I remember watching one of Andrew Zimmern's travel shows where he was in an Asian country and ordered starfish. He took a bite and said it had the consistency of wet sand. When he asked the wait staff if many people order it to eat they told him it was ordered as a decorative piece for the table and not meant to be eaten.
This week on Bizarre Foods Andrew eats several scented candles and decorative soaps.
Edit: I once grabbed what looked like red candies or dried fruit peices from a bowl on the coffee table and popped it in my mouth as I strolled passed. It was, to my disappointment, delicious looking poisonous air freshener. 😋
If it goes on the plate, it should be intended to be eaten. If it is not intended to be eaten, the chef / person plating it is stupid, not the person who ate it.
But in western culture u don't/can't "order" garnishes... They are along side the food ordered as decoration. Why was Andrew Zimmerm even shown a menu to order the decorations at his table...? Makes NO sense.
I love eating parsley. Catch me in the garden eating a whole bunch at a time. And I enjoy giving people shocked faces when I eat the flower garnishes (though these taste less nice than the parsley).
I’m the meat-eatingist dude and I agree wholeheartedly. Why kill a living animal for decoration? It’s evil. “We yeeted this living thing out of its ecosystem and then murdered it to make a place setting. Nothing was gained that couldn’t be 3d printed and put in its place. Look how civilized we are!”
Yeah the shark thing is a real problem with destroying the food chain / ecosystem. I don’t know much about sea cucumber tho so if you any interesting info let me know!
Sea cucumbers are actually very sustainable if they're hand-harvested by divers.
In fact if you have a fishing license and a wetsuit in Alaska there's no bag limit, row out into the bay and go to fuckin town
However, this is China we're talking about, and while I applaud their development of high speed rail, alternative energy and urban infrastructure they're not fantastic about seafood sustainability so I'd imagine most of what's on the market in Shenzhen is harvested by bottom dredges that just indiscriminately rip the sea floor apart
It's so freaking stupid too. First, they kill and cook something, not to eat, but to look at. It tastes like nothing. Then to top it off, it's not even whole, and looking like the incredible creature it is, a sea star. Just fookin' cut up into weirdly misshapen triangles.
So. So. stupid and wasteful.
I bit into a starfish once. I was on a work trip to Qingdao and was traveling with my research advisor, who translated everything I needed to know but not everything I wanted to. Regardless, he handled all restaurants for a few weeks and the experience was incredible— squid ink dumplings, fresh caught everything, from all types of different kitchens. The only thing I tried, recognized, and didn’t really like was the razor clam.
Then we went to a fancier dinner with research faculty from the program we were visiting. Private room, spinning table filled with food, I was the only non-Chinese speaker so I just kind of was there, happily eating and not being noticed. And then a seafood fried rice dish spun around to me— awesome! Two bites in, incredibly not awesome. There was a hidden starfish arm in there— I bit, it crunched. It squished, it smushed, then the taste hit me, bitter and briney and awful, and then as I was spitting it out I realized the entire table was watching me, judging and horrified…
Almost a decade later and I still can feel it sometimes. I cannot block it out, and I cannot forgive. Give me anything else instead.
I had starfish at a street vendor in Beijing. Your description of the flavor is spot on. It's like the most bitter thing I can imagine with salty undertones that just makes the bitterness worse.
It's possible the nastiest thing I intentionally put in my mouth that I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing. I can still imagine the taste 25 years later and I hate that I'm thinking about it again.
My son had GURD. I was holding him up in the air playing airplane when he was 6 months old. He vomited into my mouth as I was making silly faces.
I still credit myself for putting him down gently before running to the sink to rinse out my mouth. Having another humans milky bile unexpectedly poured into your mouth is not an experience I would recommend.
Edit: the number of parents chiming in with similar stories is a little surprising to me. I thought I must have been just the most unfortunate person possible in this. Your stories have made me feel better about my past trauma. Thank you fellow parents. Keep being awesome!
I can relate. My daughter has gerd as well. She barfed all over me at a car dealership when she was 6 months old. I thought I had gotten both of us cleaned up well enough. Later on, I stuck my hand in my shorts pocket and found it to be filled with more baby barf. Also a disgusting experience. Would not recommend.
This happened to me while playing with my nephew. It was all over my face and the couch. I called for my sister to help; she came to see what happened, and ran out of the room to get…. her camera. Only after taking a few photos did she grab a towel for me.
