Ever since I ate fried cockroaches in Thailand and rotten kangaroo tail in Australia, I love bringing up the ‘what’s the weirdest, most disgusting thing you’ve eaten’ topic; I normally beat everyone. It’s funny though how I can eat cockroaches, but I think caviar is disgusting.
The grossest thing I’ve eaten is eel. UGH. It was in a Korean restaurant in Wollongong (Australia) where we went with Korean classmates and (over) confidently asked them to order. UGGGHHH.
The most stomach-churning Spanish food which I haven’t had the courage to try yet is bull testicles.
Anyway, after looking at this recently published list of World’s Most Terrifying Food, bull testicles seem as good as eating grapes. Among the more, um, unusual foods are:
- Escamoles (Mexico): Eggs of a giant ant that have the texture of cottage cheese.
- Cazu Marzu (Sardinia, Italy): Sheep cheese infested with ‘cheese fly,’ in an advance stage of decomposition. It’s even illegal in Sardinia!
- Lutefish (Norway): It’s a fish marinated in lye — a strong industrial chemical used to clean drains and kill plants; and apparently when the fish is drenched long enough in this lye thing, it can dissolve silver cutlery.
- Baby mice wine (Korea): Beats the eel on a scale of grossness 100:1. This is a health tonic where baby mice are stuffed into a bottle of wine while alive! (I think I am going to throw up).
- Pacha (Iraq): Boiled goat head. Well, in the Arab world fried goat brains and tongue is not uncommon, so this one didn’t gross me out.
- Balut (Philippines): Duck eggs incubated until the fetus is almost a duck, but not quite; it’s then boiled alive and served out of buckets of warm sand.
Now let’s try and keep in focus that this is daily food of people around the world, and is not gross to them, let alone terrifying. I wonder if it’s unthinkable for people in Korea and China that in India some eat only vegetables grown above the ground — i.e. their food cannot have potato, onion or garlic. What must the rat-cat-eyeball eating people think of vegans?
The world is filled with unusual foods. What’s the strangest thing you have eaten on the road?
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