According to Wellsted, they are sold in the markets of Yemboli and also at Jeddah, and are considered wholesome and nutritious. The Mukin or red species, being the fattest, is preserved, and, when fried and sprinkled with salt, they are con sidered wholesome and nutritious food. This part of the sea-coast of Arabia is occasionally visited by an incredible number of these insects, which do much damage to the date palms. Swarms are drowned in their passage to and from the Egyptian coast, and the beach is strewed with their meats. flow insects apparently so ill qualified for flight are enabled thus to cross the sea, affords matter for curious inquiry ; but passing swarms are seen in its centre. The Acridophagi of CEthiopia,who are fabled to have subsisted entirely on this aliment, are said to have been thin and weak, and to have suffered an early and agonizing death. This was doubtless merely from semi - starvation. These people lighted large fires of dry leaves under the flight, and so brought the insects down in con siderable numbers. A character in Aristophanes (Acharn. 1116) raises the question whether locusts or fic]dfares are the daintiest eating, and answers in favour of the locust, from which one might infer that it was a recognised, though not a frequent, article of food among the Greeks. The Hottentots, unlike the Acridophagi above mentioned, are said to grow fat upon this diet. But this also is merely exaggeration, though Burton says of the Arabs that where they have no crops to lose, the people are thankful for a fall of locusts. In Ilejaz the flights are uncertain ; during the last five years preceding Captain Burton's visit, Medina had seen but few. They are prepared for eating, by boiling in salt water and drying four or five days in the sun. A wet locust to an Arab is as a snail to a Briton. The head is plucked off, the stomach drawn, the wings and the prickly part of the legs are plucked, and the insect is ready for the table. Locusts are never eaten with sweet
things, which would be nauseous. The dish is always hot, with salt and pepper, or onions fried in clarified butter, when it tastes nearly as well as a plate of stale shrimps. At Bushire these insects are generally called Maig, and sometimes Malakh. One kind is distinguished by the epithet halal, the eating of it being lawful ; the other is harem or forbidden ; this is smaller and more destructive than the Malakh halal, from which it differs also in colour. The Arabs prepare a dish of locusts by boiling them with salt, and mixing a little oil, butter, or fat ; they sometimes toast them before a fire, or soak them in warm water, and, with out any further culinary process, devour almost every part except the wings. Ouseley ate several locusts variously cooked, and thought them by no means unpalatable. In flavour they seemed like a lobster or rather a shrimp,—one neither offensively stale nor absolutely fresh. The natives of Senegal are said to dry them, and, having reduced them to powder, use them as flour. Captain Yule (p. 114), in his account of an interview with the king of Burma, and the repast which followed, mentions that the most notable viand produced consisted of fried locusts. These were brought in hot and hot, in successive saucers. They wero very much like what, one would suppose fried shrimps would taste. The inside, he believed, NM removed, and the cavity stuffed with a little spiced meat. Locusts of Inner Arabia, the jarad or jerad, a reddish-brown insect, and about the size of the little finger, are used as food. The hind legs arc called keraa. They are boiled and fried. The locust of Northern Arabia, a small green grasshopper, is not used as food.— Winslote Dr. Buis!; Central India Times ; Kirby and Spence ; Friend of India ; Pottinger's Travels Burton's Mecca ; Ouscley's Travels ; Niebuhr's Travels; Wellsted's Travels; Palyrare; G. Bennett, pp. 270, 271.