I’m not sure if this is a food, per se. But you can eat it, as it’s quite inert chemically. It’s called Bitrex, and I think it’s supposed to be the most bitter substance known.
Apparently, a human being can taste 10 parts per billion, and at 50ppb, it is already unpalatable. It’s put in lots of things to keep people from eating them. Hence, it’s kind of an anti-food, now that I think of it. But it could be used on any food, and at ppm levels it will make you vomit, it’s so bad.
Butyric acid shows up in lots of rotting things. Butyrate is what makes your feet stink and makes some cheeses stinky as well. It’s found in vomit, from what I remember, and nobody much likes that. If butyrate is present in sufficient amounts in a food, it will induce vomiting itself, it’s that foul. We’re actually evolved to respond that way because, well it’s not good to eat really rotten things. But if you could choke it down, butyrate itself wouldn’t hurt you, I don’t think, unless it was really concentrated; in which case it would be corrosive, I’m pretty sure, just like other organic acids like it.
If you count stuff that might result in sickness…feces may be the only universal source of taste-related disgust in humans.
Cite:
Rozin, P. (1990) The importance of social factors in understanding the acquisition of food habits. In E. D. Capaldi & T. L. Powley (Eds.), Taste, experience, and feeding. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association
I take it you’ve never been to a Carribean restaurant? In Jamaican cuisine, snapper is always served with the head on.
Could that also be explained by the “Last time I ate X I threw up, so I can’t stand to eat X ever again” principle? I know this at least temporarily destroyed my desire for certain foods when I became sick after eating them (actually, I started a thread on this a while ago, saying it’s probably an evolutionary adaption: many things that make someone vomit are poisonous as well).
When I was in China, I ate a hundred-year-old egg.
Man oh man oh man.
I am retching thinking about it.
They’re not really a hundred years old - merely a few months or a couple of years. They’re made from raw eggs packed in hessian and buried in soil, often permeated with horse’s piss. A slow chemical reaction occurs that solidifies the egg, and turns the yolk green and the albumen black.
It is the single most disgusting thing I’ve ever had the misfortune to savour. It hurts in so many ways: concept, ingredients, look, texture, smell, and taste. Sulfurus and jelly-like, while the yolk is powdery and rank. Gaah.
I would imagine that the Capercaille, which is a large grouse type game bird, would not be far behind in the inedible stakes.
This bird is around the size of a wild turkey and on first appearance might seem like it would be good eating. Alas, if it were good eating then its number would surely be higher as game wardens would ensure their numbers would be high enough to provide a good days shooting.
Unfortunately, the main diet of the Capercaillie are the shoots of the Scots pine and this is what give the flesh its distinctive and overpowerful, unpalatable taste.
Unless you are a big fan of drinking vintage turpentine, it’s unlikely you would enjoy eating this bird, which is pretty much an avian turps laboratory - other predators such as foxes will only prey on them if desperate, and then they will not eat it all.
I read that in Iceland they eat shark that has been buried underground for a year or two and smells like urine and vomit mixed together. The guy who was going to try it actually puked from the smell and couldn’t bear to try it. I’m pretty sure that restaurants serving this would likely have a very small clientele. They also serve sheep’s faces in microwaveable boxes at service stations, if you take this as an example of what is evidently mainstream food this might give you an insight into how rank something as ‘speciality’ as rotting shark might be.
Umm…dodo. Honest! I watched a documentary about the extinction of the dodo. It said that they weren’t hunted to death and part of their evidence was a diary entry from some sailors trapped on the island. Apparantly they killed and tried to cook a dodo but, even though they were starving, they couldn’t stomach the meat.
Oh, it seems they introduced pigs to the island and the pigs killed the dodos off (eating their eggs and stuff).
Can’t find a cite. Must be a reasonable new theory as all sites say they were hunted instead. I’ll keep looking.
