Foreign Queasine/Sandbox


 * Casu marzu, or maggot cheese, is a delicacy on the island of Sardinia. It is made by fermenting pecorino cheese until rotten, and adding live maggots to the cheese in the advanced stages of fermentation. If you aren't squicked out enough yet, if you don't chew the maggots when eating it or suffocate them in a bag beforehand, they can survive in your digestive tract and chew holes in your stomach, causing vomiting and bloody diarrhea.
 * Wait, it gets worse. It's runny. Very, very runny. And the maggots mentioned above? If you don't remove them by suffocating them or whatever, the maggots are able to leap up to six inches above the surface of the cheese. Hilariously, this edible Nightmare Fuel Was illegal in the only place people are crazy enough to eat it, the island of Sardinia. By declaring it a cultural heritage food, they were able to legalize it through a loophole in an unrelated law.
 * Nicaragua has something similar. A local fly is allowed to lay eggs in the cheese, which is then eaten with the larvae still moving.
 * In Norway, whale and seal meat is available even if some foreigners find it repulsive -- it is generally considered luxury food due to the current low level of whaling. Other classics include:
 * Lutefisk, dried cod, reconstituted and cured in soda lye water. Norwegians--and their American descendants --themselves jokingly call the stuff "a penance before God" (rather like sprouts and inedible fruit-cake at Christmas in Britain, lutefisk must be eaten on certain occasions). It literally dissolves silverware.
 * Smalahovud, a burnt, salted and boiled whole sheep's head.
 * Surströmming, Swedish "soured (Baltic) herring") is a northern Swedish dish consisting of fermented Baltic herring. A Japanese study has shown that the smell of a newly opened can of surströmming is the most putrid smell of food in the world.
 * Rakfisk and gravlaks, both basically fish that has been partially decomposed by storing it in salt solution (the former) or simply by burying it in the sand for a few days (the latter). Due to the inherent sanitary issues, one traditionally serves a piece of it to the cat first to check for botulism -- if the cat dies, the fish has gone inedible. If it lives, the fish has merely gone almost inedible.
 * Gravlaks is usually just the salted salmon not unlike what you'd find in any deli, it's just that the preparation is somewhat unusual.
 * Gamalost, a cheese that is almost entirely mouldy by design and whose smell has been known to knock grown men out.
 * Moelje, a dish that literally means "mess", a north-Norwegian fish stew made from the stomach, liver and roe of cod during mating season -- once boiled until the colour's drained out of it, the actual meat is added. Traditionally served with lots of onion to (slightly) obscure the otherwise overwhelming taste of unfiltered cod liver oil.
 * Preserved cod liver is a popular sandwich spread in Russia.
 * There is something called kakashere-pörkölt in Hungary. The literal translation to English for that would be rooster's balls stew (the pun possibilities using a different word...).
 * Iceland has hákarl, which, prepared traditionally, is shark that has been decapitated and gutted, buried under a layer of sand and stones for 6 to 12 weeks, then cut into strips and hung for several months. The end product reeks of ammonia. In an episode of The F Word host Gordon Ramsay ate some with stomach-turning results.
 * The shark is simply one part of traditional Icelandic queasine, which is traditionally enjoyed at least once during the Icelandic "Thorri" season (late January to early February. Other items on the menu include; sviðasulta (lamb head-cheese), lundabaggi (jellied sheep fat), svið (singed whole sheep heads) and hrútspungar (pickled ram's testicles).
 * The French are known for eating horse (though the Italians consume the most per head), frogs and snails, and dog is actually regularly eaten some places on the continent. In parts of both Italy and the southern United States, fried frogs are a traditional dish.
 * There's only one village in Slovakia where slaughtering dogs annually for a special dish is common - Valaská. Some rural areas in the Czech republic have the same weird tradition, but instead of dogs, they use cats (humourously covered up by referring to cat meat as "roof rabbit steak").
 * Similarly, homeless people in New York City who've grown desperate enough to catch rats in the subway system refer to these rodents as "track rabbits".
 * In the era of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, rats were called "millers" when prepared for eating, because the best rats were those caught feeding on the flour stores.
 * A CNN news story from the early 1990s profiled a restaurant in China that specialized in serving farmed rat. The restaurant's name translated euphemistically to "Super Deer".
 * Many cultures include offal in their traditional dishes, but there are fewer ones that would consider bird saliva and shark cartilage as expensive delicacies. China does.
 * Most Chinese draw the line at bugs, although there may be exceptions. Just about everything else is fair game.
 * Including congealed blood.
 * Which, to be fair, is also eaten enthusiastically in many parts of Europe.
 * There's actually a saying in a region of China that's particularly infamous even inside the country for its queasine that says they'll eat anything on four legs that's not a chair, anything with wings that's not a plane, and anything that swims that's not a boat.
 * Many people in this region still frown upon eating dogs and cats and endangered species. According to rumor, the government banned eating dogs and cats so other countries wouldn't talk about Chinese people eating dogs and cats. This is indeed uncommon, but it is still easy to find a restaurant which will prepare these for you. And in northern China--especially the rural regions, it's pretty easy to find packaged ready-to-eat dog meat (along with the donkey meat, horse meat...).
 * There is even a saying in China, "the yellow and black-haired dogs are good for eating"
 * There is also a dish which is often translated as "stinky tofu". The smell is not unlike human feces, but strangely, has almost zero taste. Little stands of tofu carts can be found everywhere in all the major cities, but hours of operation tends to be restricted to nights.
