Thanksgiving has just passed, so you have all probably had a lot to eat. I imagine that turkey was involved.
Let us all take a moment and give thanks that the following foods were not involved.
Maggoty Cheese
There are a lot of jokes about stinky cheeses, but most of them keep their bioactivity on a microscopic level. At minimum, the bacteria in cheese do not jump out at you. The same cannot be said for maggots, which are around a full centimetre long.
Casu Marzu is a type of cheese from Sicily that is made from fermented pecorino cheese. The cheese is allowed to be infested with maggots, which will jump out at you while you eat it, and hit you in the face. Oh, yes- if the maggots die off, the cheese becomes toxic.
If you are wondering why this is legal, the answer is: of course it isn’t.
Fried Spiders and Various Insects
These are precisely what they sound like. Let that sink in. In some regions of Cambodia, fried spiders are a popular snack.
If that isn’t bad enough, the spiders are actually farmed. They are fried until crispy on the outside and soft on the inside – apparently, if they are insufficiently cooked, the insides will be runny. Those who have eaten them say that they taste like chicken.
Of course, these are not the only creepy crawlies that people will eat. Grasshoppers are a popular food in Mexico – in fact, they are extremely good for you and are becoming more popular around the world. Australian aboriginals ate a variety of insects, such as witchetty grubs (moth larvae the size of a Cheezie). These are good raw (when they taste like almonds), or fried nice and crispy. Another delicious Australian insect is the honeypot ant. These ants have a special class that is fed massive amounts of food, which they process and store in their bodies. They can swell with sweet liquid until they become the size of grapes. When food is scarce, they regurgitate the food to feed the worker ants. Some of them, however, are captured and eaten as sweets.
Eyeballs
Relax, not human ones. But people eat the eyes of all kinds of animals.
In the Middle East and Scandinavia, goat or sheep’s head is eaten, eyeballs and all. In England, there is Stargazy Pie, which is a pretty normal savoury pie with fish, eggs, and potatoes – except that the still-eyed fish heads are bursting out of the pie crust, a la Alien. The story goes that this pie prevented the Devil from coming to Cornwall, presumably because even he has standards. Russians will make soup out of fish heads, which float to the top to get a good look at you.
Meanwhile, in Japan, people will eat tuna eyes – disembodied, not in the tuna head. Whether this is better or worse is left as an exercise for the reader. Would you rather be stared at judgmentally by an eye in a severed head, or just the eye?
Testicles (or just sperm)
Organ meat is fairly commonplace, but some organs are preferred over others. Testicles are one of the less desirable… bits of an animal.
Actually, if you don’t eat these, your grandparents probably did – they are very widely eaten all over the world, and in the past were still more popular. All kinds are and were eaten- goat, rooster, cow, sheep, and all the other normal delicious animals.
However, this is the past we are talking about, and many people were too polite to say “testicles,” even while eating them. Hence, while the Cambodians will proudly chow down on their fried spiders while announcing them to all and sundry, testicles have a variety of euphemisms, such as “stones” or “bull’s eggs” (which make sense), “mountain oysters” (which makes no sense whatsoever), or “fries” (which might have potentially disastrous consequences). China goes the poetic route and calls these dishes such things as “Dragon in the Flame of Desire” (yak) or “Head crowned with a Jade Bracelet” (horse). If you see these on a menu, don’t order them! Or do – we aren’t going to judge.
Russians, cutting straight to the chase, will eat straight-up herring sperm, which is breaded, fried and eaten on toast. The Japanese, of course, manage to one-up everyone else by and eating codfish sperm – raw.
Things That Are Not Recognizably Food
Some things are really not food in any sense. Birds’ nests are an example. However, in China, swiftlet nests are made into soup. Don’t worry, they are not made of sticks and mud. No, they are made of solidified bird saliva. This seems rather unfair to the birds, who presumably spend a good deal of time drooling to build a nest only to have it stolen and eaten. One note is that these are washed before consumption, which would be good culinary practice if the nest were made of literally anything except saliva. What foreign substance is disgusting enough, even in comparison to bird spit, to require removal?
In Thailand, people might eat bat paste, which is bats, mashed up. This is not only conceptually gross, but can be full of diseases. Dracula was not available for comment.
Koreans might eat Sannakji, which is made of live octopuses, poor things. These fight back, and might even choke you with their tentacles.
In numerous Southeast Asian countries, people might drink wine… infused with snake venom, which seems like a rather unwise thing to do. However, Canada has the record for the most horrible alcoholic beverage.
In the Yukon, Sourdough Saloon serves drinks containing an amputated human toe. You are not supposed to eat it (if you do, you will be fined), although there is a rhyme: You can drink it fast, you can drink it slow, But the lips have got to touch the toe.
That was not the record, though. The Inuit have managed to find an easy way to make a drink: Grab a dead seagull, put it in a bottle of water, and leave it in the sun to ferment. Yes, it will make you drunk. Try it sometime.
Leave a Reply