Curious Food
Not everybody eats the same things in different parts of the world. What we eat may seem strange, unusual, or uninteresting to others and vice-versa. Some of the curious foods that others consider a delicacy are these.
Bird’s nest soup, eaten by the Chinese for hundreds of years, are the nests of cliff swallows, which are collected by climbers on precariously tall ladders, who then clean them carefully and dissolve them into soup. They are rare and very expensive.
Beondegi, or silkworm pupae, are a popular Korean street snack, and are served fresh or from tins. They could be said to replace Western crisps, as they have a crunchy consistency.
A favourite Filipino snack is balut, a three-week-old fertilized duck egg, eaten straight out of the shell, complete with partially formed feathers, feet, eyeballs and blood vessels.
Fugu, eaten in Japan, is a puffer fish. Only specially qualified chefs are allowed to prepare this dish, because it contains deadly toxins that must be eliminated. At least 300 people die each year after eating it. The Japanese emperor isn’t allowed to eat it, lest it be his last meal.
Ketchup
Ketchup! Hamburgers seem naked without it. Nearly every American household has a bottle of it in the fridge. How did ketchup attain this status as America’s most popular condiment?
The roots of ketchup are linked to pickles. Hundreds of years ago, the Chinese and Malaysians used the brine from pickled fish as dipping sauce. Known as kachiap, the sauce had a savoury taste, flavoured by the brine spices and fish. In the 1600s, after traders brought the idea to Britain, the affluent classes there commonly served dishes with the rich brine from pickled walnuts and mushrooms. Eventually, the Brits began bottling these succulent condiments, calling them catsup.
Colonial Americans borrowed and experimented with the British catsup recipes, trying different vegetables and spices. At first, they were tart, not sweet, but later, around the mid-nineteenth century, entrepreneurs exploited the American taste for sweet foods and sold catsup made with tomatoes, vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, cayenne pepper and salt. The growing popularity and availability of tomato catsup took off in the 1870s, when the young Heinz company marketed it as ‘ketchup’ in their product line of condiments.
Extreme Sports
Extreme sports are known for their ability to introduce an adrenaline rush in participants, although it is not due to fear, as some people may think, but it is produced by increased levels of dopamine, endorphins and serotonin because of the high level of physical exertion. They tend to be individual rather than team sports and a probable result because of mismanagement or mistakes is death.
One sport classified as extreme is wingsuit flying, the art of flying the human body through the air using a special jumpsuit, which shapes the human body so as to create lift. It is also called a birdman suit or squirrel suit.
Another extreme sport is Parkour, also known as PK. It is a physical discipline of French origin, in which participants attempt to pass obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible, using skills such as jumping, vaulting and climbing, or the more specific parkour moves. The obstacles can be anything in one’s environment, so it is often practised in urban areas because of many suitable public structures, such as buildings, rails and walls.
