When you have made a serious error and need to acknowledge it with deft humility, it is highly probable that the expression you use to describe the process has something to do with food. The best-known traditional expression is to eat crow. The origin is fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is extremely distasteful and the experience is equated with the mental anguish of being forced to admit one?s fallibility.

Another equivalent for the expression is eating humble pie, which contains two ideas rolled in together, a portmanteau dish. The original umbles were the innards of the deer: the liver, heart, entrails and other second-class bits. It was common practice in medieval times to serve a pie made of these parts of the animal to the servants and others who would be sitting at the lower tables in the Lord?s hall. The phrase to eat dirt, first recorded in the 1850s, expresses the same idea as to eat crow and to eat humble pie .

While we are on the subject of consuming unconsumables, the expression to eat one?s hat, expressing one?s complete confidence in the outcome being described ? ?if that horse doesn?t win, I?ll eat my hat?? dates in this form only from 1836, when it appeared in Charles Dickens?s Pickwick Papers: ?If I knew as little of life as that, I?d eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole?. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase used to appear sometimes in the form eat old Rowley?s hat. Old Rowley was the name of King Charles II?s favourite horse, a name that was transferred to the monarch himself, though why his hat should be especially favoured in idiomatic history remains a mystery.

To eat one?s heart out, (to worry excessively), is a vivid figurative description which also evokes the often intensely physical symptoms of worry, The phrase actually predates the English language, since it turns up in Homer?s Odyssey (about 850 BC) and in writings by Pythagoras 400 years later.

The oldest of them, and most probably the source of all the others, is to eat one?s words, which first appears in print in 1571 in one of John Calvin?s tracts, on Psalm 62: ?God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken?.