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The World's Most Disgusting Delicacies

The word “globalization” conjures images of golden arches and green mermaids, symbols that promise the same oh-so-familiar flavors whether you’re in Delhi or Delaware. But there’s another side to globalization. As trade, tourism and technology shrink the planet, more Americans are being exposed to radically unfamiliar dishes from around the globe. And while these dishes — which even homebodies can experience thanks to an explosion of shows like Food Network’s “Extreme Cuisine” and Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” — may be highly prized in their homelands, to the untutored eater they are often, in a word, repulsive.

Rotten eggs. Insect larvae. Beans that have passed through a cat’s digestive tract. These are a few of the things that extreme culinary novelty-seekers choke down in their quest to sample all the delicacies the world has to offer. For writer Laura Leu, the low point was balut, a Filipino dish that consists of a fertilized duck egg. “That one was not enjoyable,” recalls Leu, who co-writes a blog called Navigeaters about her gustatory explorations. “It had bones. It had feathers. The yolk was bloody. I gagged very hard.”

Why force yourself to consume something that makes you want to vomit when you could be savoring a nice BLT? “I’m of the belief that you should try anything once,” says Leu. “I have a food bucket list, and I want to be able to tick off as many boxes as I can.” On top of that, she adds, there’s “a little bit of culinary one-upmanship”: hearing someone else talk about eating something exotic and disgusting makes her want to top it.

Fortunately, there’s no shortage of nausea-inducing foods to say you tried. Some are universally acknowledged, even in their native lands, to be acquired tastes. For instance, there’s hakarl, an Icelandic savory made from shark meat. Like many of the most palate-challenging delicacies, it gets its distinctive flavor (think rotten fish meets stinky cheese) from aggressive fermentation, which takes place during the six weeks or more the shark carcass spends buried underground.

On the other hand, some extreme delicacies sound vile but offer tastes that even a McDonalds-habituated Westerner might find pleasing. Escamoles, a Mexican dish consisting of ant larvae dug up from the roots of an agave plant, have a buttery, nutty flavor that’s earned them the nickname “Mexican caviar.” Though they can be hard to come by north of the border, the same can’t be said for kopi luwak, an Indonesian coffee made from coffee cherries eaten and then excreted by a civet cat. You can get a cup of it at Porto Rico in New York’s West Village, where it will cost you $30.

As a general rule of thumb, the further you travel from Western Europe and North America, the more the delicacies challenge Western notions of what’s delicious, or even edible. China is where you’ll find the century egg, an egg preserved for months until it turns grey, green and/or brown. It’s where you’ll find birds’ nest soup, made from the nests of the cave swift, whose saliva gives the dish its distinctive snot-like mouthfeel. And it’s where you’ll find drunken shrimp, prepared by tossing live crustaceans into strong alcohol and eating them while they’re still wriggling. “That one didn’t taste bad,” says Leu, “but it made my soul feel bad.”