Have you ever eaten anything really strange, disgusting, unusual, or rare???

I think the oddest thing I have ever eaten was Icelandic shark. There are only about 300,000 Icelanders, one of whom was my roomate in London. Once a year, on some Icelandic holiday, they all eat shark. The shark has to hang for a year in order to draw the oils out of it. Then they eat it (outside because it smells so bad) with Reyka Vodka, the tradititional Icelandic brand.

Well it wasn't a holiday but my roomate brought some Reyka back for each of us (3 of us from the states all roomed with him) along with some shark. No. It wasn't good. It is cut in to little chunks and placed in jars and you eat it raw. I ate two pieces. The first was doable because it was tough and I could swallow it like a pill. The second piece I got was slimey and squirted a disgusting fish juice in my mouth that made me want to puke. However I did it for my Icelandic friend and in the spirit of "trying new things." I think I will lay of off the shark from now on though. How about you? Do you have an experience to share with an interesting food?

Guinea pig in Peru...tastes like chicken Guinea pig, really wasn't too bad!

If you could get past his little eyes staring up at you!

When we visited Taiwan, my son's boss took us to a pub where we were served a gourmet meal along with our beer. One of the appetisers was bees in a bowl, soaked in honey. Next to it was a big plate of stir-fried grasshoppers with a small french fry in each ones mouth. Actually not bad when you wash them down with a Taiwaneken (Taiwanese beer bottled in a green bottle with a label almost identical to Heineken).

I think I mentioned it here before, but I once had squirrel. Quite an interesting experience, I still have a hard time describing the taste - which was good by the way. My grandma was the only one in my family that knew how to cook squirrel, and she retired a couple years before she died. So it's been several years now.

I ate an earthworm once (or part of it) on a dare in the third or fourth grade.

I also tasted tripe from one of my friend's grandmothers (about the same time in my childhood), but it was a very small amount as I recall, and I nearly puked once I learned what it was.

In adult life, I let my friend and my wife order anchovies on a pizza - I'm way more cautious now.

But I know what I like to eat, and I'm happy with that. Either that or I'm a pussy.

-P

P.S. And, of course, I've had Liver before. I know this isn't strange to most people, but it wasn't something I really grew up with. As a teenager I went to work with my mom, and the smell of fried liver and onions was unbelievable. Unfortunately, the taste didn't quite match the smell...and the grainy texture was far worse. I had a grand total of two bites of that before discovering it wasn't for me.

Of course, I was an on-again, off-again, vegetarian at the time. So that may have made a bit of a difference. Who knows?

anyone had Scrapple

it is made of all the leftover parts (scraps) of the pig except the oink. It's sort of a gelatinous mass made up of the aforementioned strange pig parts (lips, snout, organs, etc.) plus a bit of cornmeal and ???.

Haggis

Sheep's stomach, stuffed with oatmeal and steamed. A more accurate definition would be: "a highly spiced sausage made from offal meats with oatmeal filler, traditionally in a casing made from a sheep's stomach."

I've always wanted to try this, but can't find any source for it in the US. I've had various kinds of fermented fish, but shark isn't fish so I don't know that the tastes would be comparable.

I love haggis. I'm planning on buying a sheep from a nearby farmer and making my own. I also love scrapple, liver, tripe, bee larvae in honey (that's really good) and pretty much everything else listed here. I've never been able to see how someone can be squeamish about some parts of an animal but not others. Why is muscle less 'gross' than anything else you can cut out of a gory carcass? Or why are some animals more gross than others?

Maybe the most unusual thing I've ever eaten, in the sense of it being something that very few people have ever tried, is Pteranodon. I've also had Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus. Just little bits of powdered scrap bone, for the sake of being able to say I tried it. I did make a dinosaur bone stock once, and there was enough protein left in the bone for the stock to spoil a few days later (it didn't taste like much, though).

Thanks for all the post so far. I've had the squirrel plenty since we hunt them here. It has a wild taste somewhat like venison but more sinuey (spelling?). Most small ground animals taste simliar in my experience.

I like Haggis. I'm not a big fan of liver. I have no idea what Tripe is. And Hematite, you DEFINATELY are not missing anything. The Icelanders don't even like shark which is why they only eat it once a year. That said, if you are determined, try Icelandic sites. I've definately never eaten anything pre-human.

I have eaten Beef Tartar twice. It is basically very fresh beef, choice cuts, ground up and served raw. You squirt lemon juice on it to "cook" the meat (denature the proteins). I remember liking it. I have also had blood sausage, which is very tasty to my recollection.

