FFHT August: I can't believe I ate….

Really, I don't know why Gail is protesting about my desire to participate in Murphy and Stanley's  August FFHT on account of the subject matter. She claims that this month's phrase "I can't believe I ate…", will encourage glorification of the baser side of our natures.

Does she not realise that the urge to break the boundaries of the conventional 'approved' diet is not confined to non-human species but has a distinguished lineage including some of this country's most illustrious scientists.

No less than Charles Darwin, top of my (and Gail's) list for 'Greatest Ever Briton' had an adventurous appetite in more ways than are usually recognised.

At Cambridge Darwin was a member of a dining club which met weekly in order to eat, basically, roadkill. He enjoyed hawk and bittern, but balked at a dish of old Brown Owl, describing it as 'indescribable'. On the Beagle voyage he ate armadilloes ('taste like duck'), puma ('veal'), iguana and Giant Tortoise. A Phylum Feast is a shared meal containing as many different species as possible, eaten by biologists on February 12th to celebrate Darwin’s birthday.

Before Darwin, the noted English geologist William Buckland, who wrote the first full scientific description of a dinosaur and later in his life promoted the notion that glaciation explains many of the landscape features formerly ascribed to the biblical flood, took exotic eating to another level (you may have to click on the image below to enlarge and read):

One suspects that "I can't believe I ate…" was not a phrase much heard in the celebrated Reverend Buckland's Oxford household...