12531. Food Facts

When a pig is roasted in Cuba, the skull is cracked open and each guest takes a spoon to share scoops of brain.

12532. Food Facts

In Mexico, a black fungus which infects maize is canned and sold. It looks like black slime with a few yellow lumps in.

12533. Food Facts

Sun-dried maggots have been eaten from China to North America.

12534. Food Facts

Central American wedding feasts often included honeyed ants.

12535. Food Facts

In 1973, a Swedish sweets salesman was buried in a coffin made of chocolate.

12536. Food Facts

In Ghana, half of the locally produced meat comes from rats.

12537. Food Facts

In China, people get their own back on poisonous scorpions by frying them.They are said to taste rather like cashew nuts.

12538. Food Facts

Oysters are always eaten raw – alive – in the UK and USA.

12539. Food Facts

In Cambodia, giant grilled spiders are a popular street snack.

12540. Food Facts

The Korean delicacy sannakji consists of still-wriggling slices of octopus tentacle.

12541. Food Facts

In the Philippines, fertilized duck or chicken eggs are cooked and eaten – with the unhatched chick partly grown inside. It's called balut, in case you want to avoid it on the menu.

12542. Food Facts

An American delicacy called headcheese, similar to British brawn, is made by cooking a whole cow or pig head into a mush and letting it cool into a jelly-like mass.

12543. Food Facts

Delicacies enjoyed in Iceland include puffin and svie – singed and boiled sheep's head.

12544. Food Facts

Until 1999, it was legal to enjoy ortolan in France – a tiny, rare, song bird, fattened in a dark box to three times it normal size then drowned in brandy and spit roasted for a few minutes before being eaten whole, innards included. (It was OK to leave the head and beak.) Traditionally, it was eaten with a napkin draped over your head and the plate so that none of the delicious smell could escape.

12545. Food Facts

In Finland, people cook blood pancakes.

12546. Food Facts

Native Alaskan Indians bury salmon eggs in a jar for ninety days and eat them when they are truly rotten.

12547. Food Facts

Kakambian, from the Philippines, is made of diced goat – skin, hair, fat and meat all mixed together.

12548. Food Facts

At the winter festival of Thorrablot, Icelanders eat hákarl – rotten shark. Shark meat is buried in the ground for six to eight weeks then dried in the open air for two months.

12549. Food Facts

In Mongolia, camel or horse milk is stored in a cleaned horse stomach or hide bag and hung up in the ger (tent). Everyone who passes the door has to stir or hit the bag. It slowly ferments into a slightly alcoholic, cheesy, yoghurt drink which everyone drinks, even children.

12550. Food Facts

In some parts of Asia, monkey brains are a delicacy – but it's a myth that they are eaten from the head while the monkey is still alive.

12551. Food Facts

Bagoong is a very smelly, fermented paste made from mashed shrimps and eaten in the Philippines.

12552. Food Facts

In Palau, whole fruit bats, complete with skin, may be ordered as a starter or main course.

12553. Food Facts

Morcilla is a Puerto Rican sausage made with rice boiled in pigs' blood, stuffed into a sausage skin and then fried.

12554. Food Facts

In Ecuador, a family barbecue can include guinea pig and snake kebabs.

12555. Food Facts

In north Africa, people eat fried termites.

12556. Food Facts

In Brazil, people eat barbecued armadillo.

12557. Food Facts

In southern Africa, large caterpillars called mopani can be bought in tins.

12558. Food Facts

In Hubei province, China, eels are served whole.The correct way to eat one is to bite though just behind the head and pull out the insides with chopsticks.

12559. Food Facts

In Hong Kong, you can buy packets of crispy fried crabs like packets of crisps.

12560. Food Facts

Rocky Mountain oysters, or prairie oysters, are calves' testicles – enjoyed fried in parts of the USA.

12561. Food Facts

In some rural parts of China, you can get owl soup.

12562. Food Facts

In Korea, it's possible to buy canned silk worm pupae, or bags of silkworm from street vendors.The idea is to crunch the end off the grub and suck out the juices.

12563. Food Facts

Spider wine, from Cambodia, is actually rice wine – the spiders are added later.

12564. Food Facts

The Japanese dish shiokara is made by fermenting squid in old fish guts.

12565. Food Facts

Henry V of England once held a Christmas feast at which the menu included carps' tongues, roasted dolphin and flowers set in jelly.

12566. Food Facts

Honey is bee vomit. Bees drink nectar from flowers which they turn into honey before sicking it back up to store in the hive.

12567. Food Facts

Argentinian Gauchos keep a piece of beef under their saddles so that it is pummelled until tender as they ride around all day. It's said that the dish steak tartar came from Mongolian warriors doing the same and then eating the steak raw.

12568. Food Facts

The Roman emperor Nero kept a ‘glutton' – an Egyptian slave who ate everything he was given to eat, including human flesh.

12569. Food Facts

To make especially tender beef, the Japanese shut cattle in the dark, feed them beer and employ special cattle masseurs to massage them by hand three times a day.

12570. Food Facts

Stink-heads are a traditional Alaskan dish. Fish heads – often from salmon – are buried in pits lined with moss for a few weeks or months until rotten. They are then kneaded like pastry to mix up all the parts and eaten.

12571. Food Facts

Flavours of icecream available in Japan include octopus, ox tongue, cactus, chicken wing and crab.

12572. Food Facts

In 1919, a tidal wave of treacle swept through Boston, USA. A storage tank burst, spilling 7.5 million litres (2 million gallons) of it into the streets. It poured over houses, knocking them down, in a wave two storeys high.

12573. Food Facts

The Spanish eat the cheese cabrales when it is ‘con gusano' – crawling with live maggots.

12574. Food Facts

In India, ants are roasted, ground to a paste and served as chutney.

12575. Food Facts

A stew eaten at a funeral in Stone-Age Wales was made from shellfish, eels, mice, frogs, toads, shrews and snakes.

12576. Food Facts

An eighteenth-century recipe for making an enormous egg suggests sewing 20 egg yolks into an animal bladder, then dropping it into another animal bladder filled with 20 egg whites and boiling it all together.

12577. Food Facts

In Sardinia, cheese is left in the sun for flies to lay their egg in.When the maggots hatch, the swarming mass is spread on bread and eaten.

12578. Food Facts

In 1971, a man found the head of a mouse in a bar of chocolate.

12579. Food Facts

Condemned prisoners are traditionally allowed a delicious last meal. In some US states, it's not actually their last meal, but is served a day or two before the execution and is called a ‘special meal'.

12580. Food Facts

Odd crisp flavours available around the world include octopus, seaweed, banana, and sour cream and squid.

Fact
The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome, Italy in 133 B.C. London, England reached the mark in 1810 and New York, USA made it in 1875. Today, there are over 300 cities in the world that boast a population in excess of 1 million.      .. More >>