 * It's often referred to as the "blue cheese of china". Fittingly, some recipes for preparation use the same bacteria used in some Blue Cheese recipes.
 * Pizza Hut had faced a challenge in expanding into China, where cheese was regarded as disgusting Considering that cheese may be considered milk deliberately put to spoil by bacteria, we may get their point.
 * There's a simple reason for this. Most Asians(notable exceptions being Mongols and South Asians) have a genetic bias towards lactose intolerance, and as such, the smell of milk is itself off-putting to adults who were not raised on large quantities of milk(which apparently epi-genetically encourages the cultivation of lactase within the body).
 * One part of China is famous for their "snake wine," that is, dead snakes soaked in wine, then drunk.
 * There is a variant where they put giant millipedes the size of her forearm and giant wasps the size of her thumb in wine. Whether they actually drink it or not...
 * The Chinese have 100-year-old egg (often described as "rotten" by Westerners) as a delicacy, but they are neither 100-years-old, nor are they rotten -- they are pickled in straw and lye for several months. They are indeed something of an acquired taste.
 * To give an idea how unusual it looks, the egg whites are black and yolk is dark green.
 * Basically, it looks like a fossilized egg. Still curious on how it got it's name?
 * They're called Century Eggs, by the way, which kinda has a nicer ring than 100-year-old egg. Plus it's easier on the tongue phonetically.
 * And it is more true to the fact that gave them their name: They can be stored for a very long time.
 * The albumen(white) can be either tasteless(in which case it is a little like bland gelatin/jelly) or somewhat bitter(due to the lye leaking through the shell in higher quantities). The yolk has a consistency somewhat similar to that of a near hard-boiled egg's, but with a stronger smell and taste(again, dependant on the level of lye leaked).
 * Cold, sliced jellyfish can be found on the menu at more comprehensive Chinese seafood restaurants. The flavor of the jellyfish is so mild as to nearly be non-existent (particularly if paired with a strong sauce), although the texture (quite chewy with a bit of a crunch to it) is rather evident.
 * To be more exact, it's usually served as an appetizer or starter along with other cold dishes.
 * Just like a century egg and lutefisk above, it's usually lye-pickled before eating, but unlike the eggs and cod, it actually improves taste and texture of the dish. Lye congeals the jellyfish proteins, making it possible to eat the damn invertebrate, instead of drinking it.
 * These tend to be the more famous of the chinese pub grub. Others include stewed pork stomach, cow tongue, marinated pig feet, poultry necks and feet, and pickled liver of pigs and cow. Even more fittingly, the drink that accompanies all of these is Baiju, which is universally panned by westerners to taste like undistilled gasoline, but is considered to be better than most foreign wines in China.
 * After all that about Chinese, let's talk Vietnamese. Similar to China, a type of swallow's saliva, which looks and tastes just like vermicelli, is one of the traditional medicine, and very expensive in Vietnam. Vietnamese also consumes congealed blood (either duck or pig), mixed with peanuts, spice herbs and cooked duck innards. Same thing with snake wine and millipedes, but Vietnam goes further with bear's hands and feet, a few specific kinds of bird, and bees. There might be more. Bugs, while not very popular (because of the use of pesticides), can be found in few delicacy restaurant. Jellyfish, either dried or served fresh, is considered a delicacy.
 * And similar to Korean, Vietnamese does use silk worm larva for food, as well as dog meat. And horse. And pigeon. And frogs. And toads. Rats, too. Pretty much everything.
 * Also to the mention of fish sauce in Southeast Asian culture below, Vietnamese has a variety of sauces, be it fish, shrimp, or crabs. Fish sauce is the most standard, every day use dipping sauce, and variations are generally slight. Shrimp sauce, however, has a great variety, from shrimp paste (the smell is an acquired taste, even among Vietnamese), to fermented shrimp (still retains the shape) in sweet and source sauce. There is also a rươi sauce, a specific kind of worm that's only available in a few weeks in a year. This type of worm can also be fried with eggs and lemon peels.
 * The most famous piece of asian Queasine is the Balut, a fertilized egg who's embryo was allowed to develop for a good few days. It is then boiled and cracked open on a plate to be "enjoyed". In laymen's terms, you're eating a bird fetus, just barely growing feathers and bones are just developed enough to give a crunch. Not to mention the white will never solidify during boiling, instead pouring out like the contents of some unholy uterus onto your plate.
 * Many Americans are squicked at a favorite British meat pie filling: steak and kidney. Black Pudding (a sausage made of blood and fat) garnered a similar response.
 * Blood sausages are a staple in a surprising number of countries.
 * In Finland, blood pancakes and (in northern regions) soup with potatoes, pork and something made out of blood, beer, rye and spices. The latter is an extremely divisive dish.
 * Finns routinely eat reindeer meat and blood sausages (+ blood pancakes). Horse meat is usually only found in sausages, but still eaten without a second thought. Then there's of course the famous salmiakki, which gets its distinctive flavour from ammonium chloride, and a kind of liquorice that's flavoured with tar. A Finnish favourite for weirding out foreigners is Mämmi, a kind of dessert made from rye that, thanks to its outward resemblance to excrement really doesn't look appetizing.
 * Salty liquorice (aka salmiak) is a favourite in the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. It's nearly unavailable even in the neighbouring countries.
 * It's known in South Africa, though mostly among the Dutch (and imported). Not even Afrikaners (who are not the same thing as Dutch) eat them, generally.
