You Are What You Eat

 

Happy Pandemic Anniversary! My kids just finished up Spring Break, and it was nicer than I expected to have them home for a week. We went through quite a steep family adjustment when they came home and stayed home for nine full months shortly before Spring Break last year. They’ve only been gone for ten weeks, so I wasn’t sure if they would have had time to recover from such a recent and severe case of Parental Overdose. We couldn’t do much more than hang out at home, watch movies, and bake cookies. I’m feeling super grateful that my kids are all so pleasant to be around.

Now that vaccinations are in full-swing, I’ve been dreaming of dining in restaurants and travelling again with a fresh new perspective and appreciation after being cooped up for a year. There is a museum in Sweden that checks all of these boxes in a most unusual way. The Disgusting Food Museum is in Malmo, Sweden stretches our perspectives of how view food. What’s the difference between a delicacy and utter grossness?

Eighty foods have been chosen for exhibit based on taste, smell, texture, and “background.” The background of a food considers how it was made, particularly how animals were treated or manipulated in food preparation, such as force-feeding geese for foie gras, factory farming, and an extra unnecessary dish called Kiviak from the Arctic. Kiviak is made by gutting a seal and filling its body with 300-500 tiny auk birds, sewing it back up, then leaving it to ferment for about 18 months to preserve and tenderize the bird meat. Kiviak must be eaten outside due to its pungent odor and is said to taste like a cross between licorice and a very strong cheese. Cooking AND sewing? JUST WHY, ARCTIC PEOPLE??

The museum features one of my dad’s faves, durian, which is interesting but not surprising. Durian is a fruit that legit smells like poop but tastes kind of creamy and sweet. Century eggs are also exhibited, and I love me a century egg in my porridge! These are eggs preserved in tea, lime, and salt, which turns the egg black and delicious. I grew up eating these uniquely flavored eggs, and I understand why some might not love them. More for me! Nom, nom, nom!!

Also featured at the museum are Twinkies (not Chinkie Twinkies), Pop-Tarts, and root beer. Super weird, right? I mean, Twinkies and root beer were some of my ultimate pregnancy delights! One time I ate FIVE Twinkies over the course of an afternoon picnic when I was pregnant with Alex. Not even kidding. It probably will not surprise you that I gained fifty pounds over the course of those nine months. And while it makes me kind of queasy to think of this, I hardly think that anyone might find a Twinkie “disgusting.” Apparently, many Swedes think that root beer tastes like toothpaste.

There’s even a new temporary exhibit featuring unique alcohol from around the world. My grandma used to ferment rice wine in the closet, adding special, weird ingredients that smelled like poison, but (as far as I know) she never added live (but not any more!!) two-day-old baby mice. 

Even a pandemic quarantine would not tempt me to imbibe South Korean poo wine or Icelandic sheep-dung-smoked-whale-testicle-beer. WHO THINKS OF THESE THINGS?? Of course, this beer comes from Iceland, the land of confusion.

“Dude, I think I’m going to try my hand at home brewing. I’ll start with some sheep dung. And then….maybe I’ll add some testicles. What kind…there are so many choices! Oh, I have some leftover whale testicles in the freezer. That’ll do. But I think I’ll SMOKE them first just to make this interesting.”

Here is a gallery with pictures and descriptions of some of the food exhibits. I hope they don’t make you hurl.
Thank you for reading, my friends!