Bizarre Foods

Recently I have been watching this programme on Discovery Channel called 'Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern'. I am fascinated with food programmes obviously coz I love to eat. Especially when people eat weird food - I'm doubly fascinated.

So far I have seen him venture to New York, United Kingdom, Philippines, Ecuador, Malaysia/Thailand. I know - how exotic can New York and UK be right? In NY, he visited this guy who organizes exotic food parties, and he basically ate stuff like tarantulas, grubs etc. I didn't really watch that episode closely so can't comment much.

In the UK, he ate food like jellied eels, ox heart (cooked like a steak - I think it'll probably taste alright), blood sausage (got blood clots in the sausage thing, it actually looks quite tasty) rabbit (the 'gross thing' was that the sauce for the rabbit had rabbit's blood in it eeeps!) haggis from Scotland and I must say I don't think haggis looks half bad. For the uninitiated, haggis is basically sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and boiled/baked in the animal's stomach. It sounds scarier than it is I reckon.

The other episode that I watched, he attempted to eat durian. Of all the funky things he has eaten, including grilled guinea pig, lemon ants (ants that taste like lemon apparently) and BBQ larva (he says taste like clams yucks), he couldn't eat durian! He put it in and spat it out!

He also tried balut which is a fertilized duck egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside that is boiled and eaten in the shell. It sounds really gross and it's not an uncommon food to be featured on Fear Factor but in this episode the one he ate didn't look that scary. Anyway my point of this post is that I agree with him, most of the food that people don't dare to eat- it's psychological. People who have never eaten meat all their life, probably thinks that a roast chicken is gross. My dad thinks salads are gross ('raw cold vegetables, what's so nice about it?'). I guess since Andrew Zimmern's tagline is 'if it looks good, eat it', I might dare to try some of these 'exotic' food one day but one thing for sure - I will definitely not be able to put any bugs into my mouth. Yikes!