BTW, tripe is the intestines of a cow. It is white and rippled. I tried a little bit of gingered trip at a dim-sum restaurant in Boston, but passed on the fried chicken feet. Tripe is found in supermarkets in the northeast, as it is part of some traditional Italian dishes. It kind of skeeves me when I see it in the meat section.

So that's what my mexican-american friends talked me into after a night's drinking while in seminary...they called it menudo and said it was tripe, which I was unfamiliar with......wasn't bad, served in a broth-like stew...but at 2:00 a.m. quien le importa! who cares!

I eat alot of local food in Thailand, usually don't ask and don't want to know what the ingredients are.

As a child (on a dare) I ate some of the tar that they chip coat streets with.

You know, for all the acrid smell and all, it didn't have much taste at all - but it got all hung up in my teeth and resulted in my mom chasing me around the backyard with a forsythia switch (you might remember the drill - after she made me go select it).

and it was all the worse for you if you did not select one big enough, right?

A shark isn't fish?

No, not as currently defined. Fishes like salmon, gar, sturgeon, flounder and seahorses are more closely related to us than to sharks, because we share a more recent common ancestor with each other than either of us do with sharks. In other words, there was a time about 400 million years ago when the lineage that leads to modern sharks already was in existence, while the lineages that lead to fishes and humans (and reptiles and frogs and salamanders, etc.) had not yet diverged from each other.

You are half right in that sharks are different then bony fish. They have a different skeletal structure. However technically they are defined as fish in my understanding. Wikipedia agrees.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark

Not as currently defined by ???

I'm thinking gills, fins, lives in water, swims - a fish. Even identified as a member of the fish classification "Chrondrichthyes".

I tried to think of exotic and unusual foods while reading the comments in this thread. Tripe? That's not exotic...in fact, it's very common in Indian Country - the greener the better. My grandma would complain if she was given the "washed out" kind from the store, no flavor.

Raw meat? Deer liver is the greatest, and commonly eaten by hunters.

Squirrel, good to eat, but you need a lot to feed a family. Wild rabbit? Common staple up here. We even eat rabbit heads - considered a delicacy. BTW, most wild animals are edible...you just need to know how to fix them. I can fix most, watched the older people do it and learned quickly. Around here the big ticket items are moose, elk, buffalo, various deer...the usual. Necessary for our general health and well-being. Always much better than beef and pork.

Outside of the local menu, I've tried many things and found them all exciting. Most come from a can or were served in a fancy restaurant. I've had shark fin, octopus, snails...

I've also eaten puppy, for sundance ceremony. Very sacred, not done very often.

Wikipedia is not to be trusted in this case (it's entry on 'fossil' also is really bad).

See below.

My future son-in-law made us a beef tartar a few weeks ago. He is an afficianado of "hung" cured meats. Salmon tartar is also quite good.

I didn't consider tripe to be all that unusual. It is an ingredient in menudo, a Mexican soup that many swear by for curing severe hangovers and breaking up a cold/flu.

Modern taxonomy, which no longer is based on the Linnaean system (except in the case of "species," but not even universally with that), is based on common ancestry, not on physical characteristics. We distinguish between definition and diagnosis. The definition of a taxon (which is any natural evolutionary group consisting of an ancestor and all of that ancestor's descendents) simply is a statement of who belongs in that group. So, for example, the most commonly accepted definition of "mammal" is all of the descendants of the last common ancestor of the three living groups of mammals (monotremes, marsupials and placentals) and all of that ancestor's descendants. Of course, when we look at an animal we cannot see it's ancestry, but only can infer it from it's physical (including its genetic) features. This is where diagnosis comes in. The diagnosis of a mammal is fur, mammary glands, warm-bloodedness, a particular kind of jaw joint, and having three middle ear bones. These are not what makes a mammal a mammal, but merely are the features that allow us to identify a mammal as a mammal. If a mammal were to lose all of the diagnostic features of a mammal, it still would be defined as a mammal. A mammal is a descendant of the last common ancestor of monotremes, marsupials and placentals; we can tell whether something is a mammal by looking for fur, milk glands, middle ear bones, etc.

It's very similar to the way diagnosis is used in medicine. Influenza is a disease caused by a particular virus. it is diagnosed by a set of symptoms that, in our experience, reliably are associated with the viral infection. But there is no necessary relationship between the definition and diagnosis. The symptoms themselves are not the disease, but only signs of the disease.

In the case of sharks and fishes, features like gills, fins, etc, all are diagnostic, not definitional. Moreover they are not good diagnostic features because they do not reliably separate one taxon from another. Sharks and trout both have fins, but trout are far more closely related to salamanders and birds and humans than they are to sharks.

