A few items I didn’t see already listed are African lion, raccoon & deviled ostrich egg.
fried ants
live termites
chicken feet with the talons
barnacles
Kangaroo and camel in Australia - both ok but rather chewy.
Chicken feet and donkey in China.
Probably incomplete:
Deer/Venison
Hog’s head cheese
Beef tongue (usually in tacos)
Tripe (cow: stomach)
Gator tail
Rabbit
Chitterlings (pig: intenstines)
Fried grasshoppers
Chocolate covered ants
Squid
Pig’s feet
Chicken Feet
Goat (barbecued)
Sautéed slugs
Crawdads
I guess according to what has already been posted, the most uncommon things I’ve eaten are raccoon and penis. The penis was in pho. Not sure if it was ox or bull. The menu said cow penis, so bull I guess?
I would have guessed before the reading the thread that the most uncommon things I’ve eaten were the insects or various offal.
Osaka, 1997. My Japanese tutor took me to a restaurant near her home in Osaka Port. She ordered seagull broth. I kid you not. I tried it. Tasted as bad as you would think. Grey, tough meat.
I have told this story many times to other Japanese people all of whom accused me of lying. Then one day a guy from Osaka said it was a traditional Osaka Port dish and no one else in Japan as far as he was concerned would ever eat it.
Oh yes, and many times, kangaroo, emu and crocodile.
Many of these items are not unique at all.
Ostrich in Singapore, tree frogs in China, ox tongue in Manila.
Bison? Pronghorn Antelope? Elk? It’s amazing what seems uncommon based on where you live. Around here, “fresh seafood” would be the holy grail of uncommon food, but I could probably go outside my office and find some pronghorn within two minutes. (Catching the bastards, on the other hand…)
A few weeks ago I pan-fried some mealworms, just to see how they tasted. It was pretty good!
You ate a lion? Wow. How’d it taste? Wasn’t it awfully tough? I don’t imagine that the flesh of something which only ate meat itself when alive would be very nice to eat.
Some of these will have been mentioned before, but…
Chapulines – grasshoppers. Like someone already said, they didn’t have much taste of their own, just a crunch and a smack of cooking oil and chilis. Something like fried rice crispies.
Alligator – it wasn’t very good. Bland tasting and as tough as truck tires.
Squirrel – not that uncommon where I grew up. Delicious if cooked right.
Pork skin – not fried up into a crunchy snack like here in the USA, but cooked like meat and served for breakfast alongside scrambled eggs. It was very good.
Squirrel brains – separately from the rest of the squirrels. Baked in their little skulls, regarded as a seasonal delicacy in central West Goddam Virginia.
Ramps, or wild onions – seasonal cuisine, culturally important in Appalachia, and freaking scrumptious when fried.
Deer meat – which seems to be unusual outside of certain rural parts of the USA. I’ve had it in several ways: fried like a steak (not the best way to cook it, deer being a very lean meat), as a roast, as stew-meat, and ground up in chili. Damn, was it good!
Raccoon – it was okay.
Groundhog – better than possum, not as good as squirrel.
Possum – twice. The first time it was excreable; the second was edible but not that great.
Wild gamebirds – woodcock, pheasant, quail and grouse. None of them were as good as chicken.
Ants – I had read somewhere that they tasted like lemon drops. Did not believe this, so went out to the closest anthill, caught a few, pinched their little heads so they wouldn’t suffer, and ate 'em. They had a sour, slightly spicy-hot flavor.
Crawdads fresh from the creek.
May-apple fruit.
Poke leaves – the fruit and stem is poison, the older leaf tastes nasty, but the young leaf is quite good cooked with a little bacon and served with vinegar.
Dandelion greens, both raw in a salad and cooked.
Wild mustard greens, likewise.
Fresh-picked chantrel mushrooms.
Paw paws – tasted okay but gooey and nasty with big seeds.
Butternuts.
Some stuff that my friends called New Zealand Spinach, a vine sort of a thing with big leaves which had taken over their backyard. It was actually pretty tasty!
Sarviss or service berries, little red berries with a faintly sweet taste that grew on small treelike bushes.