 * In the Philippines, There's "balut"; duck embryo still in the egg. And there's dinuguan. The main ingredients are pig's blood and intestines. It's more like a spicy stew than some outlandish blood-broth, but the "pig's blood" part can still cause squeamishness. Also, the blood is black.
 * Bird embryo in eggs are delicacies in other Asian countries as well. Often pickled, and the bones are crunchy.
 * Balut is also a Vietnamese dish/delicacy known as hột vịt lộn in Vietnamese.
 * Speaking of blood, street food vendors let pig blood stand until they coagulate and solidify. They are then sliced into cubes and roasted. They call it "betamax."
 * Similarly, one of the principal ingredients of the Balinese dish lawar is fresh pig's blood.
 * Honeypot ants. They're a type of worker that just chills out on the ceiling of the tunnels, storing food in its butt section. Generally they only live in the desert, they get to be about the size of grapes, and some people eat them, the food is some kind of sweet nectar or something.
 * Sir David Attenborough once ate one on camera for a documentary. He proclaimed it was like a sweeter than normal, liquid, honey.
 * Those ants are known to be eaten by Australian Aboriginals, along with witchetty grubs, a favourite for Squicking out other Aussies.
 * Lemon ants are eaten in Ecuador. They're extremely small rainforest insects that actually do taste faintly of lemon.
 * Many Africans find the aroma of cinnamon unbearably nasty, simply because it's a flavoring virtually unknown in African cuisine.
 * To the extent that the Apartheid government of South Africa contemplated weaponizing it as a Malodorant. The US army picked up on this and, interested in Malodorants themselves, tested various different nations tolerances to "Foreign" food-odours with interesting results: Germans were disgusted by levels of fishy odours that Japanese people found tolerable, whereas Germans considered caraway and cumin pleasant smells whereas most Japanese people exposed to them found them objectionable in the same levels. They were however unable to find a food odour objection to all non-Americans but tolerable to the vast majority of Americans (as had been their plan) and the project was scrapped.
 * "Sweetbreads" (internal organs like the thymus gland and pancreas) aren't considered acceptable by most Americans except regionally, and then seldom at the same time. "Sweetbreads" are a big source of vitamins for people with no access to citrus fruits, though.
 * Haggis (the heart, lungs and liver of a sheep boiled in its own stomach) is the subject of widespread Squick. Really it's very similar to sausage.
 * Sheep's Head Jelly is eaten in Iceland. It's ubiquitous enough that the endcap freezer units in grocery stores there will sometimes have two-packs of frozen sheep's heads in plastic bags.
 * Czernina is a soup from Poland made of duck's blood and lots of different fruit (plus some noodles).
 * It's actually fairly exclusive to the Kujawia region of Poland. If you were to serve it to anyone from any other region, they would likely turn their nose up at it.
 * Scrapple is frequently described as "every part of the pig but the oink", which should mean that the gray loaf of pressed cornmeal and offal tastes horrendous. Many, many people like it, and its near relative, "headcheese".
 * Headcheese (mostly head, no cheese) is common component of the banh mi, a popular Vietnamese sandwich.
 * Conversely, people in scrapple-producing regions often can't stand hominy grits, and vice versa. In the Low Country of Deep South, grits are enjoyed in soup, mixed with cheese and ground-up seafood.
 * Roasted and sliced horse penis is considered a completely acceptable inclusion into some Asian meals. In parts of Mongolia, boiled testicles are a semi-common food. When you live on the most barren land in the entire world, you have to save all you can of a kill.
 * In most of South-east Asia durian fruit is considered absolutely delicious. To most of the western world it tastes like it smells - like week old rotten garbage.
 * The smell of durian is polarizing. In Singapore for example, durians may be enjoyed, but they're still banned from the subway.
 * In the Philippines, there's an old saying for those about to try Durian for the first time. Lasang langit, amoy impyerno. (Tastes like heaven, smells like hell.)
 * Anthony Bourdain, a lover of the durian, has said "Its taste can only be described as...indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother." According to travel and food writer Richard Sterling, "... its odor is best described as pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock. It can be smelled from yards away."
 * Oddly enough, its most fervent follower was perhaps the great naturalist Alfred Wallace (that guy who co-discovered natural selection with Darwin himself), who later called himself a "confirmed durian eater", as he felt the need to label people based on it like you would a smoker or a cocaine user.
 * The Midwest has the Brain Sandwich, pig (formerly cow) brain breaded and deep fried served on a bun. Most people won't make it to the "deep fried" part before losing their appetite, it's actually quite tasty.
 * In Germany, a popular meal during autumn is Braunkohl und Bregenwurst, which is boiled borecole a.k.a. green cabbage with a sausage traditionally filled with minced cow brain and herbs. (In some regions, the Braunkohl is instead called 'Grünkohl'', but it's the same plant, which has to be picked after the first frosty night.) These days, what with Mad Cow Disease, the sausages do not contain actual animal brain anymore, though.
 * P'tcha, popular with Eastern European Jews, basically consists of calves' hooves, boiled until gelatinous, then stewed with garlic and boiled eggs.
 * Even most people who love Jello don't realize it, but gelatin itself is typically made of collagen -- rendered animal connective issue.
 * Less technobabbly: they boil cow/pig hooves and hides until all the proteins give up, and then evaporate the bouillion. Voila, the gelatin.
 * Marmite, notorious for having its lovers and haters in England.
