The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World.

[tailwind]

.... Casu Marzu is a sheep' milk cheese that has been deliberately infested by a Piophila casei, the "cheese fly." The result is a maggot-ridden, weeping stink bomb in an advanced state of decomposition ....

http://www.cracked.com/article_14979_6-most-terrifying-foods-in-world.html

[MrSlayer]

1. People eat some fucked up things.

Funny stuff there.

[Jennifer C]

2. So disturbing

I feel sorry for the poor little mice in the Baby Mice Wine

[poverlay]

3. I was watching some people from somewhere so far north it doesn't matter where, delighting

in rotten seal paw. When I say rotten I'm not talking a few days out of code, I'm talking it's been sitting in a bucket underneath the house for months...many, many months...

It was so so nasty looking, but oh, you'd think that they were eating the finest meal ever made. To them I guess it was.

[China_cat]

4. They missed the Frisian sheep's cheese

that's flavored with sheep shit while the milk is heating.

[Igel]

5. They also missed jumiles and chumiles.

An exchange professor from UNAM told me about them long ago. Put a stick in a pail, let the stinkbugs crawl up the stick, scrape them off into a tortilla and quickly fold. Any that escape you get to pluck off your face or hands and crunch.

Thankfully, Wiki keeps its entry short. No need to expand it (please, esp. not with pictures).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumiles
--------------------------------------------
Jumiles are a small stink bugs of the species Atizies taxcoensis <1> native to the Taxco region of the state of Guerrero in Mexico. Jumiles are collected for making of sauce and for use as taco filling. They may be eaten alive and almost always are because jumiles can live up to one week after the cooking process which includes beheadedment and toasting. The beginning of the jumil season on November 1 is the premise of a large fiesta in Taxco, fiestagoers gather in the mountain park of Huisteco to collect jumiles, and crown a Jumil Queen.

Jumiles have a bitter, medicinal flavor, probably due to their high iodine content.<2>. Jumiles are also a good source of the vitamins riboflavin and niacin. <3>

Chumiles are a smaller, similar hemipteran of the same region (southern Morelos and northern Guerrero) that is also eaten. They are insects of the Order Hemiptera and Family Pentatomidae. Other pentatomids are commonly called "stinkbugs".
-------------------------

Looks like jumil season (and, no doubt, seasoning) is coming right on up.

[JCMach1]

6. Sorry, but hakari (Icelandic Rotten Shark) would have made my list

Icelandic Hákari

Here's the correct way to prepare good old-fashioned Icelandic hákari (I swear that I did not make this up):

1. Catch and kill a medium-sized Greenlandic shark.

2. Take that shark and bury it in the ground to rot for several months, to the point where not even sea gulls want to touch it.

3. Dig it up, cut into cubes, serve cold as hors d'oeurves.

The shark will smell and taste like ammonia, so be sure to hold your nose when you eat it and wash it down with brennivín--a schnapps made from potato and caraway that tastes like kerosene... http://www.kenbmiller.com/satpostman/articles/iceland/iceland.html

[lost-in-nj]

7. You got to wonder

who the first person was to discover these things....
try them out then proceed to add them to their diets......

and then you got to start wondering WTF was going through their minds?!!!



lost

[Lautremont]

11. The whole list could be made up of Icelandic foods.

I do like brennivin, though.

[Elidor]

8. This thread is making me hungry!

Rotting meat and maggots, mmmmm.

[TahitiNut]

9. We have lutefisk in the freezer even as I type this.

The 'season' is nigh ... and Norwegian-Americans are salivating over lutefisk dinners at the local Sons of Norway lodges all over America ... including Poulsbo, WA and Scottsdal, AZ.

The smell is enough to peel the wallpaper from the walls but the taste and consistency is much like wallpaper paste, so just smear it on the paper and the problem is solved. Uh-huh.


http://www.sofn.com/events/Event.jsp?EventChildID=2899
http://www.sofn.com/events/Event.jsp?EventChildID=2841

[uppityperson]

10. Cochineal red food coloring is made from beetles.

Was checking ingredients in a cold drink yesterday (some sort of not-water not-soda not-juice but costs a couple bucks bottled thing) and noticed it had cochineal in it. It may be organic, but I don't like drinking it, though it is supposed to be safe for eye and lip cosmetics.

Wiki and urband legends links:

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

Cochineal is the name of both crimson or carmine dye and the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), a scale insect in the suborder Sternorrhyncha, from which the dye is derived. There are other species in the genus Dactylopius which can be used to produce cochineal extract, but they are extremely difficult to distinguish from D. coccus, even for expert taxonomists, and the latter scientific name (and the use of the term "cochineal insect") is therefore commonly used when one is actually referring to other biological species; suffice it to say that the reader should be aware that there is more than one cochineal insect. The primary biological distinctions between species are minor differences in host plant preferences, in addition to very different geographic distributions. D. coccus itself is native to tropical and subtropical South America and Mexico.

This type of insect, a primarily sessile parasite, lives on cacti from the genus Opuntia, feeding on moisture and nutrients in the cacti. The insect produces carminic acid which deters predation by other insects. Carminic acid can be extracted from the insect's body and eggs to make the dye. Cochineal is primarily used as a food colouring and for cosmetics.

After synthetic pigments and dyes such as alizarin were invented in the late 19th century, natural-dye production gradually diminished. However, current health concerns over artificial food additives have renewed the popularity of cochineal dyes, and the increased demand has made cultivation of the insect profitable again.<1>

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/bugjuice.asp

[The Inquisitive]

12. Best line from the article

"They are enjoyed in Cambodia, Philippines and the fifth and seventh levels of hell. "

[midlife_mo_Jo]

13. There should be an alert on this thread

Reading it might make you throw up.

This stuff is way stranger than I thought it would be!

[western mass]

14. Balut isn't too bad...

I've had far worse food Filipino street food.

Chicken entrails on a stick was the worst: apparently they don't clean them out before throwing them on the barbie...looked tasty at the time, though.

[eppur_se_muova]

15. lesser auk, Inuit-style.

Wrap a small bird in seal fat, then wrap the whole in a bag of walrus hide and leave to stand in the sun for a week or two. When fully ripe, even the beak and bones are supposedly soft enough to chew (and are, as this delicacy is eaten whole).