Would you eat any of the following?
- Fermented shark meat with a strong ammonia smell.
- Rotted, bacteria-filled, bodily fluid of an ungulate.
- A fertilized duck’s egg, boiled but crunchy from the partially developed bones and feathers.
Each is a popular food in some part of the world, but I’m guessing you reacted negatively to all of them. Two were submitted as answers to a question we asked on a recent survey of Road Scholars: “What is the strangest or most daring thing you have eaten? Please describe the location and circumstances!”
I read through nearly 700 responses to this question, and, believe me, it was a tour through every branch of the animal and vegetable kingdoms to make Carl Linnaeus or Charles Darwin proud. I could easily have compiled a blog titled Top Ten Foods Guaranteed to Gross You Out, but the range and variety of the response raised more interesting questions, like these …
Why do we turn up our noses at food we’ve never tasted? Why is one group of people repelled by a food that to others is a delicacy? Are there foods we love in the United States that people from other parts of the world can’t imagine eating?
I looked into these questions and got quite an education in the psychology of taste and cultural tolerance, at least through the lens of food. Let’s go straight to today’s menu to see what I learned.