‘Are you really going to eat that ’

...is a question often posed to chef Zubin D’Souza during his culinary expeditions. A tough gut and taste for adventure mean that his answer is almost always positive. Read on to find out about the most unpalatable food on his dining table — if you have the stomach for it

Thanks to my profession, I have had the opportunity to travel the world and gorge on some absolutely sumptuous food but it is always the weird food that excited me. I had munched on crocodile steak in Australia, raw beef in Africa, snake and turtle in China, Bihari ant chutney, Naga field rats, crisp fried Thai insects, beating heart of a cobra in Vietnam and Filipino dogs among others. Then I realised that it was time to up the ante. I was looking for stuff that would get such a violent reaction out of me that I would seriously begin to doubt the intentions of both the server and the consumer. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to try out several revolting foods, of which, following feature in the list if not top it.

Balut: This Filipino delicacy is a boiled duck egg that contains a ten-day-old foetus. You can imagine cracking open this egg to be faced with what could potentially be a cute Donald or Daisy. The eggs are normally eaten in the dark and are enjoyed for their unique crunchy texture.

Casu Marzu: This is a kind of cheese made from sheep milk cheese in Sardinia, Italy. The cheese is illegal there too, which should be an indicator to how ghastly it really is — food that’s illegal in the one place where people actually want to eat it. The cheese is infested with the larvae of a particular fly transforming it into maggot infested, decomposing lump of putrefying matter. That’s not all. The larvae can jump several inches into the air, which necessitates the diner to wear eye protection. There’s more. The larvae can pass through the body undigested, occasionally stopping for a brief while to multiply in your intestines after which they try to bore holes through it and escape causing numerous maladies. Aficionados however, will risk everything to taste a cheese, which can potentially bore a hole through your tongue if kept on it long enough.

Kiviaq: This dish from Greenland probably tops the list. It consists of hundreds of dead birds stuffed in a hollowed out seal carcass till they rot. If a rotting seal skin was not bad enough, they went ahead and stuffed it with dead birds. The rotting process is meant to tenderise the birds, which ultimately turn into a glob of meat, bone and feathers. Why do we require the seal skin Well, it is necessary to keep away the flies. The last thing you want while eating such stellar food is a cluster of flies hovering around. That won’t make it any more appetising, right

Hakarl: This specialty of Iceland is probably one of the worst tasting dishes in the world. It is a shark that has been caught, dropped into a pit to be covered in gravel and snow, dug out and then finally hung out to dry till it decays. To be fair, the shark is poisonous when eaten fresh but to store it till it is mouldy I could have ignored the entire sordid event if there was not an addendum to the episode. Hakari is often eaten and enjoyed at a meal where it shares table space with other winners such as ram’s testicles, pickled whale blubber, seal flippers and a sheep head jam which is lovingly referred to as ‘headcheese’.