What’s The Craziest or Weirdest Thing You’ve Eaten?

If you haven’t already noticed from the name of my blog, I love to eat. I’m definitely not a picky eater and I tend to focus on quantity instead of quality. In fact, I’m still famous at work for having won a eating showdown with a fellow co-worker, taking down nearly two Costco pizzas in the span of an hour. And there may or may not be a couple buffets across the country with my picture on the “do not admit” wall.

But while I can eat a lot, I’m actually not that adventurous of an eater. We’ve encountered some interesting foods while traveling, and often times I’ve let my wife do the eating while I just watched. Notable things we’ve come across include:

– Cat and field mice in Vietnam
– Dog and horse in China
– Guinea Pig and live termites in Peru
– Tarantulas and beetles in Cambodia

And the latest one we encountered? Bat. Yuck.

Just the sound of that makes me cringe. Bat is a local cuisine in the Seychelles, most often served in curries. And while bats are often associated with diseases, the bats in the Seychelles are fruits bats and therefore clean to eat.

We went back and forth on whether to try bat – in fact, we asked almost all of the locals we encountered if they’d eaten it. I’d say that about 80% of them had, with the remaining ones sharing our squeamish feelings about it.  Our guide at Vallee de Mai said that he used to eat bat, until he took a job to catch and butcher them for local stores. He said that once you peel back the skin, they look exactly like humans. Even creepier.

I realize that everyone has a different definition of what constitutes crazy or weird foods. I used to laugh when I would see contestants on Fear Factor ready to barf just at the sight of thousand year old eggs. That’s something I put in my rice porridge everytime!

So I’m curious, where do you stand on bat, and what’s the craziest or weirdest food you’ve encountered on your travels?