The Disgustingest Bingo Ever!

Pick a box! The first contains fermented Greenland shark meat, the second has dry-roasted dung beetles, and in the third you'll find a kind of cheese that smells like 'a rugby club changing room'. Which one would you like to try?

At the Disgusting Food Museum, I tried them all!

The museum was the reason we were in the Swedish city of Malmö and I was looking forward to the visit very much. The entrance looked like a regular cafe, but I knew that inside lay some of the most disgusting foods I would ever see. We were handed our tickets, which were vomit bags. It had been three days since the last vomit at the museum. How would today go? Would it be another vomit-free day?

• 

• 

The museum is meant to be seen in a certain order, which is shown by arrows on the floor. You start at a small photo booth. You stick your head inside a little hole and a smell is released. Just as you get the horrid whiff, four pictures are taken, each showing how your face reacts to the smell. They were intended to show the stages of disgust, but my parents' straight-faced reactions backfired on the purpose of the photo booth. Our family was redeemed by my own dreadful, disgusted expressions, ones that my parents described as 'overly dramatic'.

Then we walked around the large room, seeing each food, reading each description and even stopping to smell some of the most obnoxious ones. We dutifully followed the arrowed path and found ourselves at the end of the line. Little did I know then that the visit would end with a Disgusting Food Bingo and I would get to taste some of those horrid foods! Out of the frying pan, and into the fire! I was curious and a little bit worried, but I was pretty confident that the foods on the Bingo card wouldn't be dangerous.

So brace yourselves for possibly the most disgusting food journey of your life!

Cricket

I was told the fried crickets were crunchy and tasted like cardboard. This was an awfully accurate description because the second the crickets touched my tongue, I felt the papier mâché-like texture and tasted the horrible cardboard taste!

Buffalo Worms and Silkworms

Like rice puffs, they said, and once again they were correct! The deep-fried (or dried?) buffalo worms and silkworms did actually taste like rice puffs, and had they not looked as disgusting, I would've had some more!

• 

• 

Kalles Kavier

Being a paste made with fish eggs, this Swedish food tasted like fish and salt combined. I quite like fish, but this was far from how I normally have it. It was sour and bitter on my taste buds and made my face scrunch up as though it would help rid my mouth of the taste that had just plagued my most favourite of the five senses.

Durian Fruit

My dad does not like Durian at all! If I so much as mention it, I'm immediately met with a disgusted expression. He could really be head of the anti-durian fan club. So, when I finally got the chance to try this Southeast Asian fruit, I was expecting a horrible, foul taste, worse than anything I've ever had before! What I wasn't expecting was a soft, sweet fruit that, in my opinion, tasted like pineapple sprinkled with sugar! Better yet, it didn't even make my throat all itchy after trying it!

Century Egg

I'd seen this Chinese delicacy on display. I knew that it wasn't actually kept for a century, only preserved in a clay-ash-salt-quicklime-rice hull mixture for several weeks or months. but it really did look quite old and rotten. Even though they said it had a rich taste, its appearance was so off-putting that I didn't let the taste register as I practically gulped down the small piece I was given to try,

Vegemite

I used to love Vegemite on toast with lashings of butter, then hated it for a while, and now I love it again! I knew it was one of those foods that very few enjoyed, that many judged the very existence of. So I wasn't all that surprised to see its name written neatly on the bingo sheet. And unlike the century egg that preceded it, I took the little serving of Vegemite gladly, tasting a small part of Australia, despite being thousands of kilometres away.

Root Beer

I'd seen root beer countless times in American movies. It was like a celebrity among non-alcoholic drinks, so how could it be in a place that was home to the world's most disgusting foods? Then I tasted it...and I still wondered what such a wonderfully sweet and tasty drink could've done to earn a place in the Disgusting Food Museum.

Stinking Bishop

I like cheese, except blue cheese; you would never catch me willingly eating blue cheese. So really, though it's called Stinking Bishop and it's said to smell like 'a rugby club changing room', I didn't find this British cheese to be that smelly, and it tasted alright.

Gamle Oles Farfar

I don't think I'd ever read a more accurate description! The taste of this Danish cheese is buttery, nutty and rich, and the scent is similar to that of smelly feet and rotting corpses! It was true. I did love the taste of the cheese, but I can't say the same for the smell, which made me convulse.

