- Warning.
This video is not suitable for all viewers.
That's why it's called cursed foods.
If you're cool with that, let's go.
So, you've heard of balut,
the boiled duck fetus egg on the streets of the Philippines.
and maybe casu martzu,
the wormy cheese from Sardinia in Italy.
But have you heard of etag, milbenkase,
pinikpikan, escamoles or tacos de tarantula viva.
Well, you're probably going to wish you hadn't
because these little known foods could even be worse.
Believe me, I've tried them.
Hey, it's Mike Cory of Fearless and Far
and I help people conquer their fears
so they can travel the world.
We're gonna kick off the video today
with a quote from the late Anthony Bordain.
- Do you really want to travel
in hermetically sealed Pope mobiles
through the rural provinces of France, Mexico,
and the far east?
Eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald's?
Or do we want to eat without fear,
carrying into the local stew,
the humble taquerias mystery meat,
the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head.
I know what I want.
I want it all.
I wanna try everything once.
But if I have one chance at a full-blown dinner
of blowfish gizzard and my plane leaves tomorrow,
I'm going for it.
- Now, I don't know if that fully applies
to these foods we're gonna be talking about.
But let's just keep that in mind
and keep an open mind and press forward.
These are the most cursed foods in the world.
Deep, deep in the Northern Philippines
where hanging coffins and a 103 year old tattoo artists
who grabs a for fun are still very much a thing.
There's our first curse food called etag.
A smoked meat that's filled with insects.
Okay, meet Patrick.
He is the village elder and his job is to smoke pork
for various ceremonies.
For funerals, for weddings.
The problem is,
Patrick doesn't really have an appropriate smoking shed.
He has his woodshed where he hangs the pork up.
All sorts of nasty can crawl inside of it
and also crawl inside of the meat.
- [Patrick] These are the eggs.
- Locals don't seem to mind though,
when they think the worms and insects give the meat
a distinct milky flavor and also add protein to the dish.
- I don't care.
- [Mike] You don't care?
- Before there's no people that brought to hospital
because of eating maggot.
I think they live more years.
- Village elders bring this ceremonial etag
to all sorts of different celebrations.
And it's a very important part of culture up there in Sagada
in the Philippines.
Our next food is called milbenkase
and it's cheese produced in a small little town
in Eastern Germany called Wurchwitz.
In medieval times, this German quark cheese,
this white cheese was put into these special boxes,
containing a cheese flour.
Now putting the cheese in the flour made it ripe in quicker,
made it last longer and gave it a very distinct flavor.
Everyone loved this cheese flour
and the cheese produced in it.
Until Galileo Galilei in about 1600 invented the microscope
and someone had the big bright idea of bringing a microscope
to Wurchwitz and taking this new technology
and pointing all of these lenses towards these big boxes
of cheese flour.
What they saw was billions and billions of mites.
Which if you're not familiar, are microscopic spiders.
I think at that point, you just close the box slowly,
take a match and you just burn the place to the ground.
Because I can't imagine the media backlash
when you explain to the people
that the secret ingredient in your patented cheese recipe
is just basically a billion little arachnids.
There's no recovering from that.
That's why now it's one of the world's rarest cheeses.
It tastes pretty good though.
It has this lemony, peppery tastes.
It tastes good, it tastes great.
Which I found out after is actually
the self-defense mechanism of the mites
as you mash hundreds of them every time you take a bite
of cheese. Yikes.
So how are we doing?
We have etag and we have milbenkase.
Which one would you try?
I mean, they both have bugs.
This next one though doesn't have any bugs,
so it could be better or not.
Let's move forward.
Back in the Philippines,
one of my favorite places for the weird and wonderful.
There's a food, a very controversial food called pinikpikan.
Which, pardon the pun, is a massive hit
at any reunion or party.
To prepare pinikpikan, a live chicken is beaten lightly
with a stick.
Which apparently does two things.
The chicken screaming bloody murder,
attracts the attention of the gods.
I'm not sure which God exactly.
One that's down with animal cruelty apparently.
And secondly, tenderizes this chicken
has lived a hard life in a field.
That's it?
- That's it. Yeah.
- What's even crazier is I had this food
at a four year old's birthday party.
So, it's a special dish for his birthday, like an honor?
