Blog #2: You Ate What?

It makes me laugh whenever I read or hear about "gross" foods because I think that I am open to everything when in reality a lot of things just make me want to gag.

Anyways, when I was living in France two years ago I ate the two grossest things that I have ever consumed. One I ended up liking and the other one makes me cringe just thinking about it. The first was head cheese, which is meat jelly made with pieces of calf or pig. Just thinking about what it actually is makes me a little sick, but fortunately I ate this on my first night and just heard the term "pâté de tête," my mom said it was head cheese and I just nodded thinking that it couldn't possibly be HEAD cheese. I ended up enjoying it probably in part to me not knowing what it actually was, but I'm sure I'll eat it again. The second thing I ate was the grossest and something I would care never to eat again. This was another food that I wasn't quite sure of the actual ingredients and my French cousin was hesitant to tell me. I ate it blindly but after that first bite I knew I dislike it. It was rich - too rich - and the pieces within the sausage were chewy - too chewy. After trying it my cousin finally decided to enlighten me, and I was disgusted.

My own family culture has a varied set of food do's and don'ts. For example my mother (and thus my brothers and my dad) no longer eat beef. However my mother knows that I love beef and on my birthday I usually have her make me a rare ribeye steak. My mother, before becoming so interested in the food industry and slaughtering practices, used to be very open to eating all different kinds of food, but growing up in the midwest there were still things that she just couldn't stomach, like the tongue she ordered in France as a teenager and I'm sure the idea of eating a dog or a cat would not sit well with her either. I remember one food don't I experienced as a child when my mom told me we were eating fish and mid way through the meal I discovered we were actually eating shark, I immediately put my fork down and pushed my plate away. Reading about the duck eggs with semi-developed fetuses inside was probably the grossest thing I have ever thought about eating, I cannot really see how that would be possible or how that works logically, but of course that is my own bias, but to me that seems plain cruel.

I can definitely see how that our perception of food is psychological. When reading about what head cheese actually is, I read that it was traditionally a peasant food in many countries in Europe. If you think about it that way these people were forced to make do with what they had and resorted to making something that the higher classes may have looked at with disgust, then as centuries passed it just became a tradition and the norm and people didn't necessarily think of it as a "must" to survive but as something to enjoy.

Stenzerfield, Kenny. "Eight of the Most Disgusting Food Delicacies." Purple Slinky. N.p., 06 Feb 2008. Web. 12 Apr 2010. .