 * Dog meat is a common food in Korea. In fact, walking through the numerous open-air markets there can be a real eye-opener (and mouth closer) for foreigners.
 * During the olympics in 1988, they stopped all restaurants from serving dog meat, much to the chagrin of foreigners who wanted to eat it.
 * Another example from Korea: kimchi. A side-dish served with almost every meal, it is cabbage that has been (when prepared traditionally) fermented by burying it in clay pots for several weeks. It is very strong-smelling, and the odor will stay with you for days. This description turns off most Westerners, but the flavor is very similar to spicy sauerkraut.
 * Depends on what it's made of. Korea literally has over 100 types of kimchi ranging from extremely bitter, to spicy, to sweet.
 * On the upside, It turns out that the essence of kimchi gives you the powers of a king.
 * Two more from Korea: Bondegi, or pickled silkworm larva, which have a rather nutty taste, much like walnuts. And, of course, Sannakji, or live octopus. They're both acquired tastes for Westerners. Most US soldiers are either tricked into eating the former and told what it is; or they eat a multi-course meal that served the latter (most of us will at least try it, so as not to be considered a pussy.)
 * Some places serve it live-and-lightly-cooked, and others flash-fry it on a galbi grill and throw it in a delicious and spicy broth.
 * In many South American countries the meat from a cow's head is routinely consumed. It's even split into various categories: trompa (lips), lengua (tongue), cabeza (literally "head" but refers to the muscle tissue of the skull), and sesos (brains)
 * Tongue is sold in a lot of Mexican-friendly grocery stores in the U.S. And the cheek meat of the "cabeza" (i.e. barbacoa) is just as popular in Tex-Mex cuisine as it is in Mexican cuisine. There are even places that sell it "regular" (vs. "all meat"), i.e. with all of the head bits, including the eyeballs.
 * Tongue is somewhat common in Eastern European cuisines as well. Makes a good deli meat too, especially with mustard.
 * Kiviak is a Canadian Inuit delicacy which involves fermenting seabirds in the stomach of a dead seal, then taking those seabirds and sucking their guts out through the anus.
 * From the same area of the world, "Eskimo ice cream" (properly known as akutaq) consists of whipped fat (traditionally seal, walrus, or caribou; modern versions use Crisco shortening) mixed with berries and sometimes meat (and in modern variations, sugar).
 * Pemmican, a First Nations dish from the Canadian Prairies, is dried buffalo meat, with berries and fat pounded into it, and was a common way to stay fed on the trek out to open farmland on the great trip West.
 * Hunting in Canada is still very much alive, and hunters will eat what they kill. Usually this just means moose, deer, rabbit, pheasant, etc, but people have been known to eat pretty much anything with a season. This includes beaver, bear, fox, and muskrat (beaver tails in particular are rich in fat and were/are considered a delicacy.)
 * There's a cheery French-Canadian song called "alouette", which means skylark. However, as the song progresses, it becomes clear that the lyrics are about plucking the bird in preparation for being cooked. Yes, French-Canadian settlers used to eat songbirds. This practice has since died out. (For some added fun, this song is the namesake of the Montreal Alouettes.)
 * Tripe – usually made from the lining of a cow’s stomach, is popular in some parts of Europe. Usually, the first three chambers of the cow’s stomach are used, giving a variety in texture (the fourth chamber has a lot of glands, giving it a weird texture and flavor that even tripe-eating cultures typically leave alone). It’s usually boiled in water for a few hours, with some salt.
 * It's also quite popular in Filipino households.
 * It's common in pho, a Vietnamese dish of broth and noodles.
 * Also in the Latin American dish mondongo.
 * And in the Mexican soup called "menudo". Again, just as popular in Tex-Mex cuisine, and nearly every American of Mexican descent has a family recipe for menudo. It's also considered a mighty good hangover cure. There's even canned, pre-made menudo out on the market (Juanita's brand being arguably the best).
 * Crawfish (also known as crayfish, crawdads, mudbugs, etc...), which despite its name looks more like a bug than a fish.
 * The Popeye's fast-food chain in the United States, which has a New Orleans theme (which specializes in chicken) features crawfish on its menu; any restaurant that has a serious claim to present New Orleans/Cajun-style cuisine will offer crawfish as well.
 * Also here in the states is Joe's Crab Shack with a steam pot called 'The Orleans'. One pound of Crawfish for you to shell.
 * Crawfish are eaten in parts of Scandinavia as a seasonal delicacy, though served very differently to the Cajun style.
 * The issue is a lobster is a giant bug. When you start to scale it back down people realize exactly what it looks like.
 * Also popular in Russia. To Russians, a crawfish is not a small lobster; a lobster is a bloated mutant crawfish!
 * Jakes's in Portland, Oregon, is so famous for it's crawfish that it's actually called "Jake's Famous Crawfish". Delicious, but expensive.
 * Crawfish is really like small lobsters. If you like lobster/crab, you'll probably like Crawfish tails (which most commercial dishes consist primarily of). So-called "true" connoisseurs of the dish however, will insist that you also partake of their heads as well, as in sucking them out through the separated back end eyes and all.
 * Speaking of Russia, the original Siberian pelmeni (as made by the native peoples) contained meat ground by chewing. Modern Russian ones, of course, don't.
 * Another Siberian specialty is stroganina, which is frozen raw meat cut in thin slices.
 * Raw fish (sashimi, though it' can really mean any raw meat) used to be this to a lot of Americans, though it's become quite popular in recent decades. Sashimi is the stuff that may make you a bit more sick. Granted, seafood has that tendency, but sometimes the bacteria was killed because it was fermented.
