Weirdest Foods From Around the World #1

Haggis. Sheep’s heart, liver and lungs minced and mixed with onions, oatmeal, suet and seasoned with salt and spices cooked inside the animal’s stomach.

Tuna Eyeballs. No description necessay. It is what it is.

Spam the famous mystery meat, made from chopped pork shoulder meat, ham and potato starch.

Hákarl. The rotting carcass of a shark is buried underground in a shallow pit and pressed with stones making the meat safe to eat. It was described by Anthony Bourdain as “the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing” he’d tried.

Surstromming. Baltic Sea herring fermented with just enough salt used to prevent it from rotting. Mainly found tinned in brine these days, when opened it releases such a pungent aroma that it usually needs to be eaten outside. Sounds delightful.

Century Egg. this egg is pretty rotten. After being preserved in a mixture of clay, ash and quicklime for a few months, the yolk turns a dark green or even black and slimy while the white has turns to a dark brown translucent jelly. Apparently it smells of strongly of sulphur and ammonia, but tastes like a hardboiled egg.

Stinkheads. The fermented head of a king salmon, buried underground in for a few weeks and eaten as a pungent, putty-like mush.

Shiokara. A raw dish made of pieces of meat taken from a selection of sea creatures, served in a brown, viscous paste of their own salted and fermented viscera.

Jing Leed. Grasshoppers seasoned with salt, pepper power and chilli and fried in a big wok.

Wasp Crackers. A biscuit filled with wasps. Think chocolate chip cookies, only the insects replace the choccy chips.

Fried Spider. Fried spider prepared by marinating it in MSG, sugar and salt and then frying it in garlic. Apparently, it has more meat on it than a grasshopper, but also has brown sludge in the abdomen, which consists of mainly innards, eggs and excrement.

Witchetty Grub. These grubs can either be eaten raw, when it tastes like almonds, or lightly cooked, where its skin crisps like roast chicken and its insides take on the look and consistency of scrambled egg.

Escamol. Also known as ‘insect caviar’, this dish is made of the edible larvae and pupae of ants, harvested from the tequila or mescal plant. Considered something of a delicacy, it is said to have the consistency of cottage cheese and a buttery, nutty taste.

Beondegi. Silkworms boiled or steamed and lightly seasoned, this is popular snack all over this country and usually sold from street vendors. Apparently they taste like wood.

Escargots. Snails cooked in a sauce of white wine, garlic, butter and parsley served in their shells. Said to have a similar consistency to mussels or clams.