I once sat next to an evangelistic vegetarian at a holiday banquet. "I suppose, to put it simply," I said, "you won't eat anything that had a face." She was not amused.

I eat meat, but I was struck by the odd notion I had engaged in social cannibalism. Much like us, ants maintain a highly organized society, although a literate entomologist might suggest it is closer to a brave new world than a liberal democracy. The little buggers even fight wars.

"Good protein," my wife remarked later when I told her about my culinary adventure. This from a woman who claims the smell of cooking beef makes her gag.

Of course, she said something nearly identical while we watched a television documentary about spiders. A group of Amazonian aborigines prowled the jungle seeking food, and a hunter speared a tarantula the size of a dinner plate. He tossed it into an open fire, and his children waited eagerly for the beast to roast to perfection.

The oldest child used a small stone to split the spider's body. After he levered it open, his two sisters and a brother squatted on their haunches beside him and daintily fingered out the meat. The normalcy of it all paralleled a group of youngsters sharing fries at a fast food restaurant, right down to the multiple earrings.

Ants, spiders -- does size matter? I have eaten ants, but obviously I have only ventured to the edge of the jungle of exotic foods. Perhaps it is a matter of appearance. Compare a tarantula and an Alaskan king crab, both unlikely looking brutes, but one is subsistence for a Stone Age family and the other is a luxury in gourmet dining rooms.

I looked once more at the cereal box. Why do we eat what we eat? Culture, of course. A friend, a native of the Philippines, must have rice every day, every meal preferably. And dogs are a delicacy in the Far East.

On the other hand, I am a descendant of the malcontents and misfits who fled northern Europe, where the French ate snails, the Scots sheep's heads, and the Germans blood sausage. In that great migration to the New World, we came upon aboriginal peoples who were dog-eaters, but we didn't change. The best we could do, it appears, was to admit corn was edible.

Practically speaking, a dog is a quickly renewable source of meat protein. Does Benji sound more appetizing if we phrase it that way? Our cultural equivalent is a pig or a chicken, or, perhaps, a rabbit. But it's a big world out there, and every group has its table taboos. Hebrews and Muslims eat no swine. Hindus eat no beef. I eat no dogs. I suppose we could share a meal together, but we'd probably need to hire my vegetarian acquaintance as chef.

Of course, I shouldn't point fingers. Scholars who study this sort of thing protest that any aversion to another culture's dietary preferences means we are indulging in "ethnocentric assumptions about the food ladder hierarchy."

That's a mouthful.

Apparently, while I wasn't looking, the intelligentsia has pushed us past comfort food to food as a measure of tolerance. I've traveled a bit, and I'm sophisticated enough to understand that food choices are cultural and environmental; but now word comes down from opinion-makers that food choices -- and our perceptions of other people's food choices -- are political. Of course, it has always been so in a Machiavellian sense. A good prince distributes the harvest wisely and prevents hoarding and suffers no riots in the streets. But princes are no more, and cultures are valued subjectively. We are told we wallow in elitist ethnocentricity if we declare that a Masai feast of cow's blood and milk descends to savagery. I suppose, if you consider it carefully, it's no better to eat cow lips, cheeks and other assorted scraps mashed into a gut tube and labeled bologna.

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