 * Pork rinds (which is, when you get right down to it, fried pieces of pork skin).
 * Chicharon.
 * And then Chicharon Bulaklak, which is basically the Pig Intestines cooked as Chicharon.
 * Mmm, "chicharrones". Or "fried pork rinds". Which was former president George (the elder Bush) H.W. Bush's favorite snack. They could also be found either scrambled in egg or softened up in a gravy and put into a tortilla as a Tex-Mex breakfast taco.
 * Speaking of parts of the pig, their feet, which are mostly skin and fat, are a common delicacy among older African-Americans.
 * A great many people from India would consider beef to be a perfect example of this.
 * Octopus and squid. A lot of people get queasy at the thought of eating boneless critters with lots of tentacles, but they're quite popular in many maritime cultures.
 * That calimari you ordered at the Italian restaurant the other day? Yeah, it's fried squid. Italy has a lot of different preparations for calimari (which simply means "squid" in Italian): For example, the Barese (from Bari, in Apulia), sometimes take whole squid, remove the tentacles and gut them. They then take the mantle (body) portion, stuff it with an egg-and-breadcrumb mixture, sew the opening shut and boil it. It's served in a tomato sauce, in which has also been cooked the tentacles and some parts of the mantle that were cut off during cleaning. Sometimes it's served with the thread that binds the mantle shut for cooking still in place, which can be a bit offputting over and above the whole squid thing.
 * Stuffed squid with rice and vegetables is a popular deli meal in Russia.
 * When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers drafted Charley Hannah, their food-loving defensive coach Abe Gibron took him out to a seafood restaurant. Hannah later said of Gibron's plateful of octopus and squid, "He was eating stuff we wouldn't even swim with in Alabama".
 * From the American South, there are chitterlings/chitlins, or pig intestines, but even down there they're an acquired taste.
 * Mexican chorizo is a highly-spiced breakfast sausage, often fried with eggs, that (like many other types of sausage) contains pigs' lymph nodes, salivary glands, lips, and other unsavory bits. However, it's delicious.
 * Mexican cuisine (not the non cuisine that is known abroad) has several meals that could be considered squicky to foreign palates. Like jumiles or chapulines (fried grasshoppers, that taste like pork rinds). Huitlacoche, pictured above, is considered a delicacy.
 * Consider not all mexican dishes are equally liked in the whole country. What is loved in one state may be considered revolting in other. Jumiles and Chapulines are mostly liked on the south-west for example.
 * And don't forget Molé. Granted, it's a lot tamer than some of the other stuff, but it actually uses chocolate in the sauce - And not the sweet stuff you remember; Chocolate is actually quite bitter in its natural form of Cacao. (It took quite awhile before Europeans made it into a nice creamy treat, even when the Spanish conquered Mexico they drank cacao the way the Aztecs enjoyed it).
 * It's hard to properly duplicate, but if you want to try Aztec hot chocolate, the easiest way is to take a couple of spoonfuls of cocoa powder, a pinch of salt, and (optionally) a dash of cayenne pepper, add some hot water, and mix furiously (the chocolate won't dissolve). It's actually pretty good, though the flavor of unsweetened chocolate tends to catch a lot of people (at the very least) off guard.
 * And mole isn't the only place chocolate is used. Cincinnati chili uses chocolate and a generous helping of Greek spices like cinnamon and allspice, and the Catalan picada is a garlicky, chocolaty bread sauce that's used as a flavoring and thickening. Not to mention that cocoa-crusted fish is, if rare, not unknown in New American cooking.
 * Many people outside the Deep South and Southeast Asia think sweet tea (tea made very strong, heavily sweetened, and then diluted and chilled) sounds terrible. American Southerners and Southeast Asians also have a minor beef with each other in that Southeast Asian sweet tea is made with jasmine tea (green tea flavored with jasmine flowers), while Southern sweetea (one word) is made with black tea.
 * Speaking of Southeast Asia, they enjoy a wide variety of unusual hybrid beverages, including:
 * Salty Lemonade (made with fermented lemons, sugar, and salt, garnished with a pickled lemon slice). Italian-style lemon soda is a popular alternative.
 * Fruit cocktails infused with bizarre aspics, in the shape of little Jello balls. Think tapioca pudding, but drinkable.
 * I think you mean Halo-Halo...And/or The Zagu line of Pearl Shakes.
 * Bubble tea? Durian flavor is often available, for bonus points, though the frozen durian available in the U.S. is said to be much milder than the fresh variety.
 * Some find rice pudding and tapioca pudding disgusting and/or foreign, despite its ubiquity.
 * Southeast Asia also has fermented fish sauce, and fish paste, which looks, smells and tastes exactly what it sounds like, but adds a nice flavor when cooked. Heavily, heavily cooked. Thai and Vietnamese pour it directly into dishes like ketchup, however. The Ancient Romans did the same thing.
 * Southeast Asian cuisine also has fermented shrimp paste, which also smells and tastes what it sounds like, and has to be heavily cooked for it to be edible.
 * A similar kind of fish-sauce is patis from the Philippines, the by-product of bagoong. It's used as a condiment for nearly every savory meal.
 * Time for an Older Than Feudalism example! In ancient Sparta, one of the staples of the training messes was black broth, which was pork cooked in blood and seasoned with vinegar and salt. The few outsiders that went to Sparta usually hated it.
