Most Asian markets carry durian.

And to whoever suggested eating the baby chicks in the eggs I think that would gross me out as much as eating slugs (my one and only truly full blown phobia is to even look at a slug).

I'm not a vegetarian and I do know that I'm eating adult animal parts etc. etc. but just looking at an embryo/tiny baby in an egg - EEEWWW!!!

About the germs - my mom firmly believed that kids should get dirty but she was quite fanatical about refrigerating food. If I had a glass of milk at the table (we alwys had to eat/drink everything at the table) mom would put the carton back in the fridge as soon as I poured the milk.

Back in Estonia my grandmother made my mom and uncle go through what sounds medieval today. Their "doctor" would place them inside a large "sandwich board" type apparatus which had small nails driven through both boards. He would smear some sort of vile goop on the nail points and then squeeze the child inside the boards until the skin on their chest and back was punctured. They would get fever and puss draining from all of these tiny wounds and this was supposed to strengthen their immune systems. So glad my mom just let me play outside.

My godmother sanitized everything her two kids ate off and constantly washed her floors. But she fed them raw unpasturized honey to "build up their immunities".

There were no "best before" dates back in my childhood - we just took a good long look and smell to see if something was "turning". No hand sanitizer either - I was supposed to wash my hands before I ate anything but, being a latch key child, no one was there during the day to check the hand washing.

I am one of the healthiest people I know. I have never been hospitalized for any illness and haven't even had the flu for umpteen years. I get one head cold per year and that's about it for me for viral/bacterial illness.

And I handle animal feces, saliva, and other such secretions every day for 5-7 hours.

Dagmar

Yow!!! Glad I wasn't born in Estonia.

Haha. That just cracked me up.

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My Mom tells me that her mother used to park her in her pram on the front porch in the middle of winter in Chicago for naps. Something about fresh air being good for a baby. I'm sure it's a heck of a lot better than hundreds of holes in your skin!

If you're squeamish don't read:

I've watched Andrew Zimmern eat Balut (the baby chick eggs) and also barbecued roasted baby chicks on skewers. Looking at the two, I'd choose the Balut every time, because (depending upon how close to hatching the egg is) it looks a lot more like a regular egg than it does a baby bird. Unless you smooshed it and went looking for the chick or duckling, you wouldn't necessarily see it. Whereas the barbecued grilled chicks looked exactly like barbecued chicks.

It's weird though how watching other people enjoying "disgusting food" can change your perspective on what is disgusting. My husband and I have been watching these travel-food shows most of our marriage. It began as a game between as us to what in the show we would try (of course mostly it was academic, as we weren't likely to have the opportunity to eat roasted grasshoppers, etc), but it rubbed off into our real life when we went to oriental grocery stores or ethnic restaurants (which we both love).

The more things I did try, the less I was afraid of any food. I love ethnic restaurants for the excitement of the experience, not just for the opportunity to eat food I like. I'd rather try something and take the risk that it tastes horrible than eat something "boring." There's an adrenaline rush in trying something you are initially disturbed by. I can't really explain it.

I'm a true foodie. I've been fascinated by food since early childhood. I've been collecting cookbooks for as long as I can remember (I got my first cookbook in first grade. It was the first book I chose from the SRA reading club flyers). I was cooking on my own by age 8, and experimenting with recipes since fourth or fifth grade.

For most of my life, it's been an unhealthy obsession, but I'm not sure I could have given up "food adventuring." In fact, I think that's why diets always ultimately failed. I would get so bored, frustrated, and self-pitying that I'd give up. So now I'm channeling the food interests in a different direction (just as exciting, and in a way even more "challenging" to find ways to experiment with foods without having to spend a lot of calories).

Some of this talk reminds me of a guy who claimed the ONLY thing he could eat was those giant hissing cockroaches. I remember seeing his story on TV and they showed him eating one. Alive. Gross.

Since I grew up in the late 40's and the 50's, we were not subjected to all this germ phobia (well, not as much). There were no good until dates on things, and you drank the milk until it was sour - a little off? add more sugar to your cereal. I have see people at work who won't eat a container of yogurt if it was unrefrigerated for the morning! My parents insisted that we play outside, and really didn't care how dirty we got. We also slept on a screened porch for as late into the fall as we wanted. I remember putting layers of newspaper under the mattress for insulation, and 4 or 5 blankets on the bed, then not moving at all once I was in. Getting up to run into the bathroom took determinaion. About the only thing my parents were adament about was not playing in the river that was 3 houses away - several children had drowned there in my mother's memory (she lived in our house from childhood until after I left college). I remember a summer (1955?) when the river flooded up to the backyard next door where they had the best apple tree in the neighborhood for climbing. We'd climb up and jump off into the water, with squishy rotten or hard green apples underfoot. That same summer there was a huge polio epidemic and still all the precautions our moms tood was to insist we had a bath - with soap! - when we came inside. I don't remember being sick much as a kid except with measles and chicken pox. I was the oldest of a group of kids on our street, so I caught it and had to stay home from school alone, then all the others caught it and could play with each other while they were out of school. So not fair.