- Yeah. Yeah.
And pinikpikan is a dish that will not be remove
in Sagada if there's happening.
- What does it taste like?
Just taste like fricking chicken.
This doesn't taste very different at all.
I can't say I agree with it,
but that's why it's here on the list of cursed foods.
Now, confession time.
I did tell you, I tried every food on this list,
but it's not exactly true.
While I did bite into our wormy meat, both raw and cooked.
And I did have the spider cheese
with a nice glass of German beer.
And I did try the beaten chicken at a birthday party.
This next one, I didn't actually try,
but I saw it unfold in front of my eyes in Mexico.
We were at the Mercado San Juan in Mexico city,
a notorious market known for exotic meats
and all sorts of strange things.
We were looking for a food called escamoles.
Which is also known as Mexican caviar.
Which is also known as ant eggs.
To get these some unlucky guy has to dig down
a meter or two into a big nest of angry stinging red ants
and he fishes out these little white pearls,
that are the ant eggs.
That then tastes like almond-y buttery caviar.
Don't leave me the job,
but they actually taste pretty good.
After a successful mission finding
and trying these ant eggs, we're walking by a counter
where there was a man blow torching a live tarantula.
Naturally, I had one question on my mind,
which is what the is going on here.
The guy buying the tarantula
was a not so inconspicuous Mexican cartel member.
How could I tell?
Well, it was the giant fat stack
of $100 US bills he was using to pay
for this live tarantula he was buying to put in a taco.
We asked a few questions and he was saying that,
"Well, it improves my virility and my strength."
Which, okay.
As we watched him slide down this live tarantula
with a side of avocado in a corn tortilla,
an old man came up, who was probably 70
and ordered one for himself to go.
So, of course we went up to him as well and said,
"Hi, excuse me, sir.
Nice to meet you. Sorry to intrude.
Why are you buying a live tarantula to take home and eat?"
What he said is that there are beliefs in Mexican tradition
that by eating a live tarantula,
you can cure your cancer as well.
We also found out that you have to blow torch them
because a lot of tarantulas
have these irritating spiny hairs
that will lodge themselves in your throat
and mouth and give you an allergic reaction.
If you do choose to eat tarantulas.
And you have to blow torch the hairs off.
I mean, I'm more worried about that big ball of nope,
and the front with the two giant piercing,
poison talons, fangs.
But apparently, that's not a problem.
Either way, whether it be because of the fangs,
or the poison, or the hairs, or the fact it's a tarantula,
I don't recommend eating tarantula.
And no, don't think it improves your strength up here.
Don't think it improves your strengths down there.
And I don't think it cures cancer, either.
Pick any of those, is why I didn't try
the live tarantula taco.
Okay.
Now these have been the top five curse foods I've seen
in my travels.
Now hopefully, by now you've realized they're cursed
because I don't recommend anybody try them
and I don't know if they should even exist on this planet.
A lot of them I don't particularly agree with.
But what I do agree with is traveling in a way
where you find yourself an experiences
that makes you go where the hell am I.
But I think it is interesting to see
how dynamic our world can be if you do choose
to pull back the shutters and look a little bit deeper.
Now I have to address something
and it's a little bit awkward.
You're still here.
So, maybe you just really want to,
you have an aching urge to go find ant eggs
and just put them into your mouth
or maybe it was the pinikpikan or etag.
I don't exactly know why.
Or maybe you just want to learn
how I find these amazing places
and wanna plan some more advanced journeys for yourself.
It's actually pretty easy.
And I share all of my tips and tricks and secrets
in a video called, "My top five advanced travel tips."
And it's totally free.
All you gotta do is go in the description.
There's a link there.
Pop your email in the link.
You'll get a video in your inbox.
And you can find out how to plan
these crazy adventures yourself.
Again, I'm Mike Corey of Fearless and Far.
I help people conquer their fears
so they can travel the world.
And if you want to like subscribe and comment on this video,
then YouTube will send it out to YouTube recommendations,
and we can serve the curse foods,
hot and fresh to more people.
But mostly it's to get people on board
with this more alternative travel style.
If you want that advanced travel tips video,
check out the link and thank you for watching.
I'll catch you in the next video here.
(upbeat music)