LEARNING TO LIVE AS AN ESKIMO 67 



strong prejudice against seal oil. Although that pre- 

 judice was strong, I found the gasoline taste even more 

 disagreeable. And for a special reason the fish, which 

 was the main item of diet, was to me most distasteful 

 of all. 



I grew up with two main food prejudices. I cannot 

 remember the time when I did not hear my mother ex- 

 plain to the neighbor women that I could neither drink 

 chocolate nor eat fish. I do not remember what reason 

 she assigned for my inability to drink chocolate, but I 

 remember well how she used to explain that my unwill- 

 ingness to eat fish had its reason in the famine which came 

 on our frontier community when I was in my first year. 

 The cows had died and there had been no milk, and she 

 had been compelled to feed me on boiled fish made into 

 a sort of mush. She used to say, and the neighbor women 

 used to agree with her, that it was no wonder I had ac- 

 quired a prejudice against fish. It was taken for granted 

 by them, by my mother and by me that this inability to 

 eat fish would mark me throughout life. In school and 

 college, at boarding houses and private dinners, I always 

 omitted the fish course and always used to explain that I 

 differed from ordinary people in my inability to eat fish. 

 Similarly, I avoided chocolate until I was something like 

 twenty. I cannot remember now how it came about, but 

 either inadvertently or as an experiment I tasted choco- 

 late and found to my surprise that it was not bad. Grad- 

 ually I got to like chocolate but the abhorrence of fish 

 persisted. I used to taste fish gingerly once or twice a 

 year. This was usually done in connection with the 

 stories I was telling of how disagreeable it was; it gave 

 effective emphasis to my stories if I grimaced at the diffi- 

 culty of swallowing even the tiniest bit of fish. 