So far, very little of this has worked its way into pre-college or even undergraduate science courses, and the vast majority of taxonomic information available on the web from general sites is archaic if not downright incorrect (although the amount of good information is growing. Berkeley's website-- www.ucmp.Berkeley.edu-- is excellent). It's annoying to those of us in the business that so many high schools and colleges still teach the Linnaean system (i.e., Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus), and confuse definition and diagnosis (which is a powerful logical distinction that can clarify thinking far beyond biology.

Got a name for the organization that has sharks as a member?

The chondrichthians (aka Chondrichthyes) or "cartilage fishes."

It's a misnomer. Most modern sharks lack bone (except in their teeth) and have cartilaginous skeletons, but their ancestors had bone (cartilage is not more primitive than bone. If anything, bone came first).

I thought you were right when I first read it, because I thought that I had remembered hearing that. Then I got to thinking and thought maybe you were wrong. That is why I specifically said wikipedia agrees, and "my understanding."

Why don't you fix the wiki articles? It seems like you would do a good job.

Unusual? Well, hell, I've eaten lots of things most people would find unusual.

Let's see...most off the wall?

Sea urchin roe (to sushi eaters, Uni), weird texture, interesting taste.

Beef tendon and beef tripe. I actually really like both in pho ("fuh," Vietnamese beef noodle soup). Tripe is kinda like tofu, not much taste, except for what's put on it.

chicken knees in China (you kinda just suck on them).

I've also done shark's fin, I think I've eaten sea cucumber. Kobe Beef sashimi (really good!). And the last time I got a pot of home made gumbo from our family friends, there was some mystery meat in it, haha!

Come to think of it, half the stuff I would order at my favorite Chinese restaurant would probably be considered unusual to most folks not familiar with Cantonese food

And oh yeah, Jellyfish! It's REALLY good!

Correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that tripe is actually the first three chambers of the cow's stomach, not the intestines, as was alluded to earlier in the thread.

I honestly haven't tried much of it, but I see it at the supermarket every week.

-P

I don't know which chamber of the stomach that it is, but it is definitely stomach and not intestine. (Wiki says it's the first)

I always heard it was the first and second chambers of the stomach. Most people don't like the texture or particularly care for the flavor either. I have never had it in any other dish than menudo, which I do enjoy from time to time.

My grandpa used to make "head cheese" from the head of a pig. The hog's head is simmered for hours until the meat falls off and the liquid becomes thick and gelatanous. The meat is then chopped thin and small then returned to the gelaten, seasoned, placed in a mold, then chilled and sliced. It is really not as bad as it sounds.

Not unusual here, but; when we Cajuns boil our crawfish, you separate the tail from the head (body) and then suck the fat out, then eat the tail meat.

Click to view attachment
2007 National Champions

One is called Bible tripe and the other honeycomb tripe. They taste the same but Bible tripe has a softer texture. One way I like to cook it is in milk. then I let it cool and braise it with butter and garlic. It's quite tasty-- the texture is similar to clams.

Tripe soup is eaten around the world as a hangover cure. If you get used to it, it's something you come to crave when you're feeling sick, like chicken soup.

Except for Kobe beef (which I've never had) I like all of these, especially the echinoderms. I have Sea sea cucumber a couple of times a month, and sea urchin whenever I can get it. Sea cucumber is good braised in sherry with ginseng and basil. You have to wash it carefully.

Because you can cut it up into non-threatening geometric pieces, that arent easily identified as something poop once flowed through.

Just one man's opinion......

"Something poop once flowed through" pretty much applies to the whole animal, doesn't it? Anyway, poop gets no closer to liver, heart, kidney, pancreas, etc., than it does to muscle.

Back in my college days, the cafeteria would on occasion offer grilled mako shark steak- which may sound bad to you but it was a light, flaky meat with alot of flavor. It had no oil to it whatsoever and was quite tasty.

Congratulations, you’ve just invented sausage!

Correct.

cow stomach in menudo. I had a roommate from Mexico my freshman year in college. It was disgusting.

I love menudo. One of the great things about Mexican immigration is really good Mexican groceries and restaurants are popping up all over the country, even here in the midwest. There now are two stores near me where I can get huitlacoche, fresh tamales, stewed ram and menudo every Saturday.

Once as a sophomore in highschool, I was on the team bus back from a baseball game in which I had gotten three hits that took my batting average to over .400. We were blaring a ghetto blaster in the back of the bus, acting crazy and what not, and someone dared me to eat a fruit rollup that our sweaty catcher had crammed up his butt just minutes earlier. So I took a bite. Not my best moment--but not my worst either unfortunately. Anyway...

If you don't think about what it is, it's really not that bad.