In some cases the tastes of people differ so that an article considered by one race as disgusting would be held as a delicacy by another class.

The ancients used asafetida as a seasoning, and what we have called "stercus diaboli," the Asiatics have named the "food of the gods." The inhabitants of Greenland drink the oil of the whale with as much avidity as we would a delicate wine, and they eat blubber the mere smell of which nauseates an European.

In some nations of the lower grade, insects, worms, serpents, etc., are considered edible.

The inhabitants of the interior of Africa are said to relish the flesh of serpents and eat grubs and worms.

The very earliest accounts of the Indians of Florida and Texas show that "for food, they dug roots, and that they ate spiders, ants' eggs, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes, earth, wood, the dung of deer, and many other things." Gomara, in his "Historia de les Indias," says this loathsome diet was particular to one tribe, the Yagusces of Florida.