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From Away.com
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Gross Me Out!
Make your next adventure a culinary one with these challenging delicacies.

By Nina Mitchell

There are those who travel to glimpse the majestic wonders of the world. There are those who seek to bask in nature's beauty. There are those who long to immerse themselves in other cultures.

And then there are those who travel to prove they are cool.

The last is a somewhat shameful reason for travel, one rarely acknowledged by its practitioners: to place yourself in uncomfortable situations, so that you can brag to your friends when you get home.

And what better way to prove your mettle than by willingly diving into any dish that might cross your culinary path? Whether you're dining on a Korean seashore or at an Icelandic banquet, sampling dishes that challenge traditional American cultural preferences will indicate that you are braver than the average Joe. Gross food makes you rugged. Gross food makes you sexy. Gross food makes you...a traveler.

In order to cultivate this aura among your American friends, understand that you must mildly disgust them. Therefore, the pursuit of gross food requires you to become acquainted with the great American food taboos. Break one taboo, and you will successfully arouse cocktail-party awe when you get back home. But be careful: go too far, and you might find yourself hideously unpopular. (Human flesh, for example, is an absolute no-no.)

America's rich tapestry of cultures and cuisines does make finding truly gross food a bit of a challenge—some of your American friends may top stories of your culinary escapades without even trying. In short, know your audience. Target people whose diets consist primarily of ingredients found at any highway rest stop. In other words, people like me.

With this in mind, I have compiled 10 Rules of Gross Food for the American Traveler:

Rule Number 1: Vegetables and grains are rarely gross.
Avoid these if you're trying to amass good travel stories. No one cares if you eat a wacky vegetable, unless it leads to extreme sickness or hallucination.

Rule Number 2: Americans don't like to know they're eating animals.
This is how I (briefly) became a vegetarian: I went to Spain. One of the most popular fast-food chains in Madrid at the time was the Museo de Jamón (which translates to "Museum of Ham"). Hanging from the ceiling at each franchise was a veritable carpet of pig legs, hoofs jauntily pointed at your head. Many Spanish bars had a special stand for a pig leg, and when you ordered ham, the bartender would grab a giant cleaver and hack at the leg for a while, and then put the little hacked-off bits on the plate.

My typically American response: "Ewwwwwwww!"

Spaniards are comfortable with the cycle of life. They understand that ham was once a pig. Hence hacking at a pig leg in front of patrons with grumbling stomachs isn't gross. In contrast, many Americans love meat, but don't want to think about how meat became meat. American restaurants rarely serve anything with the head on it, for example. A head implies that your dinner was once frolicking in a field, or swimming blithely through the sea, or trapped in a little pen being force-fed milk products for most of its young life.

So when you travel, make sure to taste lots of meat that looks like meat. Fish with heads, pig legs, chicken feet, things with tails still attached...all of these qualify.

Rule Number 3: Living creatures are gross.
This is a corollary to Rule Number 2. Americans do not like eating food that is still moving. Like eating food with the head on, moving food implies that our meal would much prefer to be somewhere else. (Admittedly, raw oysters are still alive and we eat them by the dozen—but they don't wriggle much; somehow, this makes all the difference.)

For the ultimate in fresh ingredients, try the Korean sannakji, a delicacy that fights back. Chefs slice off a tentacle of a small live octopus and bring it to the table. The tentacle goes down squirming, which is considered the highlight of the experience—along with the slight vacuum action of its suction cups.




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Nina Mitchell is an associate editor at Away.com.