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.

12581. Food Facts

During the Second World War, people in the UK were urged by the government to make the most of wild foods, and were given recipes for cooking roast squirrel, rook casserole, stewed starlings and baked sparrows.

12582. Food Facts

The Insect Club, a restaurant in the USA, serves only dishes made with insects. The menu includes cricket pizza, insect chocolates and ‘insects in a blanket' – crickets, mealworms and blue cheese in puff pastry.

12583. Food Facts

Roman banquets often featured hummingbirds cooked in walnut shells and roasted stuffed dormice, sometimes rolled in honey and poppy seeds. The Romans even had farms producing dormice because they were so popular.

12584. Food Facts

In Slovenia, people still raise and fatten dormice, ready to stew.

12585. Food Facts

In Nepal,Tibet and parts of China, black tea is served with yak butter – butter made from yak milk.

12586. Food Facts

Tradition tells that the French cheese Roquefort was discovered when a shepherd abandoned his lunch in a cave to chase a pretty girl he saw outside.When he came back months later the cheese had gone mouldy but still tasted good.

12587. Food Facts

Durian is a fruit the size of a football, covered in spikes, that smells like rotting meat. It's supposed to taste good, though!

12588. Food Facts

During the First World War, Germany suffered such food shortages that people ate dogs and horses, and even the kangaroos from the zoos!

12589. Food Facts

In Madagascar, people make a stew from tomatoes and zebras.

12590. Food Facts

Raake orret is eaten in Norway. Trout caught in a fresh water stream are stored in salted water with a little sugar and kept in a cool place, such as the garage, for months before eating.

12591. Food Facts

Ambuyat, eaten in Brunei, is made from pulp from the sago palm, stewed in water for several hours.The same mixture is made to stick the roof on a house! Also in Brunei, the sago worm which lives inside rotting sago palms is often cooked and eaten.

12592. Food Facts

In Northern Australia, children often eat green ants. Pick them up, squish the head so they don't nibble you, and bite off the body.

12593. Food Facts

P'tcha is an east European Jewish food made by stewing calves' feet until they turn to jelly.

12594. Food Facts

Cinemas in Colombia serve paper cones filled with giant fried or toasted ants.

12595. Food Facts

Pruno is a ‘wine' made by American prisoners from a mixture of fruit, sugar cubes, water and tomato ketchup left to fester in a bin bag for a week. In some prisons, pruno causes so many discipline problems that fruit has been banned.

12596. Food Facts

In the Japanese countryside, salamanders and skinks are grilled on sticks and served with lettuce.

12597. Food Facts

In Nicaragua, turtle eggs are eaten raw – slit the leathery skin, add some hot sauce and suck out the gunk.

12598. Food Facts

A rat restaurant in China sells rat and snake soup, rat kebabs, steamed rat with rice and crispy fried rat.

12599. Food Facts

A restaurant in Osaka, Japan, serves whale ice-cream made from the blubber of the minke whale.

12600. Food Facts

In Texas, there's an annual rattle-snake round-up.What to do with all the rattle snakes? Skin them, gut them, cut them into chunks, cover in batter and deep fry.

12601. Food Facts

In Newfoundland, Canada, seal flipper pie is a traditional dish for the end of a seal hunt.

12602. Food Facts

Think cabbage is horrid? In Korea, it is sometimes buried in clay pots with salt for many months before it's eaten – this dish is called kimchi, and is served with most meals.

12603. Food Facts

Alligator kebabs are popular in southern Louisiana, USA.

12604. Food Facts

In Fiji, people starve a pig for a week, then feed it veal when it is very hungry. A few hours later, they kill the pig and remove the half-digested veal, which they cook and eat.

12605. Food Facts

A restaurant in Changsha, China, offers food cooked in human breast milk.

12606. Food Facts

As early as the ninth century, the Basques of Spain hunted whales, and whale tongue was considered a great delicacy.

12607. Food Facts

Oellebroed is a Danish soup make from stale rye bread soaked in water, then boiled with beer and sugar and served with cream. It's possible to buy instant oellebroed powder – just add water.

12608. Food Facts

Another way of cooking snakes in Texas – cut the head off, skin and gut it, poke a stick into the neck, wrap the snake loosely around the stick and roast over a camp fire.

12609. Food Facts

Iguanas are a popular and free food in Central America – they can often be caught in backyards.

12610. Food Facts

Slimy green stuff that looks like mucus is supposedly the best part of a lobster or crayfish. It's found in the head. Some Americans eat the main part of the lobster meat and then suck the head to get the gunge out.

12611. Food Facts

In China, people eat jellied ducks' blood.

12612. Food Facts

The street markets of Indonesia sell whole, smoked bats.

12613. Food Facts

Cibreo is an Italian dish that consists of the cooked combs from roosters.

12614. Food Facts

Spam is a luncheon meat used as a filling for sandwiches.At a Spam-cooking contest, one contestant made Spam-chip cookies!

12615. Food Facts

McDonald's in Hong Kong sells a sweetcorn pie in a sweet pie crust, the same as the apple pies in the west.

12616. Food Facts

An international contest to find the best recipe for cooking earthworms included entries of stews, salads and soups but was won by a recipe for applesauce surprise cake. Guess what the surprise was…

12617. Food Facts

In Canada, deep-fried cod tongues are a popular dish.

12618. Food Facts

Baby mouse wine, from China, is a bottle of wine packed with baby mice, to add flavour.

12619. Food Facts

In Ness, Scotland, people kill young gannets – a type of sea bird – to eat. The claws are the most highly prized part.

12620. Food Facts

Some Arctic explorers have been poisoned by eating polar bear liver. The polar bear eats so much fish that fatal levels of Vitamin D collect in its liver.

Fact
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