 * As far as Utah is considered "foreign," some of the Jello dishes that happen there are definitely Foreign Queasine. For example, green Jello with grated sharp cheddar cheese in it, or Jello with frozen mixed vegetables in it. Come to think of it, aspic, something of a proto-Jello, definitely counts as this, being pretty much savory meat Jello with what appears to be a full Sunday dinner suspended in it.
 * But on the other hand, Jello can be used to make things like these, which are as delicious as they look.
 * Hotdogs, especially when cooked under a hot lamp. To older and more traditional Brits who were hoping for the reassuring white bits, and pink bits, and those green bits you hope like hell are herbs, they just look odd.
 * The Explorers Club is known for having exotic fare (Yak Wellington, sweet-and-sour bovine penis, maggot-covered strawberries, scorpions on toast, earthworm stir-fry, mealworm maki, and assorted insect appetizers according to one Epicurious story).
 * Bugs are often eaten in Southeast Asia for protein.
 * Lampreys are a delicacy in parts of Europe, but most Americans are revolted by the idea of eating one. The Great Lakes are suffering from a severe infestation of lampreys, and one of the best ways to clear it up would be to introduce lampreys to the American palate. In fact the authorities are pushing the idea, but so far it hasn't gained much of any traction.
 * Fish sauce, used in Ancient Rome (known as garum or liquamen) and parts of modern Asia, is made by packing whole fish (usually anchovies) and salt into wooden crates and pressing and collecting the liquid produced as the fish ferments, during which process it smells so bad that garum producers in Ancient Rome had to live and work outside of city limits.
 * The best garum was usually made on the north of the Iberian peninsula, particularly around the cities of Barcino (Barcelona) and Tarraco (Tarragona). Some entrepreneurs tried to reintroduce garum as a new product, made from pressing olives and anchovies instead of letting the fish rot. They weren't particularly successful.
 * They are breaking the open door. The worchestershire sauce is essentially a modern version of garum, though it's spiced differently.
 * Konowata, and shiokara in general.
 * Concha fina, a Spanish delicacy. It's a small shellfish resembling a clam, and it's eaten live.
 * Eating mussels or a crab feast (where you crack open and suck the meat out of the crabs, not just eating it in crab cakes) can seem very gross and barbaric at first to people who grew up in areas where seafood is less common, like the Midwestern USA (yes, we have the Great Lakes, but freshwater cuisine and seafood are very different beasts).
 * Indonesia has Kopi Luwak. Specifically, coffee beans that have been consumed, digested and excreted by a native cat-sized mammal. Apprentley digesting the beans removes the bitterness from them. Its also considered a delicacy, costing over US$400 per pound.
 * Plenty of people, and cultures, consider it perfectly revolting to put milk in tea.
 * Apparently Vegemite is considered disgusting in other countries. It's not helped by the fact that foreigners slather it onto bread as though it's jam; i.e., far too thickly. It's best used VERY sparingly, with plenty of butter. Aussies are usually too busy laughing to correct people.
 * It seems that there is a laundry list of foods that those outside of the central/midwest/southern portion of the U.S. find gut-wrenching. Many people (even those in those areas) have expressed their displeasure at frog legs, possum, squirrel, rabbit, rocky mountain oysters/lamb fries (testicles), gizzards (digestive organ of a chicken), chitlins (fried pig intestines), and even something as seemingly not squick-worthy as american goulash (tomato, ground beef, beans, cheese, small pasta, and perhaps sour cream).
 * In Montana, there's an annual "Testicle Festival" that attracts rowdys and malcontents from all over looking for that extra shot of testosterone from properly-cooked bull testicles.
 * Also called Rocky Mountain Oysters, but don't let the name fool you.
 * Not to be confused with Prarie Oysters, a kind of Hideous Hangover Cure that most famously involves a raw egg and lots of black pepper, though they are sometimes also called that.
 * However even most people from Colorado would Squick at the thought of it.
 * Given that gelding animals is standard practice in herding cultures worldwide, it's actually quite common to find recipes that make use of testicles. The main black holes as far as this kind of dish goes are Jewish and Muslim cuisines, not because of any aversion to testicles or gelding but because both Muslim and Jewish law forbid eating parts derived from a currently living animal or animal that might still be alive.
 * Alligator is a favorite down in Cajunland. Along with snakes, turtles, deer heart, boudan (made from liver and stuffed in pig intestines), and bullfrogs.
 * In the United States, the Luther is a hamburger with a glazed doughnut for a bun and two or more strips of bacon is a specialty in some shops. This tends to disgust just about every person who first hears of it. Deep fried Twinkies tend to get this reaction too, but they get that just as often even inside the USA.
 * And how about the double down? Fried chicken breasts in place of the buns.
 * Which is no worse than a two piece chicken breast meal. placing two buns will be overkill.
 * Other deep-fried foods that get this reaction are deep-fried Mars bars and deep-fried frozen pizza (made by literally dumping a still-frozen pizza in the deep-fat fryer), both served in Scotland. Apparently, as the frozen pizza melts, it acts as a sponge for grease, thoroughly squicking people out with the idea of that much grease. Despite that, things like Deep Fried Cola is no worse than a kneecap donut, except you relace the sugar with cola syrup.
 * Paula Dean once showed how to fry a cheesecake (by wrapping it in a wonton).
 * In a few parts of the Deep South, old-style restaurants serve butter in spigots, like... popcorn butter. Restaurants exist where chicken-fried (i.e. deep-fried & battered) steak is served in a lake of the stuff.
