So in my random surfing during working hours, I stumbled across this article about casu marzu, (rotten cheese). At first I thought it couldn’t be real, but run a Google search on it, and you’ll get plenty of hits. It’s about a Sardinian delicacy that consists of rotten cheese and the maggots inside.
An excerpt:
Now, I know that every culture eats a lot of gross things, some of them especially hideous to other cultures, but oh… even reading this makes my tummy feel abused.
That is disguisting.
Thanks for sharing, and right before dinner time here too.
I feel dirty.
Ewww, that’s nasty. But I bet it would go great with rotting cow carcass juice 
Man, I don’t think even the French would eat that!
…god, who in their right mind would even attempt to eat that? Are people so masochistic that they’ll eat something which is obviously not good for them [with nasty little maggots going for the eyes to boot…]? Strange…strange.
Know what? If I was starving to death, I still wouldn’t eat that. If someone offered me a million dollars, I still wouldn’t eat that. I’d eat a puppy sauteed in kitten sauce before I ate that. Shit, I’d eat my own foot before I ate that.
Yuck.
Rose
I know it sounds disgusting, but this isn’t new in the world of cheese. Thing is, before we had mechanized cheese making, bleu cheeses were made in a similar way. The bleu veins in the cheese are a form of mold–today, we have a machine that pokes holes into the wheel of cheese, so the mold can grow–in the old days, they let worms do the work.
Think 'bout that next time you cut into a wheel of Cabrales :).
And to try the cheese? I’d give it a shot if all the critters were taken out. (I’ve tried some seriously smelly rotty cheeses, so I’m sure this is probably in the same category).
I’ve eaten this. The worms don’t jump, and they’re picked out before consumption (at least where I had it.)
The cheese itself was very strong, but not unpleasent, kind of like sourdough starter.
This should not surprise you because you ought to know by now that people will just about eat anything, especially if illegal, like that cheese is.
I mean, there are websites where people eat human feces, and I know about 100 year old eggs, fermented seal fins, little birds wrapped in seal blubber, placed in stone cairns in the arctic, left to ‘season’ and rot for a year, then consumed as a delicacy. Who was it who ate the first stinky caviar?
Think about Limburger Cheese and from what I understand, there are stinker cheeses than that!
Not too long back people were promoting the drinking of urine, others promoted eating the afterbirth from a human child, the Wai-Wai Indians in South America eat a starchy root first chewed to a pulp by the village women, spat into leaf bags, allowed to rot for a day, and often consumed on long forays into the jungles. (It is said they like it because the human spit ‘preserves’ it for long hikes.)
The show ‘Jackass’ thinks it’s funny to spray human shit on unsuspecting contestants, the Chinese tend to consume everything that creeps, crawls, hops or limps by. I mean, who in the world decided to use a birds nest in soup? Especially a nest made out of bird spit? Many people eat pickled pigs trotters and tails, and head cheese made out of indescribable left over animal parts. The Japanese love to eat parts of a fish considered so poisonous that a specially trained chef has to prepare it and you sign a release of responsibility in order to eat it.
Euell Gibbons ate a certain type of Spiny sea critter that looks like a black golfball covered with sharp, poisonous thorns.
Human eating habits are disgusting!
I mean there was a guy on TV who goes out, catches snakes, bites their heads off and eats them while still squirming!! Along the Amazon, some natives catch these huge, hairy, tarantulas, roast and eat them!!
Who was the first person to ever eat a slimy, disgusting eel? Octopus?
'scuse me. I need to go get some Rolaids now.
Mmmm, jumping maggots.
They melt in your eyes!