Rotten shark made you queasy? A vomit bag
for every guest at the Disgusting Food Museum
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[November 03, 2018]
MALMO, Sweden (Reuters) - The dead
mouse in the Chinese wine sure looks nasty, and the maggots in the
cheese tend to put people off. But nothing is more horrible to an
unaccustomed palate than the Icelandic fermented shark. It's the worst.
Or so says the expert.
"It tastes like chewing on a urine-infested mattress," said Samuel West,
who, as curator of the Disgusting Food Museum, knows a thing or two
about unpleasant victuals.
"It's a fermented sort of rotten Icelandic shark," he says. "Anthony
Bourdain, the late TV personality, called it the single most disgusting
thing he'd ever eaten, and I totally agree with him."
From spicy rabbit heads to fruit bat soup, the collection, now on
display in the Swedish city of Malmo, aims to challenge perceptions of
taste and help visitors contemplate why one culture's abomination is
another's delicacy.
Some visitors have a hard time of it.
"Has anyone thrown up here at the museum? Yes twice," West said. But,
"it's okay to vomit because our entry tickets are not really tickets --
they're printed on vomit bags."

Grasshoppers, cooked animals' skulls and other body parts, including an
eyeball, are on display in pots or on boards.
European fare ranges from Iceland's cured shark, Hakarl, to Sardinia's
Casu Marzu cheese, which is riddled with insect larvae. There is
Scottish haggis, made from sheep innards, and Sweden's smelly
Surstromming fermented herring.
Asian foods include the strong-smelling Durian fruit and stinky tofu.
The fruit bat soup comes from the sparsely populated Pacific Ocean
archipelago of Palau. Latin American dishes include Mexico's Menudo
tripe soup as well as Peru's roasted guinea pigs, known as Cuy.
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Disgusting Food Museum curator Samuel West shows Australian
Vegemite, a sandwich spread made of the leftover yeast at beer
breweries, in Malmo, Sweden November 1, 2018. REUTERS/Mikael Nilsson

North America is represented by sweet treats: Jell-O salad and root
beer.
Australian visitor Nichole Courtney said she was surprised to come
across Vegemite, her homeland's sandwich spread of concentrated
yeast extract which is known to divide opinion.
"Things like Vegemite which we find really normal at home, like we'd
eat that every day for breakfast, are next to things like the shark
that I couldn't imagine tasting and I think it is revolting so it's
quite funny for us."
(Reporting By Reuters Television; Writing by Marie-Louise Gumuchian;
Editing by Peter Graff)
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