immoderately or without order, let it be at their peril. “He who warns you loves you. Farewell, and beware.”