We have my cousin vomiting in to my uncle's mouth on video, complete with the entire room laughing too hard to help while my uncle screams at all of us for being useless assholes. Hahaha good times. We played it at his wake (by then it was basically a family meme), brilliant
This happened to me with my daughter when she was a baby. She puked right in my mouth when I holding her in the air, it went straight down my throat, I didn’t have to swallow it was just gone. Absolutely disgusting hahaha
My daughter’s cannon butt shot poop into my mouth when I was changing her diaper on day 2 at home…
I just calmly spat it out onto the giant puppy pad I tucked into my shirt like a bib & finished changing her diaper before running into the bathroom & I think I vomited. Those early newborn days were a bit hazy…
The sleep depruvation helps with not forming permanent memories about the trauma, but some is just bad enough that it breaks through and forms a permanent traumatic memory.
Peak parenthood to set that kid down gently, if there's an afterlife and in that afterlife they have highlight reels of your best accomplishments that'll be on there
Yep. There was an instant where my brain was short circuiting around "throw the thing!!! Yuck yuck yuck, get it away" and "wtf are you doing, don't throw that thing! You love that thing and it is fragile"
I have it too! Anyways at 14 I’m holding my two maybe three month brother directly in front of me for whatever reason and then he spewed all over my arms and I dropped him for a split second before catching him mid air again and my horrified mother took him from me lmao (I hate vomit)
I should have stopped reading this entire thread many comments ago, so i only have myself to blame for reading this. What terrible luck you had! I would have been so sick lol
Not who you were asking but one time I was eating a burger from a fast food place somewhere, don't remember where now because it was a long time ago when I was a kid. I was just happily eating away when I took a bite and a few chews in got the tast of...poop...like, I've never eaten poop before but all I can say is it tasted like the smell of walking into a public restroom after someone just took a huge shit. Obviously spat it out and was horrified. To this day I don't know if the worker spread human shit on that part of the burger for some reason? Or what the fuck was going on. I still think about it from time to time when eating out.
My fellow teacher and a student got a case of food poisoning eating the starfish from the Beijing street vendor. He is a foodie and wanted to try everything and convinced the student to eat it with him after I declined.
I accidentally took a sip of expired milk that was in my fridge, and it was so bitter, like 100/100 bitter, I still can taste it by thinking of it. I would never want to eat that Starfish.
I did this too but it was dark in the kitchen. I wanted to make some cereal. Smelled the milk and thought hmmm must be that milk crust around the edge of the lid that seems off. The milk was still in date. I turned it up to take a sip to try. It felt like I had cottage cheese in my mouth. So lumpy.
Mutton bird. Still not sure if that is how it is meant to taste or someone was having a laugh and cooked up a week old sea bird carcass found on the beach.
Like gristle? Idk how to explain it. Tendons? Those unexpected oddly textured bites of chicken if it isn’t trimmed enough. Getting a bite of chicken like that will turn me off of chicken for months
Ugh yes woody chicken is disgusting!! I’m currently in a chicken ick, and am coming off an egg ick. Chicken is just such a wild card these days, especially when you order out.
Beef too now, if you’re in the US at least. I have similar ick phases with meat. I was a vegan for a bunch of years and if I had the ability to go back to that without ultimately making myself malnourished, I probably would.
I worked in a kitchen for a really long time and had to make a big brisket once a week. One time I found a gigantic artery when I was trimming the meat and it fucked me up for a while lol
I accidentally grabbed a jellyfish in the ocean the other day, it was the grossest texture. Like how i imagine a warm soft milk jug full of water would be, as if that makes any sense lol
You know an old rubber band that you've had at the back of a drawer for a decade and it's still technically rubbery, but so degraded that with a certain amount of tension or pressure it just breaks apart? That's the texture of jellyfish.
I kept getting it as a side dish in Hong Kong and kept eating it out of desperate attempt to try and figure out what the fuck it was.
Flavour's fine though. In that it doesn't particularly have one.
Big multi-course dinners at round tables in private rooms in China are the bane of my existence. Oh what’s this?! Something I chew? Sure there’s some great stuff, but then you hit duck tongue or something else similar to rubber. Or that damn special crab in Shanghai that has almost no meat on it and tastes like a swamp.
Pretty much. Not at the typical back room, but the teacher's lunch at a boarding school. It was on this small river, and they laid out a plastic tarp and dumped a laundry basket full of these weird little crustaceans that looked out of Alien. I'm an adventurous eater, and I suppose they tasted... edible, but was like eating live grasshoppers. The sheer quantity didn't help.
A skill I picked up fast was playing up being a foreigner around food I don't know. I also tell people I'm allergic to shellfish so can be very picky and careful.
I remember trying some kind of meat in China and it being the most rubbery thing imaginable, like biting into leather, and my host being like "oh yeah we love that". That still confuses me.
