Thursday, May 19, 2005

What's the wildest thing you've ever eaten?

I think about food all the time, can you tell?

I wonder what makes eating a certain thing a wild and daring endeavor. You could argue it's fear of the unknown and unusual with mysterious consequences. This would make something like chicken feet exciting to you (note it's to you; chicken feet are normal to me). But what makes chicken feet exciting but moldy bread disgusting?

My pal A said the wildest thing he's ever eaten was a durian milkshake. It more or less tasted like a vanilla milkshake but with a strong aftertaste that pretty much only comes from durian. The durian taste and stigma made the drink exciting. It was okay, but probably not something he would order every time.

My pal M (not to be confused with me) said the wildest thing she's ever eaten is Korean-style marinated crab. That's the dish where you take a whole, live (I think) crab, douse it in spicy sauce, and eat it raw. Let's face it; what made this dish exciting was the prospect of eating raw crab. She didn't like it. Apparently the dish was too spicy for her taste and the crab meat was the consistency of jelly, which is a desirable feature of jelly but not crab. However, this dish is intriguing in that, to a casual observer, it is clearly the child of necessity. You can imagine a hungry fisherman in his boat in the middle of the sea, unable to build a fire, with only a jar of sauce remaining in his provisions, surrounded only by his catch and icy grey seawater.

As for me, I consider things like chicken feet, fried pig intestines, and fish intestines in egg to be normal fare. These aren't everyday dishes, mind you, since the pig intestines are definitely high in cholesterol. Oddly enough, the wildest thing I've ever eaten was a salty yogurt drink. My pal K and I once ate at a kebab restaurant and decided to try the bottled yogurt drinks in the refrigerated case. These drinks are basically thinned plain yogurt with a lot of salt. I do mean a lot. Something like 2000+ milligrams per serving. What made this wild was the sensation of drinking something made of ordinary ingredients (albeit ones I don't normally eat a lot of) in a combination I'd never tried before. The drink itself was intensely tangy and salty. I could feel my blood pressure skyrocket after the first sip.

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