Horrifying Food

Here are a couple of the best comments from a MonkeyFilter thread about truly offal food from around the world. Link.

My ex was an attorney for Kraft and swore me to certain corporate secrets she found too interesting not to share. However, she turned into a bitch so all pinky swears are off.

Velveeta actually has four different recipes. Why? Well because it's a made of waste products and the formula will vary based on what they need to find means to dispose of. It's not just bad food, it's scarcely food. In industrial quantities like Kraft is dealing with, disposing of huge quantities of certain substances is quite problematic. It's expensive as the waste needs to either be processed into something safe for disposal or... made into food so that you all are buying their waste product and loading up nacho chips with it.

posted by nonbinary at 03:50PM UTC on March 28, 2006

and

I can't speak as to its universality, but in Korea they have a dish which essentially is a tofu brick stuffed with an eel. Now, you may wonder, how does one get an eel into a sem-soft brick of tofu without crumbling the soft curd?

Simple!

Into one (not quite) boiling large pot of water, drop one large brick of tofu, one live eel, and spices... You see, the eel, sensing that it is being roasted alive, will burrow into the cooler tofu block, before dying in the center. Voila! Self-stuffing food! *shudders*

(My vote my USsian foods would have to be Spam, Corndogs, and Hormel vienna sausage)

posted by Debaser626 at 06:22AM UTC on March 28, 2006

My personal opinions about Canadian food is taht Kraft Dinner is child abuse, though I'm sure most will disagree. Going international, I think kimchi is probably the best example of a truly desperate people having to make whatever garbagey vegetables they had remotely edible, and then becoming proud of the squalor they once lived in that necessitated it. I've heard people say that kimchi (Korean fermented cabbage) cures / prevents SARS.