No matter how much you like Winnie the Pooh, human excrement otherwise known in the vernacular
as poop can take some getting used to. Urine and spit belong to the same category. However,
did you know that some foods may have these organic human additives in them? Here are
the Top 10 Exotic Foods Made From Bodily Fluids that are as delicious and as healthy as they
are filled with the stuff that we all love to hate and yet some can't get enough of.
Poopalicious Spiders
A big part of the chunks that humans dispose
of on a regular basis actually contain unused nutrients which can be immensely useful not
only for fertilizing plants but spicing up dishes or keeping us healthy, like fried spiders
from the streets of Thailand and Cambodia that are sold by street hawkers to commuters
from all walks of life in Phnom Penh or Bangkok. Of course, it would be tortuously time-consuming
to extract the innards from the little eight-legged creatures, so washing them before frying them
would have to be enough. As it turns out, the spider meal is rich in proteins and for
a cheap price, it's a steal. The fresh crunchiness is also to die for. So you can just close
your eyes and imagine that you're inside the movie theatre pigging out on popcorn or chips.
And it's all good. You'll be chewing or munching on spider eggs, arachnid stomach, and of course,
that spider poop that the little creature failed to eject before it got caught in the
human trap. It's pretty much like an insect being frozen in time inside a piece of amber;
except that you're not actually preserving it for posterity or scientific progress, you're
eating this one. And it squirts inside your mouth, too!
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Korean Wine Inspired by Baby Poo
This hare-brained wine idea came up and became a controversy in 2013, causing South Korean
as well as Japanese media to check out the veracity of the claim. It celebrated the magical
powers of baby poo to inspire awe and wonder in the taste buds. According to select media
reports, the wine tasted more like a medicinal herb with absolutely no hint of what it actually
contains. To this day, it remains to be proven whether the reports are true or just plain
hype. But the die is cast. No one will feel safe making a toast in a busy Seoul wet market
anymore. But for all the Indiana Jones lovers out there, this is the zenith if not the holy
grail of food junkiness. You just have to listen to the whispers in a crowded South
Korean street to know where to go.
The Great Baby Poo Sausage Rescue
Call it fuet or pork sausage with a twist, for it originates from 43 baby stool samples
and utilized to ferment sausages. Tasters say that this baby poo version of fuet takes
just like any other fuet. So aside from the normal taste, you don't have to feel bad at
all. Many ingredients for otherwise normal food like cheese or yogurt actually hail from
the human gut, which is reportedly rich in good bacterial cultures. Many of the so-called
probiotic drinks can come from human feces such as the world-famous Yakult tonic drink
from Japan. The bacterial culture henceforth named as Lactobacilli Shirota strain in honor
of the scientist Dr. Shirota who discovered the good microorganism colony came from,
you got it right: under our butts . At any point in time, there's always a war going
on in the average human gut between the little good guys and the little bad guys. Whoever
wins will determine whether you go to the latrine in a regular way or in an unexpected
rush triggered by a diarrhea attack. Kudos to the scientific community for finding health
inspiration from the most unlikely of sources.
Papaitan from the Philippines
Here comes a bitter and hot soup and meal combo that is as common in Manila streets
as it is higher up north in a country of over 7,000 islands. What accounts for the greenish
hue of this dish is bile which, as you would guess, emanates from goat or cow liver. However,
it's actually much more complicated than that. For when you're dealing with an animal's internal
parts such as intestines, some leftover poop can actually get left in the batch no matter
how carefully you wash the stuff. That adds even more excitement to the bile-flavored
stuff. Who knows, the phenom might even add more authenticity to a dish that everybody
seems to eat in these hot and humid islands.
Salivary Glands to the Rescue: The Sake Like No Other
And what about saliva? For some time now, we've been concentrating on exotic foods rich
in human feces content or additives, all the while when saliva is really the holy grail
of antimicrobial action. And you ask, really? Well, just consider Jesus Christ who made
it a part of his ministry, biblically speaking that is, to cure blindness by rubbing a combination
of spit and sand on the poor man's eyes. So the next time you question the practice of
adding saliva to the modern day diet, think again. It's not as gross or as far-fetched
as you think. Examine, for example, a mouth-chewed sake from Japan as a cherished tradition in
Tokyo or Kyoto. Nowadays, a cultured mold called Aspergillus oryzae is the shortcut
for giving the Japanese rice wine its distinctively bitter and pungent taste. However, with tradition
still more valued than modernity in the country, it's not strange to find packs of Samurai-faithful
localites in isolated areas who still prefer to ferment the rice by chewing with their
gums or teeth. Mind you, the rice in this equation needs to be dried afterwards, so
perhaps it's still a much more sanitized version of a human saliva after all. Go figure.
That Great Puke or Poop Controversy
There's an ongoing debate regarding whether Ambergris is really the vomit of a great whale.
It is believed that it's more likely to be the giant marine animal's feces rather than
what comes directly from the sperm whale's mouth, instead. Anyway, The National Geographic
Society concurs when on September 1, 2012, it reports about a British boy beachcombing
and finding a treasure trove of the intestinal slurry that could be worth $60,000 or more.
