词汇 | famine food |
词源 | famine food. Food that people wouldn’t normally eat but were forced to consume because nothing else was available. The Irish coined the name during the terrible potato famine of the 19th century, when they ate foods like mussels to ward off hunger and starvation. Mussels, of course, are a gourmet food today. The same could be said of the lobster, which early Amer- icans disdained and called a bug (still a term used by Maine lobster fishermen). In fact, our ancestors raked up all the win- drows of lobsters storm-swept on our shores and used them for fertilizer. See lobster; bug. |
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