Su Callu

I tried this Italian cheese, and I didn't like it. I saw the description and I liked it even less. The cheese was made by feeding a baby goat milk and killing it while the milk was still in its stomach, and then air-drying the stomach for several months. It was unimaginably cruel.

Sauerkraut Juice

I knew what sauerkraut was and didn't really mind the taste of fermented raw cabbage that much. Would it be any different as a juice? Nope. Honestly, it was the same. If anything, I found the sauerkraut taste to be milder in the juice.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8586bd_b651fc0296bd4feb815c54215a47a6a5/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Dung Beetle and June Beetle

I think both the beetles tasted the same - a little salty and a little crispy. The reason why I only have a vague memory of these dried bugs, especially the Dung Beetle, could either be because I almost swallowed them without allowing myself a proper taste from the pure dread that the word 'dung' in a food's name gave me, or because they were just little snacks with no overpowering or distinctive taste.

Hákarl

Hákarl is an Icelandic dish made from fermented Greenland shark. Because the Greenland shark pees through its skin, its flesh is toxic. The carcass is left in the ground for months to rot and then air-dried for several more months. It's meant to be eaten with Iceland's national drink, Black Death akvavit. The spirit perhaps tones down the taste, because the shark meat tasted so strongly of fish that I, someone who tends to enjoy all kinds of fish, wanted to spit it out the second I got my first taste of it.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8586bd_a3185b8cdec84cff91f084ef086a58bf/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Surströmming

This is apparently the dish/smell that has induced the most vomit at the Disgusting Food Museum! I don't know which part of this fermented Baltic Sea herring I detested more - the insane amount of salt, or the taste so fishy that I went straight back to the root beer to rid myself of it.

Salty Licorice

The Salty Licorice from Northern Europe hit me harder than a football ever could! Its saltiness was similar to Surstromming and had the same severity as ten Warheads put together! I took one small bite and grimaced; the saltiness was simply too much to bear.

Hot Sauces: The Last Dab and Da Bomb beyond Insanity

Being underage, I was allowed to taste only the first two of the six hot sauces on the Bingo card: The Last Dab and Da Bomb beyond Insanity! The girl at the counter said the hottest sauces on supermarket shelves would be 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville; Da Bomb was 135,000 Scoville!

The sauces made my tongue burn and the roof of my mouth sting. Then my whole mouth was on fire, causing tears to roll down my cheeks. My vision blurred because of the tears that had built up in my eyes. The look of sympathy on my parents' faces made me wonder exactly how miserable I looked!

No longer able to tolerate the fireworks in my mouth, I drank some milk. It helped, but my tear-stained face remained swollen for several long minutes, and the burning sensation didn't quite go away for another half an hour.

Some Honorable Mentions

The Mellified Man from Assyria

I didn’t know what the Mellified Man looked like; I didn’t know what it smelt like; and I definitely didn't want to know what it tasted like! I could not believe anyone would consume mummified human confection steeped in honey. The mere thought disgusted me more than any other food at the museum, and though I only remember seeing a picture of honey and reading a description of the process, the knowledge that a food like that existed was something I will never forget.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8586bd_7b274301eafa4d4db25a4eee6f958444/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

Casu Marzu from Italy

When I looked into the hollow inside of the block of pecorino cheese, I was shocked to see that the cheese fly larvae inside were actually moving! And to make matters worse, I found out from the description that when eating this cheese, people are required to wear safety glasses so that the larvae don't jump into their eyes!

Virgin Boy Eggs from Dongyang, China

It is a food that truly deserves to be called disgusting, to the point that it remains imprinted in my mind as I sit writing this post three years after my visit to the museum. The process, nothing short of shocking, involves collecting the pee of schoolboys in big metal buckets and then soaking and boiling the eggs in it. Just the idea of it made me shudder, and the relief I felt when I saw its absence on the Disgusting Bingo was tremendous!

I'd always thought of pumpkin and coconut as the most disgusting foods; not once had foods like Gamle Oles Farfar and Surströmming crossed my mind. I thought seeing the revolting foods at the museum would make me wary of trying them, but if anything, seeing the taste test turned into a Bingo made me want to try everything!

Now that I've tasted some of the yuckiest foods there are, I think pumpkin and coconut sound quite alright!