Yeah, giant hunks of fat are 100% the most disgusting thing. I would much rather try almost anything else mentioned so far than eat that. 
My philosophy on food is that I will try anything twice, as it may be an acquired taste. When I had a three-day layover in Iceland I went to a restaurant that had a sort of sampler plate which included a small portion of hakari. Based on the stories I had heard about it I put off trying it for a while; when I did, however, I did not find the taste nearly as strong as I had heard. I had also been told that it was best eaten with Brennivín, but unfortunately my liver won’t allow me to consume alcohol.
I had it when I visited Japan last September. I went square dancing, and after the dance the other dancers invited me to go out to eat with them. As we were walking there, a guy said we were getting chicken sashimi, and i thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t, and i ended up at a raw chicken place.
I had raw liver, raw gizzard, raw breast meat, and barely seared (mostly raw) thigh meat. And after we’d finished the raw chicken, they brought us a fried chicken. Not a batter-fried chicken, just a chicken that had been cooked in hot oil.
I love sushi. I’m the one who brought up German mett, which i adore. I like raw beef, and sometimes, when I’m cubing beef to make stew, will snag a couple of interior pieces and eat then raw. I love raw oysters and clans, too. But i wasn’t wild about the raw chicken.
It was extremely fresh, and firm, and didn’t have the slimy feeling that chicken often has when you buy it in an American supermarket. But it was extremely mild in flavor, and just wasn’t very interesting or exciting. The fried chicken they brought out after was much tastier. (It was only barely fully cooked, i suppose, but it was cooked through.) It wasn’t gross or especially icky, but i doubt I’ll ever have it again. If I’m going to take risks with food safety, I’d prefer to get something delicious for it. This was more in the category of “not nearly as gross as i expected”.
I like tongue. I’ve had tripe. It doesn’t have a lot of flavor. But i had a tripe dish at a Chinese wedding banquet that was fabulous, mostly because the sauce was fabulous. I like liver, any I’m okay with kidney. I wouldn’t eat brain today because I’d worry about prion disease, but i had it once years ago, any it was okay. Also not good enough to want to try it again. I also had sweetbreads once, and they were disgusting. It was like getting an enormous pile of snot with little bits of brain lurking in it. I guess i don’t like slimy.
I enjoy chicken feet, but i don’t like duck feet. The webbing has a weird texture that i don’t care for.
I’m willing to try almost any food. There are a lot of vegetables i dislike, but i like most meats. One of the few foods I’ve been offered that i couldn’t put into my mouth was natto. It looks like grey snot, and it smells rotten.
One thing I learned when my son introduced me to truly fine sushi dining is that I was using too much soy sauce as well as too much wasabi. For the best sushi experience, let the chef be your guide. High-end sushi bars typically don’t even give you wasabi – it will be inside the sushi. In many places the chef will also (usually on request) brush on just the right amount of soy sauce (if the particular piece requires it at all – some come with their own unique sauces).
Yes, some types of sushi are cooked. Eel is usually grilled, tuna belly will sometimes be seared with a torch as a variation, not a necessity, and one will occasionally encounter sushi made with delicately smoked fish (usually tuna).
Scandinavians are such fine people, I don’t understand what motivates them to make such toxic fish dishes. I’ve never had any of the above, but from what I’ve heard of Surströmming, I wouldn’t want to be within a mile of it.
I do, however, enjoy the occasional pickled herring with sour cream. One wouldn’t normally associate the concept of pickling with fish, but herring fillets pickled in a vinegary wine sauce with onions and served with sour cream is really quite good as an occasional appetizer, though I couldn’t subsist on a steady diet of it. Fortunately it has a long shelf life even after being opened.
Raw? Fermented? Smelly? Bah. The single most disgusting food on the planet is casa martzu: a Sardinian cheese containing live fly maggots. Live as in wiggling and squirming around in the cheese, which is basically fly excrement, as you’re eating it. The EU has banned it but the locals still make and eat it.
National Geographic did a cover story on it. Never. Never, never, never.
I tried bacalhau (dried salted cod) when we lived in Portugal. It’s prepared a number of ways and is the national dish. Didn’t care for it. I’m pretty sure it’s one of those things that you have to grow up with, like gefilte fish or lutefisk.
Another traditional Portuguese dish is cozido (another national dish), which is a stew made with meats, sausages, veggies, etc. The version I tried was made by the local maintenance staff and was ghastly (to me). Lots of very fatty boiled meat, which was a non-starter for me (see above post). I swear I saw a pig’s ear in there. Made me gag to look at it. I was able to nibble a token potato, but claimed a headache and beat a hasty retreat from the gathering. I’m sure they were insulted, but would have been more so if I had vomited on the table.
