The variety of alimentary substances used not only by individuals, but
among whole nations, are prodigiously diversified, and climate seems to
have some effect in producing the diversity of taste, though it must in
a great measure depend upon the natural productions of particular
countries, their religion, and their commercial intercourse.
A vegetable diet seems suitable to the hot countries under the Equator,
and we accordingly find nations there, who have completely adopted it,
and who abstain so much the more from all animal food, in as much as it
is an article of their religious faith.
Potatoes, chesnuts, and the leguminous and cereal seeds, satisfy the
want of the Alpine peasant, and numerous tribes solely feed on
vegetables and water. In the most remote antiquity, we read of whole
nations in Africa, and of the Indian priests, who lived entirely on
vegetable substances. Some wandering Moors subsist almost entirely on
gum senegal.