 * And the heart-stopping king is the Fried Butter served at the Texas Fair. Not that it tastes bad, but you may as well just start taking lard intravenously.
 * Crubeens are an Irish food. Definitely an acquired taste, though not many are willing to acquire it once they're informed that it's pickled pigs feet.
 * Dilisk has been eaten in Ireland for at least 1,400 years. It is a good source of fiber, iodine and various proteins and minerals. It is also dried seaweed, which some consider objectionable.
 * In the maritime provinces of Canada (possibly the eastern US, too, but don't quote me on that), it's called dulse. It's quite salty, but locals seem to love it.
 * Dilisk is also called dulse in Ireland, not just a Canadian thing. Unlike nori, it's purple and sometimes treated a bit like candy. Takes some getting if you aren't used to it.
 * Nori is the same way. It's literally sheets of dried seaweed, and it literally is eaten by the sheet in Hawaii, but some outsiders consider it extremely squicky.
 * The really funny thing about nori is that it's a key ingredient in genuine sushi (as in the dish, rather than the rice after which it is named). You can find some folks more squicked by the fact that they're eating seaweed than the fact that they're eating raw fish.
 * Extra strange because Japanese-style nori actually just has a very fishy taste with a papery/crunchy texture.
 * In Iraq, goat heart is considered a delicacy.
 * Poutine is a Canadian creation that some people, mainly Americans, seem to think sounds gross. It's french fries smothered in gravy and cheese curds, and it's delicious. It's even served at Canadian KF Cs. In Quebec, there are places that have 'specialty' poutine with meat, veggies, multiple types of cheese, etc. added to it.
 * The timeless Canadian maritime traditions of eating pickled oysters on crackers and stewed fiddleheads. Fiddleheads, by the way, are baby ferns. Yes. Ferns.
 * Arguably, the national dish of Canada is the much derided Kraft Dinner, macaroni coated in reconstituted powdered cheese sauce, traditionally topped with a ketchup smiley face. Enjoy!
 * KD and tube steaks, a proud Canadian dorm room tradition, is Kraft Dinner Macaroni and Cheese, nauseating on it's own, but still a Canadian staple, and chunks of hot dog. Add ketchup for flavour.
 * Canada's other notable culinary failings include Habitant pea soup, which is arguable the Kraft Dinner of French-Canada, a gelatinous canned substance with the consistency of wet gravel.
 * A Soviet defector wrote a book which mentions in passing how the spy service tried to cure his phobia toward frogs and reptiles. They showed him a film of French people eating frog legs, but he felt the movie was faked, because there was a dog sitting near one of the tables, and who would eat frog when dog meat was available?
 * One delicacy in certain parts of India and Southeast Asia is fish head curry, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin (not that you can get it in tins, thankfully) - a whole fish head stewed with veggies in a soupy sort of curry. The squeamish can usually get away with eating the more... normal parts of the head, along with the assorted vegetables. However, aficionados particularly prize the fish's mouth parts and eye sockets. Even among fans, most people - save a very "special" few - generally don't go for the eyeballs or brain.
 * Baked salmon heads are quite popular in Eastern Russia as well. They are also often used for soup.
 * There's a popular joke/urban legend that Chinese food resturants use cat meat instead of chicken or pork. Taken to it's logical conclusion in an episode of Robot Chicken where not only does Snarf fall victim to such a restaurant, so does Shipwreck.
 * Spam (the food, not the junk e-mail) is considered a delicacy in both Hawaii, Guam, and Fiji, but is considered mildly unpleasant to downright disgusting by many mainland Americans. The story goes that during World War II the U.S. soldiers, completely sick of Spam, gave a lot of it to the native Fijian islanders, who loved it because the taste was very close to that of 'long pork', a.k.a. people.
 * When filming an episode in Hawaii, Andrew Zimmern, who has probably eaten a good 1/3 to 1/2 of the things listed here, could not eat it because he could not fathom how it is a canned meat by-product. Later in the episode, he ate the offal of a wild boar cooked in its own blood and loved it.
 * The New England area has a triumvirate of desserts that tend to skeeve the unsuspecting out. Indian pudding; a pudding made of milk and cornmeal and sweetened with molasses, Grape-Nut ice cream; a mildly sweetened ice cream mixed with Grape-Nuts cereal, and Moxie soda, a soda with a somewhat bitter aftertaste.
 * Moxie is made with gentian root extract- possibly the last natural component in any soda not made by a micro-brewery.
 * In many parts of the world, corn is seen as unfit for human consumption as it is considered "animal food".
 * Some types are, some aren't. The corn you feed animals and the corn you eat at home are usually different breeds.
 * Norman Schwarzkopf was with his father as an official in occupied Iran during World War II. As part of his duties he was to go with his father and attend a Fancy Dinner given by a sheik whom the Allies were trying to cultivate. In the course of the meal he performed a heroic feat of valor for which Schwarzkopf's father greatly praised him. He ate locusts.
 * The perennial favourite for disgusting foreigners in Sweden is surströmming, Baltic herring caught during mating season and fermented. It smells like a really gross old fart, but the taste is somewhat reminiscent of cured meat. The taste in and of itself can be pretty overpowering, but surströmming is usually eaten with potatoes, onion and sour cream, wrapped in soft flatbread. Needless to say, surströmming is divisive among Swedes too.