I suspect episodes of starvation in the past prompted their desperate ancestors to get “creative”.
I don’t think folks in our modern, comfortable society where the major dietary problem for most is too much food really comprehend what true hunger/famine/starvation is. I include myself in that. I hope to never have direct personal experience.
Heck, cheese is rotten milk, when you get right down to it.
There’s a hypothesis that our ancestors were largely scavengers rather than hunters, and as such we’ve inherited adaptations for consuming food that’s begun to decay. Including stronger stomach acid than most animals, and a taste for food that’s beginning to go “off”. We habitually age meat, for example.
Just ask for ketchup.
I consider hard boiled eggs extreme. People may not like pickles, or celery, but imagine going to every midwestern gathering and seeing a bowl of deviled eggs and knowing as you go up to fill your plate in line you will do it with a hearty whiff of an entire Long John Silver’s dumpster on fire with burning baby diapers. Then you’re meant to say, “mmmm, it all smells so good.”
I remember, the first time I ate sushi, was in 1996 when I was in Japan for a few months. At the time, sushi hadn’t really become popular in the Midwestern US (where I’m from), and indeed, at the time it was still shorthand for “gross-ass food those weird foreigners eat.” But then, in Japan, I figured, since I’m here, I might as well give it a try. What do you know, I’ve been hooked ever since then. Fortunately sushi is kind of mundane and commonplace now here in the US, even in the Midwest (although it’s far from high-quality, like you’d get in a coastal city).
When my younger half-sister was about 16, my wife and I (we’re much older than she) took her out for sushi. As soon as the piece hit her tongue, she was like, “ew grosss!!! ACk!!!” and spit it out and began scraping it off of her tongue. Then a few years later, like me, she wound up in Japan and gave it another shot. And she, like me, is hooked. In fact, when she was pregnant with my nephew, she told me that the thing she hated the worst was having to go nine months without sushi.
I’ve never had steak tartare, but I’ve wanted to try it ever since a friend told me about it in college. I’m pretty sure it’s on the menu at one of the restaurants on the cruise vessel I’m sailing on later this year, so I’ll give it a try.
I have no interest in trying any of those legendarily-horrifying Scandinavian dishes like Surstrommig(sp?). I did learn, however, from Doper @Mangetout via his YouTube channel, that all of these reaction videos of Americans eating this stuff, screaming in horror as the can explodes while they open in, are doing it wrong. Long story short, you can’t ship it to America and expect it to still be good. And also, you have to open the can under water. Still, I’m not going to try it.
Deviled eggs, mmmmmmm! Mayonnaisey goodness with lots of sweet paprika on top. 
I was put off sushi back in the '80s when I read an article about a guy suffering from chronic stomach cramps. When surgeons opened him up, they found what they thought was some kind of orange thread inside his gut. When it started wiggling, they realized it was a worm he’d consumed while eating sushi.
I have had sushi since, but only in the US, where I assume it’s safe to eat. It’s okay (my younger daughter loves the stuff), but I’m not really a big fan of it.
I think the places I went were never so upscale, mostly kinda McDonalds of sushi or a level or two above that.
If I ever go to such a fine place I’ll keep your advice in mind, both to truly savour the sushi and to avoid being killed by an angry sushi chef!
Yeah, I know. Some people won’t eat any sushi because “raw fish”.
And some types of sushi contain only vegetables (and possibly cream cheese, like the avocado roll - and yes, avocado is a fruit, but let’s not quibble), no fish at all.
I think I may have shared this story, but it fits the OP, so here it goes again. Our son-in-law is Filipino. At his family gatherings, there is usually a table overloaded with food of all kinds. I’m Asian, and used to eating what a lot of people consider weird or gross, and in my experience with his family, there had been, up to this time, only one thing I wouldn’t eat they’d prepared (they overcook salmon every freakin’ time). On one occasion, I went to the buffet and saw a tureen of soup. I love soup, so I took a bowl and started to help myself to a big ol’ ladleful. While I was scooping, SIL’s dad sidled up to me and quietly whispered, “You may not like that. Not many people do.” I thought, “Hey, how bad could it be?”, and served myself a scoop (albeit a smaller scoop than I normally would have, thanks to Manuel’s warning). Once I put a spoonful into my mouth, I found out how bad it could be. It was like I’d taken a huge slurp of bile. It was bitter. I could barely keep myself from wretching. That was the day I learned I did not like papaitan, and Ilocano delicacy made, in part, from bile. I’ll never eat papaitan again.
Only later did Manuel tell me that most Filipinos don’t like papaitan, either!
I once knew a gentleman (an American) who had a lovely wife from Thailand. He told me you could go to one of her family’s holiday dinners and feast on rat, which is apparently considered a delicacy in that neck of the woods.