A peculiar-looking fruit which a friend’s local girlfriend gave us in Southern Mexico – it was greenish, the shape of an olive, about as big as a pecan, and very good – soury-sweet, juicy and refreshing, with a conveniently small-sized pit… I’ve never seen them since, nor heard their name (she called them something like "wild tree berries).
Jerusalem artichokes, little spud-like growths found on the root of a plant looks like a Black-Eyed Susan.
Miner’s lettuce.
The plant is a relative of the sunflower. The name is a corruption of girasole, the Italian word for “sunflower.” “Gira” means “to look at,” and “sole” means “sun.” Sunflowers rotate during the day so that they face the sun (although they stop doing this when their flowers open).
This stuff grows wild around here.
And all the stuff you listed was perfectly normal for me growing up, with small tweaks to spelling
As was the escargot other people mentioned, but we call 'em caracoles.
Fish spooge? LOL!
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Hmm,
Vertebrate meat: kudu, springbok, impala, elk, venison, reindeer, horse, (cow, bison, pig, sheep) warthog, crocodile, alligator, turtle (no idea what species), kangaroo, ostrich, pheasant, (chicken, turkey, duck, goose, quail, pigeon), lots of species of fish, but I don’t think any that are especially unusual.
Odd parts of vertebrates: deer brain, (tasty, but icky. And I wouldn’t eat that today due to fear of prion disease) pork and lamb liver, kidneys of various common food animals, sweetbreads (truly nasty, I will avoid this one in the future) chicken and duck feet, fish air bladder, beef tendon, a couple kinds of tripe, hmm, probably some other parts that I’ve missed.
Arthropods: fried grasshoppers, raw ants, Maine and South African lobster, various crabs, crawfish, various shrimp.
other animal stuff: raw and cooked octopus, raw and cooked squid, including a steak from an enormous quid I had in South Africa, assorted clams and oysters and scallops, some stuff I couldn’t identify in Chinese restaurants and in Japan, including some delicious dried something invertebrate from the ocean I bought in cellophane at a train station.
stuff that isn’t exactly plant or animal:
some oddball mushrooms, most of the “fake meats”, (seitan, quorn, that sort of thing). I wasn’t able to bring myself to eat natto.
plants… hmm, does anyone keep track of which plants they’ve eaten, or how unusual they are? I’ve certainly eaten parts of lots of plants, but have no idea what I’d add to this list. I guess I had some unusual fruits, like quince, cloudberries, saskatoons, true currants and gooseberries, probably several others.
It doesn’t look like anyone has mentioned iguana yet. It tasted like–surprise–chicken. The locals even called it bamboo chicken.
We also had iguana eggs, which didn’t taste at all like chicken eggs. The shells were pliable and leathery and hard to cut into. I’ll turn them down if there’s ever a next time.
As a child:
Tripe, which I believe is cow’s stomach.
Trotters - pigs feet.
Brawn made with pig’s head.
Lamb brains.
Ox tail made into ox tail stew.
As an adult:
Kangaroo. It is sold in supermarkets here. It is quite strongly flavoured but very lean.
I notice my local supermarket is selling packaged crocodile meat. I don’t think I will be buying it.
Is Wyoming a place where you can buy the tags outright? Here if you get one with antlers, you have to wait for 5 years before you can even attempt to get another chance in a lottery (I think females/short antlered males can be taken once a year, but even so a draw is required). And they’re wiley and fast. So it’s not the type of thing that enters peoples’ pantries often.
I had a raw one once. Alcohol was involved.
Hakarl. Vile stuff.
Many unusual (to the US) fruits- durian, jackfruit, mangosteen, rambutan, longan, many more. Chicken of the woods mushroom (tasty but doesn’t really taste like chicken).
Meats- nothing terribly unusual, alpaca, haggis, tongue, oxtail, alligator.
I’ve had hákarl, too - not the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat it again unless money were involved.
Horse pastrami and broiled puffin are the only really unusual things I’ve eaten in recent memory. Both, like the hákarl, were consumed in Iceland.