Loads of Taste

This Sardinian cheese is riddled with insect larvae. “Casu Marzu” means ‘rotten cheese’ and is most commonly referred to as ‘maggot cheese.’ It’s now been banned for health reasons but can still be found for sale on the black market in Sardinia and other parts of Italy.

This Filippino dish, called Balut, isn’t unlike a chocolate Kinder Surprise, these eggs harbor a surprise, although it’s not a plastic toy, but rather a chance to eat your chicken and your egg at the same time.
Fertilized eggs are boiled just before they’re due to hatch, so your yolk oozes out followed by… a chicken (or duck) foetus.

You’ve got to be careful with this delicacy or you might end up in the morgue. The deadly Puffer fish, or fugu, is the ultimate delicacy in Japan even though its skin and insides contain the poisonous toxin tetrodotoxin, which is 1,250 times stronger than cyanide.

The eensy weensy spider climbed up the water spout…if you suffer from arachnophobia you probably don’t want to try eating these eight-legged monsters. They’re not tiny little house spiders, they’re great big tarantulas and you can buy them from street vendors in Skuon, Cambodia.

You wouldn’t necessarily think a birds nest would be edible, but the Chinese use Swifts’ nests to make this soup, known as the ‘Caviar of the East’. Right now you’re probably imagining a nest made out of twigs and leaves, but Swiftlets make their nests predominantly out of saliva.