The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.