What’s the strangest food
you’ve ever eaten?
Because I am very public about my love of food this is a question I get a lot. The problem is that trying to come up with a good answer is dependent on how well you know your audience. For some, mentioning a traditional staple like escargot or frog’s legs is enough to cause howls of disgust, while other–much less conventional and more adventurous eaters–might roll their eyes at such “mundane” exotic foods as alligator, kangaroo, sea urchin and guinea pig.
For some folks a “strange” food can be something as normal as a steak cooked in a way they’re not used to, while for some of us anything less than the still beating heart of a freshly killed cobra is going to elicit a big yawn.
I say this because today I’m judging a midway fare food contest and two of the items up for judgment are pizzas topped with scorpions and meal worms. So far 95% of the people I know who have heard about this have asked me if I’m actually going to eat these offerings with a look of disbelief in their eyes. And I shrug and tell them that of all the items being judged, those are the ones I’m looking forward to the most. Because everything else is a variation of something I’ve had before, while they have the chance to offer up a genuinely new and interesting taste experience. (If anything, my main concern is that the pizza itself is decent.)
Are you an adventurous eater or are you the kind of person who would sooner amputate a finger than eat worm pizza? What’s the strangest food you’ve ever eaten? And what’s the strangest food you WOULD eat, if you ever got the chance?
As a kid, my palate was more adventurous: snails, chicken feet, bird’s nest soup, turtle soup…in China, I think I tried frog and chicken/snake soup…my mom tried beetles (too blecchhh for me…!)
Wow in regards to some of the above! A few times, my husband and I have gone to an exotic meat Thanksgiving dinner. I have tried snake, kangaroo, abalone, jellyfish, wild partridge, crocodile, venison and frog. This list isn’t particular to the Thanksgiving dinner. Once, a date took me to a very expensive dinner where the menu was in Italian. I thought I was ordering fried calamari rings over pasta (in retrospect that would have been a strange dinner option), but what I got were whole mini squids staring up out of a bed of noodles. I think I managed… Read more »
The only exotic food I would actually like to try is blood soup – I believe it’s congealed blood from a goat or some such other typical mammal boiled in a pot with some seasoning. I like the taste of my own blood and I would boil it myself and try if I could.
Probably silk worm pupa. But, I’ve also eaten duck’s brain, tripe, scorpion, king spider, blood, snake, frog and I think the silk worm and tripe were the only ones that I won’t be eating again. I guess I won’t eat brain either, mostly because of the risk of infectious disease.
Strange and disgusting is largely in ones head.
Frank … you win hands down. Scorpion is the one that got to my gag reflex.
Trying scorpion in less than two hours!
Rocky Mountain Oysters.
I’m a middle-of-the-road food adventurer. I’m Greek, so the insides of things don’t phase me. But slice up a tomato and ask me to eat it and you might get kicked in the shin.
I love this topic becuase the answer depends on so many factors like upbringing, location, etc. So depends on who is asking, the strangest thing I’ve eaten is either alligator or chicken. 😉