 * Some (mainly Mulisms and Jews) consider pork unsavory. Which stems from the fact that pigs will eat pretty much anything, taste so much like humans that Arabs consider them a human tribe cursed by God and the fact that before modern cooking techniques pork was likely to have all kinds of worms that live in your intestine and muscles in it.
 * Cheese, "the celebration of milk going off big-time stylee." With adult consumption of milk itself a product of Western influence outside Europe, South Asia, and the Near East, it's no surprise that letting it sit in acid and scraping the chunkier bits out hasn't caught on in most of the world.
 * Anyone for Ortolans? This French delicacy is made by catching these tiny birds alive and imprisoning them in cages so small they can't move, and force-feeding them on oats and millet for a couple of weeks until they are grossly fat. Then they are drowned (still alive at this point) in Cognac brandy, and eaten whole, bones and all. The extra delight comes from the fact that the crunched up tiny bones lacerate the inside of the mouth so that the diners blood is mixed with the luscious foodstuff. Yum! Traditionally eaten with a napkin over the head, ostensibly so that God can't see what you're doing, but more probably so that you can show off to the other diners how rich you are (they are very, very expensive) while not being seen drooling Squick. President Mitterand of France enjoyed them despite the fact they were and are illegal in France.
 * Eastern Russia has somewhat cavalier approach to the seafood, that tends to squick many foreigners.
 * Take the way of eating a scallop that the locals consider an only correct way. You take the live shell, and pierce it with the knife. When it opens, you cut the abductor muscle (the coin-shaped bit usually eaten there) with the same knife, dunk it into the soy sauce and eat it.
 * The crabcakes are virtually unknown there and anyone who couldn't cut up a freshly-boiled crab is considered weird.
 * Liptov and other northern regions of Slovakia are known for a rarely used strange drink, called hriatô (meaning something like "warmerer" or "warmed booze"). It's actually moonshine (mostly plum brandy) mixed with home-made caramel and with freshly fried bits of smoked bacon added in. The whole thing is actually meant to be a health drink or home medicine of sorts, in case you have a nasty cold.
 * Miso soup. Considering it's prepared using a fish stock (which smells predictably fishy) and fermented soybeans, with bits of tofu, seaweed, or whatever else the cook prefers (or, in the traditional case, whatever happened to be on hand at the moment) it's no wonder many Americans turn up their noses at the stuff, despite it appearing rather harmless visually.
 * Also, the miso paste (the fermented soybeans, salted and smashed) used to make the soup can also be used as a sandwich spread like Vegemite.
 * Even worse than miso is natto, another traditional Japanese dish. It's also made of fermented soybeans, but has a decidedly cheesy taste and aroma. Even worse, when picked up, the stuff makes strings which seem to forever connect each bite back to the bowl. Predictably, it's touted as a health food.
 * Austria, surprisingly, has a few:
 * Beuschel - stew of lung, heart, possibly kidney of a calf. Well, it does translate to innards, so...
 * Blutwurst, or Blunzn - sausage made from pig blood. (Basically the direct opposite of kosher, so to speak...) It's delicious by the way, especially when served hot, with Sauerkraut and potatoes.
 * Blood sausages has a number of variants from northern Italy all the way up to the far Northern recesses of Europe. Very, very common along the Baltic Sea coast.
 * Pferdeleberkäse - a real specialty, something like meat loaf, made of horse meat.
 * An old Urban Legend said, that some Chinese restaurants serve monkey brains, which you eat after opening the still alive and screaming monkeys head. A lot of people still believe it to be real.
 * During the Old Kingdom, Ancient Egyptians ate hyenas, and apparently considered them delicacies. They proved hard to domesticate, however, and went out of style.
 * Cilantro is one of those spices that you either love or hate. To many people, it tastes and smells much like soap or detergent, yet it is an important part of some Latin American cuisines.
 * The soapy taste is due to a quirk of DNA that might be a remnant of early human evolution. Saponin is the chemical that smells and tastes like soap, and plants high in saponin tend to be poisonous.
 * In some African countries, you can buy cans of dried insects, much like those cans of salted nuts sold in U.S. stores.
 * Kefir, a fermented milk product not quite like buttermilk that is quite popular in the Caucus region and a lot of Eastern Europe. Unlike many other examples, the smell is not exceptional, but the taste is like slightly off milk with a slight fungus tossed in for good measure.
 * Kvass is what happens when you take black bread and ferment it only to stop the process just as it starts to form alcohol. The resulting liquid is a soft drink that tastes like watery bread that someone spilled a bit of cheap beer into. It's a Russian staple that many foreigners find quite odd.
 * Mannish Water is a Jamaican soup and traditional aphrodesiac made out of the parts of a goat that don't go well in curry (head, brains, and heart) seasoned in a pot with yams, unripe banana, potatoes, and dumplings. It is delicious, but I'll get back to you on its 'natural male enhancement' properties.
 * In some deep interiors of continents, fish alone disgusts many people, particularly if they have not traditionally eaten it in any form more exotic than breaded fish sticks. The cooked fish smells that you may find divine, are the same smells that nauseate the landlocked landlubber.
 * This troper (born and raised in the Midwest) has never liked the flavor/aroma of cooked fish, but loves the much subtler taste of sushi (yes, you can get good--or at least decent--sushi in Indiana). Go figure.
 * Pizza in Japan may contain a variety of unusual toppings, such as mayonnaise, corn, tuna, mochi (a sticky cake made from rice flour), seaweed, octopus, squid (even squid ink), the aforementioned natto, and much more.