The great thing about this controversial large intestine byproduct is that it's heavily used
in the French perfume industry especially when you talk about the musk scent. For culinary
purposes, Ambergris is priced in ice cream and other dessert products. How chefs and
other gustatory experts find or discover these things can be the cause for endless fascination
and even childlike wonder. Nevertheless, humanity as a whole deserves credit for developing
the wine press, let alone the art of making liquor from collectively stepping on ripe
grapes. In fact, even God's proverbial son himself has been reported in the Bible to
relish the taste of well-fermented wine. And yet Ambergris was yet to be discovered in
those times.
Shellac: Insect Poop for the Sweet Tooth in Us
Let's keep talking about desserts. And to an unsuspecting person, there's nothing wrong
about glazed treats like candies, cakes or cookies. They have been part and parcel of
our gustatory makeup for a very long, long time even by Star Wars standards. What most
people never know, however, is that the substance known as shellac actually comes from the Laccifer
lacca Kerr insect which is so highly prized in Burma, India and other Asian countries.
The poop of this insect finds its way into the glazing for an infinite number of sweet-tooth
concoctions all over the world. The process of converting insect defecation into glaze
is a long and laborious one, but the bottom line is someone's got to do it. And the last
time we did some fact checking, the burgeoning USA desserts industry is worth at least a
whopping $34.5 billion. Just imagine how much glaze's market share is on that one. Want
some more sweets?
Let's Talk About Honey
Technically speaking, honey is a vomit from the average bee. After all, the tiny and immensely
helpful insect with a painful sting has two stomachs in order to effectively collect all
the sweet stuff from flowers all over the world. The collector bee returns to the honeycomb
once its stomachs are full and regurgitates all the sweet goodness to the next bee in
line, which yet another bee passes on to one of the tiny cells in the bee colony to whisk
out any extra water content. It's fast, safe and efficient. And we can't get over just
how much we all love honey. The sad news is that the bee population all over the world
has been going down for the past twenty years or so. Albert Einstein, himself, yep, that
heavyweight physicist once said that if the bees were to disappear from the face of the
Earth, humanity will only have about two weeks left to live. Wish there was a way to reward
the little ones for all the good things they've been doing when they're not working on a bee
sting. To us humans, zombies are just a figment of TV and movie imagination. To the bees,
however, zombie bees are a reality. Apocephalus borealis is a North American fly that infects
the lovable honey-making creatures with bacteria, causing them to implode and become zombees
in the process. It's a scary thing. Just imagine what happens if all the bees in the world
were to become zombees. Who's going to make our honey?
Elephant Gets Stung by a Bee: The Sankt Gallen Brewery Story
Now it's time to talk about the elephant defecation that in April Fools 2013 took Japan simultaneously
by surprise and by storm. A Japanese brewery in the Kanagawa region was responsible for
unleashing a beer laced with coffee. While there's nothing strange about that, the coffee
actually comes from the excrement of Thailand-raised elephants. Once again, this is another labor-intensive
process similar to honey or glaze gathering. And this is because, in order to manufacture
the coffee that goes into the brew, the elephants need to be fed with coffee instead of peanuts,
tree barks, fruits or grass. Worse, the resulting Elephant excrement only has a small percentage
of caffeine in it, so just imagine how much waiting is involved to say nothing of tweeking”
elephants. Unless of course, diarrhea were to become part of the equation. As we don't
want to give anybody any wild ideas about mass producing elephant poop, let's just stop
right there. These creatures already work hard enough. We don't want to cause them any
further aggravation.
The Steak Made from Human Poop
LiveScience was actually the first to report this one, so kudos to Rachael Rettner who
writes in June 2011 that she's actually found a Japanese steak that has been flavored with
human feces in a good-natured way. It can be as excellent tasting as any other steak
out there, on the premise that you make sure that you cook it well before you eat it. This
makes medium rare definitely out of the question. To extract the good bacteria that marinates
the exotic steak, the Japanese turn to the average Tokyo sewage for inspiration. And
for all the sheer resourcefulness of this, every slice of steak is gifted with an extra
60% or so of protein content. So for anyone who likes to scream for more protein, this
Japanese steak is it.
In the final analysis, human and other excrements have and still are giving some foods a wild
ride and the general public a run for its money. The future definitely looks bright
for poop since aside from being used in fertilizers and building artificial lands, it can evidently
be put to better use provided it's properly sanitized and the awful smell vanished without
a trace. In fact, the energy sector has found a way to generate fuel from animal poop. From
Thailand to Australia to France and South Africa, these are the food stories that can
make you throw up just by imagining how the dish would look like in reality. Most of the
time, however, the dog's bark is worse than its bite, so-to-speak. You just never know
how you'll like an exotic dish unless you have finally tasted it yourself. It's high
time to get adventurous about the food that we eat. Just like traveling, trying out
unfamiliar culinary delights can transform you into a true citizen of the world. Also,
we must pay tribute to all the gallant men and women who find strange avenues to develop
gustatory delights that are as out of this world as they are delicious. Just like the
food samples in this list, you just never know where the next revolutionary culinary
idea will come from as even Gordon Ramsay himself will attest. Surprisingly, some food
adventurers have taken it upon themselves to seek inspiration from septic tanks, sewage
disposal systems, and even bug culture. And what about saliva and other animal fluid transfer
products? At the rate that they're being employed in many cuisines of the world, the spit of
all the baseball players around the planet combined won't be enough to feed the huge
demand for beverages, foods, and desserts in particular. Bon appetit!
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