"Disgusting delicacies"

I think the slashfood article Ezra links to here gets it wrong; I don’t think I could force myself to eat that maggot cheese on a bet, but I didn’t really have an issue with eating balut. I hadbalut a couple times in Cambodia this summer and I thought they were actually pretty good.

I really want to try civet coffee some day, but it’s simply too expensive to justify. While wikipedia claims the coffee’s unique taste comes from enzymes in the civet’s stomach, I’ve heard from coffee people that the real reason civet coffee is so good is that the civets are far more discerning in choosing which the coffee they eat then any human harvesting method could be.

Unfortunately, when my bus stopped in Skuon, I was having some stomach troubles, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to try the deep fried spiders.

One of the tastiest things I ate in all of Southeast Asia was in Laos; I selected an item at random from a Laotian menu at a little roadside stand of a restaurant. I was served a wonderful baguette stuffed with fresh herbs and chunks of some of the most delicious, tender, tasty fried meat I’ve ever had. I went back the next day for another one, and this time they had an English menu to accompany the Laotian one. The dish was identified simply and directly: “fried weasel with baguette.” Whether the meat was actually a weasel, or some other animal that some white person said looked like a weasel, I’ll never know.

Another Laotian food note: many Laotian restaurants primarily serve a combination of Thai and Vietnamese dishes, but in my experience they were often better than the versions of those dishes I had in Thailand and Vietnam. The Pho, in particular, was consistently much tastier and more flavorful in Laos than Vietnam.