My sister and I also ate rhubarb straight from the patch, with little paper cups of sugar for dipping. And you haven't lived until you've eated a sun-warmed superripe tomato standing next to the plant!

We have kept chickens in the past and put them raw into eggnog - yum! But I do have a friend who got samonella from eating raw cookie dough, to it is out there....

Love this thread. I like to think I'll try a lot of things, but having watched Amazing Race and gosh, the other one where folks had to eat stuff (little senior moment here), I know that I do have limits. But applesauce, mmmm, love it. Ate some this morning in fact.

I think what surprises me the most is that the parents who are (IME) the worst about the whole germ-phobic things are the parents about my age - in their 40s - and younger. And I know that my parents and most of THEIR parents didn't have this weird paranoia (for the most part). Most of us this age and older grew up as a lot of us have described here ... so it's not something that has been learned from our parents.

However, I grew up overseas and wasn't subjected to the mass media / advertising hype about "antibacterial" everything, and sell by / eat by dates and all of that. And that's the main thing that I can see is the difference - is that the majority of people are *SO* hugely influenced by the mass media. Between the ads and the panic inducing news ("Will Your Chicken Kill You!?!? News at 11!!!") and all of those parenting articles that tell you if you don't sterilize your kids belongings ... have created this huge panic about ... *gasp* ... germs!!!

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In the spirit of this thread, I tried something today that was both one of the most disgusting (from a typical American perspective) and yet most delicious things I have ever eaten. My grandfather would have loved it, because whenever the family had pork chops, everyone who didn't like the fat border of the pork chop (which most pork chips don't even have anymore) would give their fat trimmings to Grandpa.

Anyway my husband and I stopped by the thai restaurant to say hi to the owner. We weren't even planning on ordering anything, but we talked so long, we ended up taking a couple items home so we wouldn't have to cook for dinner. I got a pork rib and hubby got an order of wings.

My rib was a huge Flintstone rub with a large slab of fat and the skin still hooked to the meat. The restaurant owner told me how wonderful it was, so I ordered it. OMG, it was absolutely amazing. There was a seasoned coating sort of like an oriental version of Lawry's seasoned salt (but with the celery flavor less dominant). The crispy, yet tough skin was like roast pork flavored bubble gum with a hint of bacon. As Emeril is so fond of saying "pork fat rules." The meat was like the best pork chop you've ever had (the meat itself was very lean and unmarbled).

On one hand, eating such a large proportion of fat with the meat, I knew I was being what I used to consider very, very, very bad. On a low carb plan, it's not as disastrous, but still there's no good reason to eat THAT much fat on a regular basis (which I don't and wouldn't). The rib was about eight ounces of meat/fat so probably about 1000 calories, and I did split it with both my husband, his friend, and the cat. My husband shared his wings also (and yes, also with the cat). I estimate my portion at about 500 to 600 calories, so not a disaster, but definitely a luxury snack/meal.

Funny story about the chicken wings and the ribs.

Chicken wings - My husband and I helped the owner name the chicken wings. One afternoon the bar next door (which doesn't serve "buffalo wings") had some patrons complaining they wanted wings with their beer, so the owner sent them over to the restaurant. So the group of people came over to the restaurant asked for a couple large orders of takeout wings so they could take them back to the bar. The restaurant owner had a chicken wing dish on the menu - but it wasn't really finger food. However as any good mom & pop restaurant owner woud do, instead of turning them away, went in the back and on the fly, cut up chicken wings, tossed them in seasoning and deep fried them.

We were there a few days later, and the owner was struggling to find a name for the wings. She didn't know what to call them, and asked us for suggestions. She brought us an order with ranch dressing. We suggested that instead of ranch dressing she serve them with her egg roll sauce (it's a light, thin sweet/sour sauce), because the ranch wasn't really jiving with the oriental seasonings (in our opinion). We suggested she just name them after the restaurant itself. So she did, and it's become one of her best sellers. Luckily, she's on very friendly terms with the bar owner, because some of the bar patrons have begun to buy orders of her wings to take with them to the bar and eat them there. Since it's a bar that doesn't really have a kitchen it's good business for them both.

