In the Old Testament (2 Kings 6:24—29) a famine so devastates Samaria that the king encounters a woman who tells him that she and a neighbour made a bargain to eat her son one day and the neighbour’s son the next; now, however, the woman is upset because they did indeed eat her own son, but the neighbour’s child has gone into hiding. Children were not the only bill of fare during this famine: the same biblical passage describes how some Samarians paid through the nose for an ass’s head and three pints of dove’s dung, items they apparently cooked and ate. The eating of dove’s dung certainly suggests the severity of the famine, but actually the Hebrew word traditionally translated as dove’s dung may have been confused with a similarly spelt Hebrew word that means locust pods. In any event, the King James version of the Bible retains the dove’s dung translation, but more modern versions, like The New Jerusalem Bible, usually substitute something less repellent, such as wild onions.