Or for you pedantic types, The Most Unhygienic Custom of Which You Can Think.
For me, I’ve never quite gotten over reading about some parts of rural India where they clean their houses (including the kitchens) with fresh cow dung.
EEEEEEWWWWWWWW!
The Blarney Stone.
Shaking hands.
Agreed. It is the most loathsome custom, and I am constantly amazed that people still do this! Cow dung? Yeah, pretty sure it’s cleaner than most people’s hands or mouths (just to comment on the Blarney stone too).
Bleargh. If you try to shake my hand, I am going to conveniently have a sneezing/coughing fit right at that moment. If you’re still ignorant enough to insist on touching my hands, I will happily give you all my germs.
The whole ‘use your hand instead of toilet paper’ thing is absolutely repulsive to me. Part of it is just the very idea, which…eeew. But also, it’s a custom most common in third-world countries, where I really doubt someone will be able to wash their hands with clean running water and useful soap.
How does one clean a kitchen using cow (or any other, for that matter) dung? I mean, that sounds like a fantastic way to get some nasty strains of e. Coli in your system - there have been plenty of outbreaks linked to produce contaminated with cow poo. Yuck.
Doggy kisses.
“Blood brothers” type oaths. You know, the kind where two participants slash their arm or hand and press them together.
Hindus washing in and drinking the waters of Ganges river during religious festivals seem pretty unsavory to me as well.
Of course, neither beat plain ol’ fucking. Now that’s just nasty :D.
They say that dogs’ mouths are much cleaner than ours. My GF is always trying to get her dog to kiss her, but to no avail. Last night, though, the pooch was in strange mood to kiss. She (the dog, not the GF) had just returned from some fine dining at Chez Litter Box.
No thanks.
The funny thing about this is that while my daughter (age 16) encourages our 5lb chihuahua to kiss her, she grosses out when the wolf tries the same thing. I, on the other hand, don’t mind the wolf licking me (never, ever, ever on the mouth, BLEARGH!) but it squicks me right out when the chihuahua does it. Go figure, right?
I can think of customs WAAY more disgusting than any of the ones listed. But the OP is probably asking for actual customs practiced somewhere in the world that come to mind, rather than asking us to use our imagination.
I hate eating at other people’s houses for the first time because I’m afraid that the food will be put on the table without a serving fork, and then it will be a free for all with everyone using their own forks to serve themselves. That’s fine when all the forks are clean, but not so cool once they have been used to eat. If that’s what you want to do at home with your family, that’s fine. Please have serving utensils available when there are guests. Thank you.
In the same vein, it grosses me out to see a bunch of people all eating out of one communal bowl. I was just watching an episode of Bizarre Foods where the host was in Ethiopia and lunch was something that looked like diarrhea on tortillas and they were all eating from the same platter. It didn’t help that he described some of the food as “rank” and difficult to eat because it tasted like it had been out in the sun for a couple of days.
Sharing the cup of communion wine always kind of wigged me out.
Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.
At least it’s fresh…
Amen! That may be the Blood of Christ but I don’t want to drink it after Drooler McMouthbreather just took a sip thank-you-very-much!
The drink made by some (IIRC) Amazon tribe that’s made by chewing up some kind of plant material and spitting it into a pot always struck me as particularly foul. Maybe the fermenting kills the germs but it’s still a big cup of spit. Yech.
(delete duplicate - Rico)
metzitzah b’peh would be high on my list. Following circumcision, some* mohels clean the wound by sucking the blood from it. “Ick” factors aside, it’s likely that some infants contracted herpes in this manner.
*Emphasis on some - very, very few practitioners do this.
Short of coprophagia, which isn’t a custom but generally a paraphilia, I agree that “blood brothers” rituals which involve open wounds being pressed together is about as dangerous, from a disease transmission standpoint, as it gets.
Consumption of nerve tissue and brains is up there, though, especially when cannibalistic (humans eating other human’s brains). Prion diseases are nasty!
The ancient Greek habit of storing money in one’s mouth.