Face Your Food

You might want to think twice if someone offers you a cup of this coffee when you pop round to their house in Indonesia, or maybe not. Kopi Luwak is the rarest, most expensive gourmet coffee in the world. Sounds divine right? It’s actually made from the excrements of an Indonesian cat-like creature called the Luwak.

Sannakji is a raw dish consisting of live octopus typical in Korea. Live octopus is cut into pieces, lightly seasoned with sesame oil and served immediately, the tentacles still squirming on the plate.
Eating live octopus is a serious challenge. Beyond the mental challenge of trying to get your head round eating something that’s still alive, but there’s the physical difficulty of fighting with your food, as the tentacles stick to any surface they touch.

Surstomming is fermented Baltic herring and can be found on supermarket shelves all over Sweden, although you probably won’t see it next to the Ikea meatballs.
“Certain airlines…consider the pressurized cans to be potentially dangerous, like fireworks and explosives.”

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.