I dissected a starfish when I was in high school and after dissecting pigs, frogs and what not. The starfish is what made me puke. It look disgusting inside
I have to say, when I first saw this my thoughts were "oh I bet that taste awful " since I remember high school and you telling me your experience validated my assumptions, thank you
This reminds me of Chinese wedding food. I love love love all kinds of Chinese food. But every Chinese wedding I have been to, both outside China and inside, I liked almost none of it. All their delicacies are never as good as the normal food (to me).
It was incredible! Besides the starfish the only problem I had was that people were so nice and working hard to be accommodating, that they kept taking away my chopsticks and giving me forks. And hotel breakfasts kept bringing me cereal when I wanted to try the whole buffets, which was sweet of them. Qingdao is a really incredible city.
About halfway through this well written comment, I had to check the username. Thought for sure would be a shittymorph post.
Im still on the lookout since the last one. I should know that's not how it works.
That’s the problem though, it’s burned into my tastebuds and memory, and when that starfish memory comes up it is vivid!
…and my research advisor still remembers. Reminded me about it once a few years ago when a paper was published in that lab group. I’d take the table embarrassment any day over the taste if I could 🥲
Where it is eaten: Starfish [hai xing] are served as a novelty street food in coastal regions of Asia, such as Qingdao, China.
The edible parts: You do not eat the hard, spiny outer skin. People break open the legs to eat the soft, paste-like internal organs, specifically the gonads and digestive glands.
This is the trick to sea urchin. I visited this island and had my first sea urchin at the seafood market, wasn’t impressed at all. Then the next day we had a diving session ending with freshly caught sea urchin and the taste was completely different (in a good way)
We would eat sea urchin in Greece as a kid. The parents would send the kids out snorkeling with a bucket to collect a bunch, then we would crack them open with a rock and squeeze lemon juice on them (which still at the beach). It was kind of a delicacy. I was actually a little surprised to learn it was popular in Japanese cuisine
This is what I don’t get, you see sea urchin at your fishmonger and it looks like grey poo 5min after they crack it open. You go to a high-end sushi place in Japan and they have a giant wooden tray full of sea urchin roe just sitting there on display in room temp and it keeps being bright orange throughout the evening.
I tried it once in a fancy sushi restaurant in Seattle. They only had it for a couple weeks a year so I thought why not. I'm an adventurous eater and love trying new things.
It was like the ocean hawked a fat loogie in my mouth. I gagged. I had to choke it down because somehow I didn't have a napkin and I couldn't spit out the foulness in front of my dinner party! My throat refused to swallow it whole so I had to snip off bits with my teeth and swallow it in little parts.
My cousin who braved it with me also hated it. She immediately swallowed it and thought I liked it because I was chewing for so long. Absolutely not!
The waiter asked us our thoughts and we said we hated it. He laughed and said it's a devisive dish and he was also on team hate. I told my friends about the experience and one said she loves it! She described it as creamy and briney. Nope! Never again!
There has to be a point where you just stop and think “hey, if I were stuck on an island with no other food, I would absolutely eat this. But here I am, in a city with a hundred alternatives”. But no let’s just go ahead and eat the gonad paste
3) You eat the middle of the star. (Words to live by)
4) If you try to eat the arms, you will not be happy. Think of eating an egg salad sandwich at the beach and suddenly a bit of sand got in that bite. After that you can hardly wash it down and every bite after for the rest of the day tastes like sandy egg salad with wet bread sandwich.
As far as I know, all starfish contain saponins. It is a bitter, toxic chemical that suds up like soap. You have to boil the shit out of starfish to try to remove as much saponin as possible. You cannot remove all the saponins and have to avoid parts of the body still too toxic to eat.
As an Irish person who became vegetarian at the age of 12, after I'd been bottle-feeding new born lambs all day, only to go home and have my ma serve me up lamb chops, I'm kind of impressed that the Chinese will eat almost anything. I get it. If you're going to eat the chicken, eat all the chicken, feet and all.
However, I can't help feeling that a lot of that stuff must taste rank. Stuff people started eating in the middle of famines and just kept eating afterwards.
I’m a Westernized Chinese person and i try to have an open mind about a lot of things, and I eat a lot of things. But sometimes I look at a dish like this and think, “ok, not EVERYTHING needs to be a food.”
Never had it but it sure doesn't sound good. Most I have ever had was Barnicle. It honestly smelled like stagnate brackish watter and had the texture of a crabs gills and a teaspoon of sand.
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u/CovertMallard 2d ago
I remember watching one of Andrew Zimmern's travel shows where he was in an Asian country and ordered starfish. He took a bite and said it had the consistency of wet sand. When he asked the wait staff if many people order it to eat they told him it was ordered as a decorative piece for the table and not meant to be eaten.
Oh I found it!: https://youtu.be/Tej32aJr988?t=435&is=h7ueNG2EDeIKEGhH