I won't eat... What are your food limits?

[rbm]

Sometimes, regional delicacies are hard to stomache. I have eaten Norwegian rakfisk (trout weighed and marinated several months in salt water in a pail)

lutefisk (cod marinated in lye)

klippfisk (sun-dried cod)

gammalost (I have no idea but tastes like you're eating compressed sawdust)

brunost (goat's milk cooked to the softball stage)

But, there is no way I am ever going to try smalahove EVER!!! It's a complete sheep's head cooked over an open fire until the outside is charcoal. Then, they take an axe and split open the skull. Enjoy! The eyeballs are the best part.

[curlywurlyfi]

Enjoy!

[VickiA2]

Dill; I love smoked salmon but can't handle gravlax. Also olives: love the oil, hate the veg.

[Bombdog]

Green bean casserole with those french onion things from a can.....

Oh, and watermelon. It's not that I don't want it, but I am terribly allergic to it. Just the aroma of watermelon makes me want to loose the last bit of green bean casserole still in my stomach.

Try growing up in the midwest with THAT around your neck! I think it scarred me. Who can I sue?

[Mulcahy]

No cockroaches. Could probably eat grasshoppers.

Rabbit. Every time I try to order it I hear "here comes Peter Cottontail . . . ." No can do.

Taco Bell. The smell makes me queasy. Never got close to eating it because of the smell.

Also I won't eat anything, ever, that has maggots anywhere. Eeeeew.

Edited for punctuation.

Edited April 20, 2004 by Mulcahy (log)

[theabroma]

Eyes. At least knowingly and wittingly. The more sophisticated food carts in Mexico that serve taquitos de barbacoa de res (pit cooked cow's head) will part the head out and cover the evidence with tea towels. So you can select your favorite choice parts. They roll back the towel like a Gibson Girl showing ankle ... but when the contents of that part of the tray look back at you ....

That plus the texture descriptor 'gelatinous' and the jaw that had given pass to iguana, possum, and jumil bug, involuntarily locked down.

Theabroma

[mags]

No cockroaches. Could probably eat grasshoppers.

Rabbit. Every time I try to order it I hear "here comes Peter Cottontail . . . ." No can do.

Taco Bell. The smell makes me queasy. Never got close to eating it because of the smell.

Also I won't eat anything, ever, that has maggots anywhere. Eeeeew.

Edited for punctuation.

(sigh) I never ate rabbit. In fact, I had sworn an oath never to eat rabbit, because the furry little adorables scrubbing behind their ears in the Easter window of a Bleeker Street boutique reminded me so much of my beloved cat.

It's all Charlie Trotter's fault.

I broke my oath, and now I am a broken woman.

But it was really delicious.

[ccarretero77]

The first thing are peas. No matter who makes them, I don't like the texture. The other is belut. I think that is how you spell it. The egg that has the baby chick inside.

[Majra]

Raw tomatoes. Crying shame, I know, but it's a handicap my palate suffers. In a spirit of good sportsmanship and eternal optimism, every summer I ask my husband choose the best tomato in the universe for me to taste. Every summer I gag and wretch, violently, the moment it passes my lips.

Cooked tomatoes are great, though. Cooked and pureed are even better.

[morela]

things i will not eat if given the choice:

dogs: inconsistent ethical reasons

monkeys and apes: see above

spiders: they gross me out

cockroaches: see above

endangered species: anyone remember "the freshman"?

Yes, I love The Freshman! That was the best; that song...

I won't eat 17 Year Cicadas or any others for that matter. Pretty much anything with more than four limbs/legs, that makes a graphic squish sound under the weight of me in shoes...is out of the question.

If someone ever fools me into eating dog, cat or horse. I will hose them with MSG!

[whippy]

yay for today's internet connected world! we all get to geek out with full bellies, on whether or not you'd eat something even if you were starving.

but since this is a site which reaches people from all around the world, (i mean unless they don't have internet access), i want to know if anybody here has ever actually ever been starving?

like, seriously. have you ever been starving?

what was "off the table" in those desparate moments of yours?

i can't see myself murdering another viably live human being for food, but of course i've never endured genocide, nearby war or all encompassing persecution.

i think if i was starving to death i would make my pets, the loves of my life, as comfortable as possible and then suck the meat off their bones. god forbid that such a thing should come to pass, but well, i've read a bit about the history of the human race. and these things do come to pass.

what wouldn't i eat? i think like most people, when push comes to shove, the real answer is:

nothing.

