I'm reading Greek and Roman Necromancy by Daniel Ogden and once again encountered the trope of oracular locations and temples keeping snakes for various ritual purposes and "feeding them" on a kind of honey cake, which as far as I know would not be interesting whatsoever to a snake and even if a snake ate a baked good it would probably have trouble digesting it (I assume). so I was mulling this over, and naturally Ogden doesn't address it, I've actually never read any writer on these subjects address the animal husbandry involved with ancient rituals, which is always frustrating , and it occurred to me that snakes wouldn't eat a Twinkie but rodents and insects absolutely would.
if your ritual snakes are just being kept in some sort of enclosure, especially something like a pit or a katabasis (the Greeks were really big on a Amigara Fault-type procedure where people would go into holes in the earth in various ways and then come out of the holes in various ways and during this process be understood to have visited the underworld or received a vision from an oracular ghost such as Trophonius, the mechanical details of the process aren't clear), you probably aren't directly observing them very often except for any part of the rituals that involve handling, during which the snakes wouldn't be eating anyway. but alone in their enclosures with a bunch of bakery snacks, the rodents and bugs could sneak out of hiding and get grabbed by the snakes.
also I imagine a lot of the smoke and mirrors of the staff at these temples involved managing the various sacred animals somewhat like a petting zoo or a feeder goldfish tank at PetSmart, and just disappearing any of them that died so the clients wouldn't see them. it's likely the staff were cleaning, feeding, and taking care of the snakes at various locations and the dogs at the Asclepias temple and so on.
one has to imagine that most temple priesthood were probably just people who had gotten that particular job somehow, and not the ecstatic true believers that are depicted in every classicist romantic painting and most mythological or fictional imaginings of such places. of course there are tons of modern fiction books that imagine the same thing I do, I read The Jaguar Princess by Clare Bell when I was about 13 and loved the plain and practical descriptions of Aztec temple life, the process of creating art, and the anatomical approach to the idea of a were-jaguar (i have no idea if this book stands up, probably not), I think it permanently contextualized my thinking about ancient ritual as practical and pedestrian for the people who worked in that field. it's fun to imagine the blood-soaked ancient temples in any part of the history of humanity being as ho-hum as an Anglican church service, but they probably were for most people.
