Food Sources: Earth, Water, and Air - Food Culture and Health in Pre-Modern Islamic Societies - page 106

they figure in the enumeration of the
Plagues of Egypt (VII, 133) and in a simile
describing the resurrected on the day of
judgement (LIV, 7). According to some
adī º s they are lawful as human food.
In Arabic zoological, pharmacological
and lexicological works numerous kinds
are mentioned, part of which, according to
some authors, differ in colour (green, red,
tawny [ afar ], white). Where it is stated that
the male is tawny and the female black,
a specific variety is obviously spoken of.
Some locusts fly and some leap. Some
have a big and some a small body. They
have no fixed habitat but wander about
from place to place following a leader.
The males have a lighter body and there-
fore are better able to fly. Locusts have six
feet, the tips of which (or: the tips of the
two hindlegs) are like saws. Their eyes are
immobile. Next to fish they lay the largest
number of eggs of all oviparous animals.
The young hatch in less than a week. Sev-
eral authors state that, for laying eggs, the
female seeks rocky ground which cannot
be broken even with sharp tools, strikes
that ground with her tail (ovipositor) and
thus makes a crevice into which she lays
the eggs. Other sources give a different
and more detailed description: In spring,
the females seek out good, soft soil, dig
holes with their tails, in which they con-
ceal the eggs, fly away and perish of cold
or are killed by birds; in spring of the fol-
lowing year, these buried eggs open, the
young hatch, feed on all they can find and,
when they are big, fly to another country
where they in their turn lay eggs. Locusts
eat dung and the young of hornets and of
similar animals; they themselves are eaten
by sparrows, crows, snakes and scorpions.
No animal causes greater harm to the
means of human sustenance since they
eat all that they come across. Their saliva
is a deadly poison to plants. Some devices
to keep them away from crops are men-
tioned in the sources.

In the opinion of the ancient Arabs,
who used to eat them, locusts yield a deli-
cious food tasting like the meat of scor-
pions; and ⁄ āi wondered why certain
people did not like it. Yet eating it was
believed to cause epilepsy ( ar ). Locusts
are eaten to this day by the Bedouin.
Medicinal uses of the locust and its sig-
nificance when occurring in dreams are
dealt with in pertinent works.

(L. Kopf)

(ii). The locust, more commonly known
as grasshopper, exists in various harmless
forms in almost all climatic regions, but in
its gregarious destructive form it is partic-
ularly and lamentably well-known. Inva-
sions of locusts are a phenomenon not
peculiar to the Muslim world, since they
occur from China to America and from
the U.S.S.R. to South Africa, but almost
the entire Muslim world lies within the
affected area, and in a region where inva-
sions are especially frequent and severe.
There is no need to give an account here
of a well-known phenomenon which
from the Bible to our own times has been
described by many writers. Contemporary
biologists have established that in their
gregarious forms locusts are the same as
in their solitary, peaceful forms: unfavour-
able climatic conditions simply modify the
nature of their reproduction and mode
of life. Young locusts then take flight in
dense masses numbering millions which
darken the sky like a vast cloud; the sound
of the rasping of their legs and wings is
intensified; when there is a drop in tem-
perature, as for example in the evening,
they suddenly settle on the ground and
in a few moments every scrap of vegeta-
tion is destroyed, sometimes over an area
of several square kilometres. As a result
the local population suffers an economic
catastrophe, except only that the locusts