In recent years, Hollywood has learned that people like watching others chow down on calf pancreas and camel spiders. Even so, one person's offal is another person's delicacy. Here are interesting foods enjoyed around the world.

Poi (Hawaii): Taro root is boiled to remove the calcium oxalate poison, then mashed to a muddy purple paste. To most non-Hawaiians, it also tastes like muddy purple paste.

humpback whale with throat grooves
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Muktuk (Alaska, Canada): Enjoy a hunk of whale blubber, which looks and feels in the mouth like densely packed cotton soaked in oil. It's attached to a thick piece of whale skin with the look and feel of worn tire tread. You cut off chunks of blubber and chew them--for a long time.

Black pudding (Britain, Ireland): Try some congealed pig blood that's been cooked with oatmeal and formed into a small disk. It doesn't taste like blood; more like a thick, rich, beef pound cake.

Vegemite (Australia): "Yeast extract" is a brewery by-product that looks like chocolate spread, smells like B vitamins, and tastes overwhelmingly salty. Australians love it on sandwiches or baked in meatloaf, and it goes well with cheese.

Lutefisk (Sweden): It's simply fish boiled in lye. The lye gelatinizes the fish, but if it's soaked too long, the mixture starts turning into soap. The taste is actually fairly mild; the smell depends on the fish used (reportedly, cod isn't the best choice).

Chorizo (Iberia, Latin America): This is what remains after all the respectable pig offal has been made into normal sausage. By now we're down to the lips, lymph nodes, and salivary glands. It's spicy and tasty, provided you don't mind dining on an immune system.

Menudo (Mexico): Basically, it's cow-stomach soup. If you can tolerate the slimy, rubbery tripe chunks, the soup itself tastes fine. It's often served for breakfast to cure a hangover.

Scrapple (Pennsylvania): The Amish and Mennonites don't waste much, and pig butchers chop up leftover guts, cook them with cornmeal, then pour it all into brick-like molds to solidify.

Casu marzu (Sardinia): It's illegal in Italy to sell wormy cheese, so pragmatic citizens make their own by sticking a perfectly good round in the cupboard for a couple of months so flies can lay eggs on it. The larvae produce enzymes that break down the cheese into a tangy goo, which Sardinians dive into and enjoy, larvae and all.

Balut (Philippines): Ever get a hankering for soft-boiled duck or chicken embryos? Some Filipinos think there's nothing finer, even though one must sometimes pick miniature feathers out of the teeth.

Surströmming (Sweden): Primarily a seasonal dish in northern Sweden, this rotten fermented herring could knock out a wolverine. Even the Swedes rarely open a can of it indoors, except for playful children who swipe some and hide it in their school's air vents.

See some even stranger foods on the next page.

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