[Huron St Hunt Club]

kittycat.

[auntdot]

Whippy, I was not thinking about being Donner party hungry. Most of us, I believe, were including foods we would not eat if pb&j sandwiches were the alternative (and if there is someone out there who won't eat pb&j sandwiches, you should be shunned and I don't want to hear about it).

One item I would have trouble choosing from the menu, however, is pollack guts.

We purchased a jar several years ago, from an Asian market, for a very good friend. It looked like, and was, fermented fish insides (pollack, for those who may not be aware, is a northern Atlantic food fish related to the cod).

It was a gag gift (you can interpret gag in at least two ways here) and was a big hit.

No, he did not offer to share, and I am sure the stuff did not make it past the first garbage can he saw.

Would chomp down a whole lot of Uruguayan soccer team tartare before I would take a bit of a taste of fermented pollack guts.

Just a personal preference.

[hedoness]

I assume we're talking would rather starve to death on desert island than eat, right?

Cockroaches.  Pretty much everything else, I could choke down if I had absolutely no other choice ever on this world.

I'd eat people before I'd eat most other bugs, though.

*shudder*

K

I have said pretty much the same thing throughout the years.

No Cockroaches.

I will try just about anything else.

Also, in terms of cannibalism if something can do advanced Math or speak more than one language, I won't eat it.

[carp]

Duck/chicken embryo semiformed in the egg (I forget the exact name). I saw it being eaten on a foodnetwork tv show.

A friend of mine from the Phillipines told me about this. He said it's called balot.

It didn't sound like something I would be eager to try, but I will pretty much eat anything that is well prepared.

I wouldn't eat anything they eat on Fear Factor. Although if you took... let's say a pig rectum (I saw some people on Fear Factor eating this), and prepared it really well... I might eat it.

Edited April 26, 2004 by carp (log)

[Mabelline]

Just when I thought I'd seen some extremes pretty much explored, I came across two OK Cherokee recipes for parched yellowjackets, and yellowjacket soup! O...K...I pass.

[Muffin210]

I've eaten fugu (Japanese blowfish sashimi), hakarl (Icelandic rotten shark -- accompanied by the customary shot of brennivin, or as it's endearingly known, "Black Death"), and durian, but I'd have to agree with the earlier posters about the worst food ever: yellow pasty tube fruits of death -- BANANAS!

And peanut butter would have to be a close second place.

[cambyrat]

how sad. Peanut and banana sandiches were Elvis's favorite.

[petite tête de chou]

Anything that didnt WANT me to eat it.

[whippy]

just to sort of give a quick compact view, a list of the mostly non toxic food items mentioned so far:

bugs, brains, slugs, salmon, okra, milk, orange-flavored items, beets, spicy hot food, cockroaches, testicles, maggoty cheese, snake (dead or alive), balut, black eyed peas, parsnips, spiders, livers, kidneys, rats, overcooked crucifers, internal organs in general, oatmeal, stinky cheeses, eyeballs, little debbie snack cakes, foaminess, miracle whip, sauerkraut, dogs, blue food, chitlins, 3 bean salad, tripe, buttered popcorn jelly beans, anything with cinnamon, calves' livers, tarantulas, eggs, sea urchin, lizards, durian, roquefort, fennel, cherries, non deveined shrimp, cats, oilyness, raw tuna, fermented seal oil, ritually captured air dried shark, fish marinated in fermented fish, smoked haddock, sheepshead, dill, olives, green bean casserole, watermelon, rabbit, taco bell, peas, raw tomatoes, horses, fermented fish, bananas, peanut butter.

[eatrustic]

Dates- I had a date square when I was a kid and the fibers sticking out made me think it was full of hair so to this day I will immediately spit out anything I discover that had dates in it. Eggshells in food are the next most disgusting but that's an accidental thing.

[Betts]

That corn fungus that is found in upscale Mexican restaurants. I used to have nightmares about it after working in a cornfield growing up.

Otherwise, I have a low tolerance for slime, melons and will not drink fluid milk.

[Jean Brislance]

I won't eat anything where you take meat or fish and turn it into a mayonnaise-based salad (tuna salad, chicken salad). Not my cup of tea at all!

Jean

[mags]

Nono, Jean, you don't put the tuna salad in a cup of tea. That WOULD be horrible. You may, if you like, drink a cup of tea WITH your tuna salad sandwich, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish.

[estragon]

Kidneys. Forgodsake they smell like pee! How hungry do you have to get to find that appetizing?