One by one, he sat them down at a table and presented them with a plate of what he said was dog-doo and asked them if they'd like to eat it. Then he did the same with a sterilized grasshopper. Older children invariably rejected both plates.
Culture is our instructor.
Espousing, as I have, a belief that nothing is inherently disgusting, that it's all a case of mind over culture, I have frequently, in my travels, felt the need to put my money where my mouth is and my mouth where it would rather not go. Now I am getting my come-uppance. I am getting it big-time, in a small village in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I have come here to do a story on an anthropologist named John Patton. Patton's base is Conambo, a scatter of houses along a fast, muddy river, reachable every now and again by a four-seater missionary plane.