Illustration: Liu Rui & Peter C. Espina
CNN recently published an article that claimed to reveal the world's most disgusting foods. Top of the list? China's century eggs - so called because they have been consumed for thousands of years by the Chinese as an appetizer in addition to acting as an ingredient in any number of dishes.
I get that these little black eggs that have been preserved in clay for months on end may not be everyone's dish du jour but are they really as offensive as CNN's iReporter, Danny Holwerda, would have us believe? Holwerda, in case you haven't seen the article, described century eggs as "awful" before going on to say that they taste "like something that used to be an egg, but made some horrible choices." I can't help thinking that Holwerda is guilty of hyperbole, as well as wondering whether Holwerda and I actually ate the same item?
But it's not just China's century eggs that have come in for criticism at the hands of the CNN team. A whole host of other Asian countries and foods have also been singled out. Rounding out CNN's list of the "world's most disgusting foods" were
tamilok (Philippines), fermented chips (Indonesia), dog meat and offal (South Korea), fried tarantula (Cambodia), stir-fried cicadas (Thailand) and fried frog (the poor old Philippines again).
Yet while CNN (an American media channel) finds the aforementioned unpalatable, in their respective countries these dishes aren't considered weird, bizarre or downright obscure at all. Rather they are treasured as delicacies! All of which goes to show that one region's food heaven is another's food hell - a fact CNN would have done well to remember. After all, America isn't exactly innocent when it comes to crimes against food. Case in point? My Yankee friends are fond of filling up on a "treat" (I use the word loosely) they call peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Translation? Two hunks of refined white bread liberally slathered in strawberry jam and peanut butter before being pieced together to make an unusual (and for me unsatisfying) snack. My American mates might think this creation tastes great but to my British palette, their creation does a grave disservice to three otherwise perfectly good, if humble, ingredients.
I would have liked to have seen some unusual items from other parts of the planet make CNN's so-called list of the world's most disgusting foods. Why weren't Mexico's
escamoles (eggs of the large, black, venomous Liometopum ant) included? Or
casu marzu (a cheese consumed in Sardinia that contains thousands of, I kid you not, maggots)? Then there's Norway's offending
lutefisk - codfish which has been soaked in lye (a substance said to be so corrosive that it can disintegrate silver utensils) for two days solid. And what of Alaska? Forget the Philippines: Alaska has two dishes that, in my mind, are much more offensive than fried frog and
tamilok (woodworm). Step forward fermented salmon heads - the heads of king salmon that have been buried in the ground, left alone for a few weeks and then harvested for our, erm delectation - and jellied moose nose. The latter is something I'll refrain from describing for fear you'll lose your appetite.
At the end of the day, every country has both weird and wonderful cuisine in equal measure. The only real way to discover what, for you, is food paradise and what is food purgatory is to pick up a pair of chopsticks, an explorative palette and a passion for the unusual and unexpected - and get ready to
chi fan!