101 Things #87 - Unfamiliar Menus

Nature is a wonderful protector. Our senses have developed to find opportunities and detect threats. Much of our understanding of our immediate surroundings runs in our subconscious, making us react to anything unexpected and thereby helping to keep us alive. There are (or were) the obvious dangers from wild animals, approaching storms, and our fellow humans. Additionally, we have over many generations developed instincts for the perils of the unknown and chief amongst these is our feelings about what to eat. For example, it is counter-intuitive to eat blue food. Why? Blue is the colour of rot in many foods. And it is counter-intuitive to eat food that looks strange for the obvious reasons that, if we don't know what it is, then it might be dangerous.

With this in the background, consider the suggestion found on the Bucket List Journey website that one of the items on your bucket-list should be

Eat something foreign that looks disgusting.

I agree with Mother Nature on this one. This idea goes into my anti-bucket-list compendium, 101 Things I Refuse To Do Before I Die. However we should first dissect the trap in the innocent phrasing of "something foreign".

We are naturally, and quite rightly, suspicious of foreign foods and with very good reason. We are used to eating a certain diet. Going off it can have unexpected and unpleasant consequences. Foods that are fine for the locals are not necessarily going to suit strangers. Europeans travelling to Asia and Africa are routinely advised to be very careful about drinking water or anything made directly from water. Having been on a holiday to Egypt, where, despite all precautions and warnings, everyone on the trip was ill at some point with stomach upsets, I know this advice is based on hard experience. Equally, there is a far higher proportion of lactose intolerance amongst Asians and they must take care before plunging into the more dairy-based diets of Europe.

I think the point about "something foreign" is that, if you are confronted with a familiar food in your own country that is disgusting, then it should be avoided with good reason; if it is foreign then, one might argue, the disgust is simply a cultural phenomenon and merely reflects our upbringing. But here we have a genuine dilemma. Is it apparently disgusting but really absolutely fine, tasty and nutritious or is it genuinely harmful to health and tastes so appallingly nasty that it will haunt our nightmares for weeks to come? How can you tell? Watching the locals tucking in with relish proves nothing - the locals on our Egyptian trip had no problems, it was the unfamiliar bugs in the water that did for us.

I have seen slabs of meat hung up on market stalls in Tibet, festooned in flies and without any form of covering. The locals shopped, unconcerned. I would not then, and would not now, wish to eat such meat. I did once risk having some strange intestine-like sausage at a French motorway service station (out of the same spirit of adventure that underlies the "foreign disgusting" meme) and after two cautious mouthfuls heartily wished I had not done so. And right now the world is grappling with the covid-19 pandemic, caused (probably) by a mutating virus in Chinese food markets. The indiscriminate mixing of species enables the virus to spread and mutate, whilst the crowded markets are there to feed the appetite for weird foods, including plenty that we find disgusting such as bats.

The "foreign" bit is a red herring (and those really are supposed to be rather good, according to a recent TV programme about the fisheries of Lowestoft). If food disgusts then there is a good reason for it. I don't care how popular something may be, if I don't fancy it then I'm not going near it.