Since it is Halloween season, I am going to touch on something frightening, though not "monsters and murderers" kind of frightening. I have a special interest in food and cooking, and we will be discussing monsters indeed, but they are of a different kind than the ones that slaughter teenagers camping in the woods. Those monsters: horrifying, disgusting foods.
I know you’re thinking, "what makes a food horrifying and disgusting?" After all, many people across the world eat many different things, and some folks eat things that we in the USA would think unconventional (or just plain nasty) as part of their daily lives. Hell, some people here eat Burger King.
To plumb the depths of disgust and horror, I will try to make sure that the problems with the food are due to their nature. I wish to pursue this topic without undue prejudice. I won’t just be making fun of things because "haha, people in other countries eat weird shit." No, the items I describe will be objectively terrible from the standpoint of what is in them or how they are made.
Anyhow, enough bullshit—on to the list.
Not ranked in any particular order.
It’s cow piss. Yup, just straight-up cow piss from the sacred cows of India. It is bottled like a supplement you’d find at a fitness store and is touted for its therapeutic properties and many fine traits and values, but...at the end of the day, it’s still just cow pee. And yeah, you are supposed to drink it.
I’m sitting here wondering, "Well, how do they obtain this? Is there a man with a tub who waits for the cow to take a whiz, and goes a-running to catch it, or some kind of cow-piss harvesting machine in play?" I have yet to find an answer to my inquiry on this.
For those who don’t know, cows are sacred in Hindu culture, and they just move wherever they want. In the rural countryside, in the busiest cities—cows exist in the middle of everything. In my mental picture, I’m supposing there’s some lonely dude watching and waiting for them to pee, and then when they do, jumping up and going for it, bringing his best whiz-catching bucket game.
This is a Chinese item prepared by the collection of young boys’ pee...in which eggs are boiled. Yes, eggs boiled in child pee. It is sold by vendors as a delicacy. I am not sure what the fuck goes on in Chinese elementary schools, but apparently, some of it involves everyone peeing into a barrel. A barrel which, in Chinese fashion, is then sold to people who wish to make bizarre food. Why do both these first two things involve urine? I’m going to try to steer away from that.
This is Korean holistic medicine. There’s no pee in it. There is poop, however. The way you make it is you have a small child between the age of 4 and 7 shit in a jar...and mix it with water and boiled rice. Wrap it in a towel and have it ferment for a month, and bingo, there you have your tongsul. Ostensibly, it’s good for the constitution and is said to cure all sorts of problems, from broken bones to epilepsy. If my doctor told me to drink child poop to cure a broken arm, I am fairly sure I’d tell that doctor to go to whatever hell they believe in. Then, if they don’t believe in any hell, I’d probably just call ’em an asshole.
This is a thing from Greenland, so you know it’s gonna be a horror. Kiviak is when you take an arctic seal, club it to death, cut its guts out, and fill the inside with hundreds of birds known as the Little Auk, or Alle Alle. You can only use this particular species of bird. Apparently, other species of birds don’t work. Then, you stitch up the seal, cover it in grease, and bury it for between 3 to 18 months. Once the requisite time has passed, you open up ol’ sealy, and take the birds out. They will, by this time, be fermented. The traditional way to consume them is to bite the heads off and suck out the juice within; the seal carcass is merely discarded.
I get it. Life in Greenland is hard, and you must make do with what you have, but I must wonder what prompted the first guy who said, "Let’s stuff birds in a dead seal so we can suck out their bird juice next year," and I wonder what his friends said after that bomb dropped.
Hailing from Sardinia, a place where they seemingly sit around all day and eat terrifying things, comes Su Callu Sardu. This is somehow more horrifying than their famous maggot cheese (casu marzu) by an order of magnitude.
What is it, you ask?
It is when one takes a baby goat that just drank its mother’s milk, slaughters it, and takes out its stomach, pours the milk through a filter, then puts the milk back in the stomach! You are supposed to pour it into the goat’s fourth stomach, known as the abomasum, which contains rennet, a necessary enzyme used to make cheese. Afterward, you are supposed to seal up that stomach, cover it in salt, and let it hang out to dry for a few months. What a windchime that must be. Once it ripens, you slice the stomach, cut it into pieces, and serve the cheese which has been made (yes, with the stomach still on it), typically on pieces of rustic bread or deep-fried in lard. The taste has been described as a mixture of ammonia, candle wax, and gasoline.
It’s pronounced "bawver yall" and means "beaver bark," which is bark in the sense of a dog’s bark, not a tree’s bark, and involves castoreum. It also would be a great Nordic death metal band name.
Castoreum is horrifying enough as is. It’s a substance squeezed from the anal glands of a beaver. If you’re over 30, then you’ve probably had it without realizing it, as it’s been used for decades as a vanilla or raspberry flavoring agent until food scientists developed better artificial flavors, which don’t require a beaver’s ass to be part of them.
Yeah, about those raspberry Dum-Dums we got when trick-or-treating in 1985... Hate to break it to you, but we all ate beaver butt sauce in sucker form. Also, ladies, be mindful. They use castoreum to manufacture perfumes to this day.
However terrible that whole business sounds, the Swedes were big fans of the stuff and said to themselves, "I would like more, and I would like to drink it." Thus, they came up with the idea to take out the beaver’s anal glands, dunk ’em in booze, soak them for a few months, then drink the schnapps that resulted. It’s been described as simultaneously tasting like pine trees, leather, and beaver piss. Damn, Sven.
That’s my list for now. Plenty of people eat plenty of terrible foodstuffs, so there may be more in the future. I think I’m just gonna have a bowl of tomato soup, a sandwich, and I will try to forget about these things.
Eat well, and enjoy life.
-Wombstretcha
Wombstretcha the Magnificent is a beaver believer, fermented bird, urine producer, writer, and retired rapper from Portland, Oregon. He can be found at Wombstretcha.com, on Twitter as @Wombstretcha503 and on Facebook (boo!) and MeWe (yay!) as "Wombstretcha The Magniflcent."
