The world is filled with weird and unusual stuff, from weird Missouri dead letter laws to unique traditions. While weirdness is everywhere, the part you’ll see celebrated below is the food world.
Bad environmental conditions, political turmoil, or even just a desire to not waste any food has led to many cultures eating some strange foods. Whether you’re looking for some interesting things to put on your bucket list or are simply curious, you’ll find the following information valuable.
Haggis
While the following entries may contain foods you’ve never heard of, haggis may actually be familiar to you. This Scottish dish is when a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs are chopped with onions, combined with oatmeal, suet (fat that can be found on the kidneys of many animals, including sheep), salt and spices. This interesting mixture is then mixed with stock before being cooked, though the container has changed a bit over the years.
The modern version of the dish will likely have been cooked inside an artificial casing. Those following a traditional recipe instead will find themselves handling the sheep’s stomach instead. As with any food, haggis can be served with just about any side dish, though obviously some work better than others.
If you looked at the aforementioned “recipe” and immediately thought about potatoes, you’d be right. Haggis is commonly eaten with mashed turnips and potatoes. If pure protein is more your thing, then you can stuff your haggis into some chicken and then wrap the whole thing in bacon instead. From here, you just serve it with some cream sauce and enjoy!
Balut
You’ve probably eaten a lot of eggs in your life. There’s even a chance you had some for breakfast or are even eating some right now (not recommended). However, you probably have a limit as to when you’d decide to skip them.
Particularly, if you cracked it and got a partially formed chick instead of a yellow yolk and runny white, you’d probably avoid them for a while. Not all countries feel the same way, though. In the Philippines, you may find people enjoying a food called balut, which is a boiled fertilized duck egg.
Once fertilized, the egg is left to develop for about two or three weeks before being cooked. This allows the duck embryo to form and provides a slightly crunchy texture. While many outside of the country shudder and gag at the thought, it’s a well-loved snack or appetizer in a few countries, from the Philippines as mentioned before to Cambodia and Vietnam.
Deep-Fried Tarantulas
It’s not uncommon for people to enjoy insects and arachnids as snacks. From crickets and locusts being covered in salty or savory flavorings to scorpions being encased in candy, there are quite a few options to consider if you’re curious about snacking on your insect neighbors.
While this is typically just down for curiosity or due to the abundance of the bug in question, the deep-fried tarantula has a much darker past. Cambodia was once ruled by an incredibly violent dictator.
Anyone who disobeyed him was either killed or sent to the S-21 prison to face unspeakable horrors. Those who avoided these fates were forced into hard labor as they farmed to fulfill Pol Pot’s idea of an agrarian communist society.
The people were starved and had to do whatever they could to survive. Luckily, the Thai Zebra tarantula is not only safe to eat but also incredibly easy to catch, saving an unknown number of lives. Today, they’re a delicacy that can be found either rolled in garlic or sugar and sold by street vendors for cheap.
Tuna Eyeballs
Tuna is a common sushi ingredient. You may have enjoyed it many times. However, sushi is made up of the meat of the fish. Many other parts are therefore left to be either discarded or used in another dish. Japan saw this as an opportunity and decided to make their own unique appetizers and snacks with one of these discarded ingredients: tuna eyeballs.
After being braised in soy sauce and mirin or sautéed with sesame oil and ginger, you can enjoy your dish. Don’t just pop it into your mouth, though. The cooking process leaves the sclera, or white, of the eye too chewy. Instead, you’ll want to suck the lens, iris and fluid out.
Sannakji
While many people enjoy sushi, which has raw fish as a central ingredient, many people stop there. The most adventurous will consider themselves brave for attempting fugu, or a dish of pufferfish that has had its poisonous parts removed. The dish is so dangerous that chefs who prepare it must be specially trained or they risk accidentally killing people.
Even with these safety precautions, death is still not completely off of the table. If you’d like to try a dish that will raise your adrenaline without risking ingesting a highly dangerous toxin, then visit South Korea and order some sannakji.
This dish will arrive at your table wriggling because it is the tentacles of an octopus that was served very quickly after being chopped while the creature still lived. To be clear, the food you’re served is no longer alive. The tentacles simply continue to move due to the nerves in each arm. Despite this, you need to be careful when you eat it. The suction cups on the limbs are still very active and can cause you to choke.
Spam
While it may seem very normal and even mundane to those living in the United States, Spam is definitely weird when you step back and think about it. Pork meat combined with salt and potato starch that is then stuffed into a can is definitely an unusual concept, though not as strange as some of the other items mentioned above.
Most people will take some Spam and cook it with a small amount of oil before eating it alongside other foods like scrambled eggs, adding it to a sandwich or even chopping it up and using it as a pizza topping.
Some even experiment by deep-frying it in oil or mixing it into cookie dough. Of every food mentioned so far, Spam is one of the most versatile while still having a disconcerting ingredient list.