Ribs - we actually had the ribs once before, but you could hardly call it the same food item. We bough a rib from a Hmong deli in town the year before. It was obviously the same "dish," but the execution was very different. In the deli case, it looked like large pieces of roasted meat - mostly meat, but when we got it home, it was about 3/4 fat, not just the 1/3 or 1/4 fat of the one I had today. The skin was also still on it, but it was rock hard and indigestible (it had the texture of peanut brittle stuck to DOTS gum drops). We figured that we hadn't known what we were ordering and it was meant to use for a soup base or something. I ended up dicing the rib meat and doing just that, using it as a stock for bean soup.

The rib I had today was obviously a better executed example, because I told my husband that it would make a wonderful base for bean soup or baked beans, but it was so delicious I'm not sure I could sacrifice it to the soup, because of the wonderful flavor. I'd have to buy one rib for me, and one for the soup.

Dried salt cod! Yuck! It comes in a box and behind all the little restaurants in Portugal is a pile of those boxes. This is the only ethnic type food that I have tried that I didn't like.

Gail! While my family didn't have dried cod growing up, I knew many people who did, living as I did on the coast in New England. My mother's very favorite dish was something called baked finnan (?sp) haddie - basically another salted fish - a haddock - which had been rescusitated and baked with a milk based sauce. Still too salty for me.

Strange foods? In Panama I had lots of lychees, and some armadilllo. Armadillo was weird, very chewy. But they also had this flash fried ocean fish that was... mmm... I'm sorry I'm drooling over here even though it's over 6 years later.

Frog legs and escargot? Meh. Whenever you have to SATURATE something in butter and garlic to eat it- it's just not worth eating in my opinion!

And I'm so glad to hear that I'm not the only antigermaphobe! My dad was a lab scientist most of the time I was growing up (mainly FDA testing for medication development to boot) so as kids we were the anti antibacterial family, the you will play in the dirt and eat raw cookie dough family. Other than sinus infections (turns out I'm severely allergic to hamsters...) was literally never as a kid. As an adult, I refuse to get a flu shot, avoid antibacterial antyhign like the plague (which is VERY hard to do), and refuse to take antibiotics unless there are clear and pressing signs of actual infection (not like cold infection- like bit by my neighbors dog and my hand was swollen and hot to touch infection) And by golly, I'm NEVER sick. Now, my germaphobe coworkers... totally different story!

Oh my gosh isn't that the truth. Seriously. Go shopping for dish soap and spend 20 mins trying to find ONE brand that isn't anti-bacterial. Or hand soap. Or anything.

I actually make my own handsoap now out of a bar of grated castille soap. It's cheaper, lasts longer, I can scent it myself ... and I don't have to have the antibacterial stuff that I just refuse to buy.

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I love this thread! I do think it's funny that my parents (who grew up in the same era as Pat, they were both born in the 40's), despite growing up without the antibacterial craze, now throw things out as soon as they hit the "sell by" date. That said, I never washed my hands all the time or anything like that when I was a kid (still don't).

Okay, this is probably going to gross people out, but . . . . I don't usually wash my hands after using the bathroom. I just don't get it. I didn't actually touch anything, so why should I wash my hands? The only thing I touched was clean toilet paper, which I bundle up so that nothing can leak through to my hands. I'll wash my hands if I actually touch something, if the public bathroom is nasty, or if someone else is in the bathroom.

On the other hand, I will specifically wash my hands with antibacterial soap after handling raw meat. Raw eggs, no big deal, I eat batter with raw eggs in it and just give my hands a quick rinse after touching egg. DH thinks I'm crazy. His dad is a doc and his mom is a nurse and they are definitely a Purell family. I do check for things to be stinky/growing mold before throwing them out though . . . the one time I tossed an egg it was because when I broke it open it was green and stincky, eew! Usually I am using eggs WAY past the sell by date.

Jessica. I use eggs way past the sell by date too. I check them in the store for cracked ones (we seem to get lots of cartons with cracked eggs) and then unless I find one like you mentioned, I eat them til their gone. In fact this week the store had cartons of 18 eggs BOGO, so we're set for quite awhile. And I only buy milk on sale and then freeze it, so anyone reading the sell by date on my milk would absolutely freak out! Interestingly the price of milk has gone down at my grocery. It was regularly $3.95/gallon, and now it's $3.50. I got some Sat for $2.00/gallon though - score.

Oh yeah, I use eggs well past the date. I do the "float" test - put 'em in water and if they float, they're probably not good. Even then, sometimes I"ll break 'em in a bowl and smell. If they smell ok, then I eat them.

I dislike milk anyway, so even the slightest smell of spoiling I can't deal with. Milk is probably the only thing I'm paranoid about - but even then it's not paranoia about getting sick, but paranoia about the flavor/texture.

I'm trying to think of anything that I'm freaky about dates about ... and there's not really anything. I'm of the smell it / taste it mindset.

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