In every culture, at least one food requires courage from those who try it for the first time. Take French cuisine, for example. You have to wonder who decided that only the common garden snail could do proper justice to a garlic and butter sauce. Yet escargot tastes delicious - once you forget that your appetizer spent many happy days spreading mucus trails and feeding off decayed plants.

And what about the Japanese penchant for seaweed? Many people view seaweed solely as a slippery nuisance that causes beaches to smell strange. But the Japanese count upon the marine algae to lend flavor to soups, salads and even sushi.


I can’t imagine eating anything that generates its own electrical defense system, but many cultures have a favorite eel dish. The next time you’re visiting Britain, watch for an East End street vendor hawking fresh jellied eels, a popular treat made by boiling fresh eel with seasonings and adding gelatin to the stock. Sound icky? Scandinavians might agree – they prefer their eel baked and served cold on bread.

As for Chinese cuisine, a famous Cantonese saying states that “Anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible.” So it’s not surprising that the Chinese eat several unusual foods. Here are a few examples:

“Stinky Tofu”

Take a brine made with shrimp, vegetables and salt, ferment for months, soak a block of tofu in it for several hours, and you have a dish renowned for its pungent odor. Stinky tofu (also known by its Chinese name, Chou Dofu) is one of those foods that it’s impossible to feel neutral about - people either love or hate it. Asian tourists who follow their nose will have no trouble locating a stinky tofu stand – street hawkers who sell it have been fined for breaking air pollution laws. For those who want to enjoy their stinky tofu in a more formal atmosphere, several restaurants devoted to the smelly curd have sprung up in recent years, including Dai’s House of Stinky Tofu in Taipei, rumored to be a favorite haunt of film director Lee Ang.

Sea Cucumber

Wander into any Chinese medicine shop and you’ll spot what appears to be a chunk of cement in one of the display cases. This is the dried form of sea cucumber, also known as beche de mer and sea ginseng. This strange looking ocean creature looks exactly like a cucumber with the addition of tubed feet and a ring of tentacles around its mouth.

Unfortunately, sea cucumber’s taste doesn’t live up to its appearance – it’s rather bland. Nonetheless, it’s reputed medicinal value and reputation as an aphrodisiac make sea cucumber a popular dish at Chinese New Years banquets and other festive celebrations.

Thousand-Year Old Eggs

If the thought of eating food that could have been served to an Emperor during the Song dynasty offends your culinary sensibilities, relax. Thousand-year-old eggs aren’t really that old. A more accurate name for this pungent hors d’oeuvre would be salted or preserved eggs. Thousand-year old eggs (also called century eggs or hundred-year old eggs), are made by preserving duck eggs in ash and salt for one-hundred days. This turns the white of the egg a darkish gray color, giving the eggs an ancient appearance. Definitely an acquired taste, thousand-year old eggs have a strong salty flavor.

Bird’s Nest Soup

The chief ingredient in Bird’s nest soup is the nest of the swiftlet, a tiny bird that lives in caves in Southeast Asia. Instead of twigs and straw, the swiftlet makes a nest from its own saliva – the only bird in the world to do so. Harvesting these nests requires great skill - men must balance on tall bamboo poles to grab the nests from inside the dark caves. Like sea cucumber, bird’s nest actually tastes rather bland. Its recent rise in popularity comes from its growing reputation both as a health tonic and an aphrodisiac.

As debates about climate change — does it exist and how serious is it? – rage on, many scientists continue to uncover more and more evidence that atmospheric pollution is having negative effects on Earth, right here and now, climate change or not.

Scientists studying the chemistry of lakes reported in a study published this week that atmospheric nitrogen released from the burning of fossil fuels and the widespread use of fertilizers in agriculture is altering the makeup of even remote bodies of water.

The study, published in Science, found elevated nitrogen levels in alpine and subalpine lakes in Colorado, Sweden and Norway.

The added nitrogen changes the food composition of the aquatic environment, first by feeding the phytoplankton, and then other organisms as it moves up the food chain. With the lake’s plant life getting a disproportionate amount of nitrogen relative to other necessary minerals, like phosphorus, the “fundamental ecology,” of the lake is changed, according to the researchers.

This result of this new balance of minerals means that the phytoplankton, in essence, are eating differently (rather like when we hominids don’t get all our vitamins). The excess nitrogen restricts how much phosphorus they can absorb, and they become, in scientific lingo, “phosphorus limited.” And that’s not a good thing.

“We know that phosphorus-limited phytoplankton are poor food – basically ‘junk food’ for animal plankton, which in turn are food for fish,” said James Elser, a limnologist (people who study fresh water environments) in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, who lead the study of collaborating US and Scandinavian scientists.

“Such a shift could potentially affect biodiversity,” Elser said. “However, we don’t really know, because, unlike in terrestrial systems, the impacts of nitrogen deposition on aquatic systems have not been widely studied.”

In other words, it’s possible that the lake life will adapt. Or not.

Elser’s collaborators include researchers Tom Andersen and Dag Hessen from the University of Oslo; Jill Baron of the United States Geological Survey and Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University; Ann-Kristin Bergström and Mats Jansson with Umeå University, Sweden; and Koren Nydick of the Mountain Studies Institute in Colorado, in addition to members of his own group in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Marcia Kyle and Laura Steger

Elser and colleagues were supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.