I was watching a rerun of Fear Factor of FX last night. One of the stunts involved contestants eating a one hundred year-old egg.
Where, exactly, does one find a hundred-year-old egg? I mean, if you find eggs lying around a barn that’s been abandoned for a century, you’re still just guessing as to its age. It could have been laid last week by a wild chicken, for all we know.
Also, I doubt that, one hundred years ago, someone put aside a few eggs in the belief that they’d be used in 2004.
Anyone know the scoop on this disgusting side of archaeology
When I passed by that episode, I presumed that Fear Factor was lying about the eggs being a hundred years old.
They probably took regular eggs, did some nasty things to them and then called them “100 year old eggs”. Sort of the prime time, high-tech equivalent of the peeled grapes = eyeballs in a haunted house.
Can you imagine the lawsuits from someone getting sick from REAL 100 year old eggs? I don’t care what they make you sign before you go on that show, that’s a lawsuit you would win.
You can buy “100 year old eggs” in Chinese grocery stores. They are not a century old, but they are pickled in a fairly disgusting (to my palate) manner. The ones I saw weren’t chicken eggs but quail, I believe.
It’s a pickled egg. Well, not pickled like dill pickled, but pickled in wood ash, earth, salt and tea. They’re a Chinese dish, often called “1000 year old eggs” and most often made of duck eggs. They’re rarely more than 100 days old.
But you do dig them up out of the ground, so it feels like archaeology!
100 year eggs don’t taste bad at all, and yes, I’ve tried them. The moniker doesn’t necessarily mean they were aged a full 100 years, and the ones you get today are just as likely to have had the process accelerated chemically. The original 100 year eggs would have been buried underground and the chemical reaction and heat of decomposition would harden and preserve the egg.
Well exactly. That’s why it doesn’t matter how scarey, revolting or dangerous the stuff is made to look in ‘reality’ TV game shows, you can be 100% sure that the safety guys have been all over it beforehand. The TV companies need insurance to do these programs and the insurers are well aware of the financial costs of anyone getting ill, injured or even killed. There is no way in a million years they are going to permit people to eat anything that is not 100% certified fit for human consumption.
I read an interview with a TV insurance guy on the web not so long ago that explained all this. Unfortunately I can’t find it now…
I don’t watch the show, but my dad does so sometimes I’m subjected to it while walking through the room - I did once see a contestant who evidently had an allergy she was unaware of get scratched by reaching into a rotten fish mouth or something - her arm swelled up some and she was sent packing post haste. They roll out all hard with the fetus pie, but they obviously had a doctor right off screen and took it extremely seriously - it’s safe as houses.
I work third shift, and our break is usually around midnight… the local FOX affiliate recently switched from “Street Smarts” to “Fear Factor” in that time slot. I wasn’t happy. But on the bright side, I get to see large breasted, scantily clad women about to vomit while eating disgusting stuff/bugs. :eek:
I’m not sure this is a good thing… but it kind of grows on you after a while
That actually reminds me of “Joe schmo” (yes, I watched that show,) and the difficulty of setting up the sketch where Matt was told to eat the dog droppings (but would complain, and negotiate with the fake ‘producer,’ and the segment would go in a different direction from there.)
Partly because no-one could be 100% sure that he wouldn’t just go for it, and that no-one would be able to stop him if he did, they decided that they couldn’t use real dog droppings, and one of the show’s special effects people came up with something of exactly the right color, texture and odor… I think it was some
kind of mild pate, with artificial dog dropping odor added. (They even talked about this one company that makes thousands and thousands of different kinds of artificial odors, and had one that was suitable for this purpose.)
(As I recall, John Waters called the emergency room afterwards and told them his kid ate doo-doo and should he worry about it. They told him no. Wouldn’t ya think he’d have called them first?)
Ah, how times (and potential lawsuits) have changed.
There seems to be a confusion here between two different types of aged eggs from China.
[ul]Regular preserved eggs - pi3dan4 (“Leather eggs”). These are delicious and almost anyone can get to like them if served up correctly. Often served with some soy sauce, or cooked as an ingredient in a thick rice soup (zhou). The “white” is now black and like hardened jello, and the yolk is just slightly darkened.
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[ul]Hundred- (or Thousand-)year-old-eggs are quite different. Although they are, as stated, only about 100 days old, they seem like 1000. They’re green, of a mucous-like consistency, and stink to high heaven (of something like ammonia). People can eat them raw, but it’s hard to imagine how. Or they can be cooked into something (again, hard to imagine how).
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