Chapter 15: What are the Strangest Foods You Have Eaten?

There are so many! Where do I begin?

I’ve had food poisoning three times eating or drinking whatever is put in front of me. If someone offers me food, I think it is only polite to at least try it. The first time was at a Vietnamese wedding. The daughter of one of my fellow-workers was getting married. He asked me and two of my friends to attend the wedding party. We had to get special permission to go/drive off base. Driving off base in Vietnam is a challenge to say the least. There were very few road signs, and if so, they were written in Vietnamese. “Just before you get to the market, turn left. Go straight until you see several big stacks of empty plastic beer cases and turn right. Keep going for a while until you see a pink Catholic church. Park the truck there and the nuns will secure you M16 rifles and show you the way to the wedding.”

We were a little late and they were pretty much finished eating. My Vietnamese friend asked some of the young guys to take care of us. We sat in the back so as not to be the center of attention. We purposely ate lunch before going so we would tell them that we just ate and weren’t hungry. No matter, they started bringing dishes of food to our table. One dish was “red rice.” This was cooked rice mixed with duck blood. I didn’t know this until the next day, but I would have eaten it anyway. They also served some mystery meat. To this day, I have no idea what it was. We had a great time at the wedding party, it was a great experience since we usually could not leave the base. But the next day…

I woke with a little hangover, but otherwise felt fine. After lunch, while brushing my teeth, I noticed that my tongue was turning black. There was no pain or ill feelings, but it scared me. I went to the emergency room. After the doctor looked at my tongue, he asked if I had gone to a wedding on the day before. It turns out that my other two friends had the same problem. The doc said it was food poisoning. He gave me some medicine and in a couple of days I was ok.

While stationed in Thailand, I was introduced to rice bugs, a.k.a. water bugs. The bugs kind of look like cockroaches. They eat grains of rice from the plants in the rice paddies. Their stomachs are full of the rice. They are traditionally eaten by boiling them and then removing the head and sucking out the rice. While working outside at night, we use large bright portable spotlights. These lights attracted hundreds of rice bugs. The local-national workers would gather them up after the bugs hit the lights and fell to the ground. I asked them what they were doing, and they said that they would sell them. Not long after that, I was at a bar, and someone brought in some boiled rice bugs. All the employees were excited and started eating. They were so happy eating them, I decided that I would try one. I ripped of the head, but I couldn’t just suck out the rice. I broke the bug in half and scooped out the rice and ate it. I only remember a salty taste. It wasn’t good nor bad, but the idea of eating something that looks like a cockroach kind of turned me off. I haven’t eaten one since then.

A friend of mine took me to a fresh seafood restaurant here in Japan. They served both cooked and raw seafood, but we were mostly eating sushi. The chef asked me what kinds of seafood I could or couldn’t eat. I replied that I can eat anything. The challenge began. First, he offered sea snail. He grilled it over a charcoal fire, added a little sake in the opening and when the hard opening cover “pops,” it is ready to eat. You pull the meat out of the shell with a special fork or a skewer. It was a little chewy, but ok. If someone offered me some again, I would eat it, but I probably wouldn’t order it for myself. The chef was sure that I wouldn’t eat the next dish. It is called “shirako.” They tried to explain what it was, but we had no dictionary and I just decided to eat it. It was white and gooey. It was raw and he drizzled some “ponzu” over it. (“Ponzu” is a tangy sauce made with soy sauce and a citrus juice.) I could basically only taste the ponzu. They were surprised when I ate several pieces of it. The chef said, “I guess he CAN eat anything.” It was later that I found out what it was. The literal translation of “shirako” is “white child.” I tried to use my imagination to guess what it was, but I had no idea. Thanks to Google, I found out that shirako is the sperm sack of a male codfish. This is another seafood that I probably wouldn’t order, unless I wanted to make an American friend sick, but I would eat it if served to me.

There are some other strange foods, but I will save them for another day.

Here are photos of the rice with duck blood, rice bug, sea snail and shirako.