Weird Food by Leanne Yuen


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The thrill of travelling is not just seeing new places and meeting new people. It's about adventure - especially trying out new food! Eating is a feast for the eyes, nose, tongue, stomach and even your mind. What is considered a delicacy in one part of the world may be strange and off-putting to the other parts. Let's take a tour around the world and be an intrepid traveller, and see how weird and exciting food can be.


 

Blood Sausage
Blood sausage is made in various countries throughout the world. It is a dark-coloured sausage made from pig or cattle blood, together with bits of meat, fat, onions and herbs. Fillers such as bread, rice, barley, sweet potato or oatmeal can also be added. It can be eaten uncooked but is often grilled, boiled, smoked or dried. It is often served as a traditional European breakfast. In England, the English call blood sausage 'black pudding' or 'blood pudding'.

Balut
Eating a balut is like eating a half-hatched egg. It is a common street food in the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and even Hawaii.  A balut is a 15-day fertilised duck or chicken egg. It is an incomplete chicken foetus with partially formed feathers. It is boiled and eaten out of the shell. The difficulty in eating this food is picking the odd feathers that get stuck to your teeth!

Dried Lizards
While the Westerners enjoy a bowl of chicken soup as a cure for the common cold, the Chinese eat dried lizard soup. Boiled in a broth with Chinese dates, yam and ginseng, the dried lizards are said to taste like fish. Found in medicine shops all across China, dried lizards are sometimes sold in couples, a male and female. Chinese herbalists recommend these be cooked in soup. The lizards can be eaten by removing the heads and legs, and the best and most nutritious parts are the tails. Dried lizards are reported to be good for asthma, colds, the lungs and heart.

Fried Spiders
In Cambodia, a small town called Skuon has been nicknamed Spiderville because of its popularity in breeding and cooking spiders. Crushed garlic is fried together with the palm-size spiders in making this crunchy delicacy. It is reported to taste somewhat like chicken, cod and crab. It is believed that the practice began in the days of the Khmer Rouge when food was scarce. Today, it is a common sight to see a street vendour carrying a tray of fried spiders and walking up to your car and selling you their national ‘fast food’ delicacy.


GLOSSARY
  • Intrepid - brave; daring; fearless.
  • Foetus - a baby or young animal before it is born.

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