[nickcarraway]

This would make a great picnic.

[mlocher]

Andrew Zimmern Ping!

[chris37]

Oh wow! And I thought I did something noteworthy when I ate escargot...

[Richard Kimball]

Somewhere, someone was the first person to eat a raw oyster.

[MS.BEHAVIN]

PING

[DryFly]

One word: NATTO.

Fermented soy beans that develop a sticky slimy coating and which smell like a dirty jockstrap. Not surprisingly they taste just as bad. I tried it in a sushi house and although I can and have eaten just about everything, I nearly lost my whole dinner right there on the spot.

[Age of Reason]

The Boodog sounds great!

I’d go for some of that.

[Allegra]

I can get all this stuff at WholeFoods, right?

[Bean Counter]

Deep Fried Twinkies.

[LadyDoc]

YUM BALUT!

Can’t be worse than eating raw oysters, or deep fried prarie oysters!

[glorgau]

Nothing beat Durian fruit.

[PA Engineer]

Drunken shrimp -- you may have seen a dish by this name on a menu in your country, but those are usually cooked. In Shanghai, drunken shrimp is not only raw -- it's alive !! Now I've heard many a Shanghai person talk with disgust about how the Cantonese eat all sorts of weird creatures, but eating a live animal is as weird as it gets. OK, some Americans eat raw oysters, which are actually alive also, but these Shanghai shrimp have little claws -- they bite back as you try to eat them.

[Sgt_Schultze]

Balut

[a fool in paradise]

Corn Smut, or Huitlacoche For years farmers in the U.S. tried to avoid the fungal infection called corn smut. But Americans are discovering the tasty treat people in central and southern Mexico never stopped eating. "It looks like a stalk of corn that looks like a brain, it's all lumpy but it's grey," said Dr. Christine Gerbstadt, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. Once the fungus infects the corn, the kernels expand and change color to various shades of grey and black. As the fungus grows it also changes the corn's flavor and adds nutrients. "It has tons of fiber, it also has beta-glucans which it's a kind of carbohydrate, and it's got a lot of other free sugars, which is very unusual for a mushroom," said Gerbstadt. Corn smut, called huitlacoche in Latin America, also adds cancer protecting antimutigens and lysine to the corn, Gerbstadt said.

Any relation to the fungal infection in rye that causes people to hallucinate? LSD is a synthetic version of it.

[aruanan]

The civet cat coffee beans look a bit like PayDay candy bars. I’m sure they are for someone along the chain.