Today is an unpleasant day, cloudy with rain expected and chilly at 65°. The roads will be filled with tourists hoping to find diversions. Route 28 will be the most heavily trafficked with slow cars and their gawkers. The parking lots at movie theaters will be filled beyond capacity so cars will haphazardly park on the grass. Such is Cape Cod on a chilly, cloudy summer day.

I sometimes wonder about food, strange foods, at least to me. Did every explorer have a food taster? I remember once when my brother ate some red berries and had to have his stomach pumped. I wonder about the artichoke. Who tried first and how many attempts before it was edible as not only is it ugly but also cooking and eating it is complicated. It seems most cultures have traditional foods we might not eat. In Ghana, chicken feet were boiled then eaten. They became gelatinous, and I thought they were gross to look at let alone eat. Insects are eaten all over the world. I have never been tempted to eat a spider, a grub or even locusts. As a joke one year I bought lollipops from Mexico with worms inside. Nobody tried them. They got tossed. I did try frog legs, and they weren’t bad. They were actually tasty. My mother could never watch my dad, my sister and me eat steamed clams. They grossed her out.

I have found that asking questions is sometimes the wrong approach in identifying unknown foods. It was in Ghana where I learned that and where my culinary experiences began. The one food I should never have questioned there was bush meat. I should have just been content to wrap pieces in bread and eat them. I found out it was grasscutter, a bush rat, a rodent. Had I not already eaten it, I would have been grossed by it being a rodent of sorts; instead, I kept eating it anyway.

When I first visited my sister in Colorado, I ate Rocky Mountain oysters which are not oysters. They are bull testicles battered in flour and deep fried. Even now, decades later, my stomach turns a bit at the thought of them.

This entry was posted on June 28, 2025 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.