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Question of the Day: Ever eaten something while it was still alive?

15 Comments:

I once chomped a stinkbug that was in my salad. It had hitched a ride in a bag of Earthbound Farms "washed and ready to use" lettuce. Needless to say, it was rather acrid tasting.

Raw oysters.

OMG!!! I can't imagine any food experience worse than eating a stinkbug! And this comes from a person who, as a girl, once swallowed a living cockroach that was in a soda. [We had been overrun for a while after the butcher shop next door burned down.] Thank G-d I didn't chew it!

only sprouts.

Yup, quite a lot of things. Mostly seafood, mostly in Korea. Fish, clams, octopus, mussels and oysters. I'm a big oyster fan, but of the others I'd only really recommend the fish. In Korea I would often go to the beach, select a fish from one of the tanks. See it manhandled out of the tank onto the kitchen slab. One side is then sliced and sashimied fairly rapidly before being presented on a plate with the other half of the fish underneath. The fish eye still moves and the tail too. It's very offputting the first few times, but you soon forget about it, or cover both ends with a lettuce leaf. It tastes fabulous.

The only one I wouldn't choose to repeat is the live octopus. There's a nasty YouTube clip of octopus eating:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=kXYHnSU8z-o

I had a live scallop at Morimoto's in Philadelphia. Delicious!

Live oysters and live Nantucket bay scallops. And I eat both as much as possible, whenever I have the opportunity.

The beating heart of a cobra. Oh, wait, sorry, I just watched Bourdain do that on TV. So, oysters then. But, oysters plucked right from a riverbed, below the boat I was on. Does not get any fresher, people. Also, don't forget, yogurt is live culture bacteria.

Lobster sashimi. It wiggled still on the plate. Fascinating, yet, gross.

Oh, I completely forgot I have had the cobra heart thing three or four times when I lived in Hanoi. Quite odd. It swims around the shot glass still beating. Also the cobra blood and bile which aren't too bad when mixed with snake penis wine, but snake - in any form - is not an interesting culinary experience on the taste front. Not by a long chalk whether your portion is live or dead.

no. i must be completely boring! the problem is i can't even thing of one "alive" thing i even want to try.

Graham Holliday said, "...but snake - in any form - is not an interesting culinary experience on the taste front."

Have you ever had chicken fried rattlesnake? That is darn tasty! Not live, of course, but very tasty. It is a little strange to eat a meat dish much the same way one would eat artichoke leaves, though. There are only small pieces of meat on either side of the ribs.

Cleaning snakes is a breeze because their innards are all contained in a membrane. They are much easier to clean and skin than fish.

Once, while visiting an Achuar community in the Ecuadorean Amazon, I put my tongue to the bark of a tree, letting the marching Lemon Ants crawl one by one in to my mouth where I crunched them down, each one bursting with a satisfying citrusy pop! Mmmm. They were good.

I too had Korean Sashimi, but interestingly enough at a North Korean restaurant in China. You can check out the video here: North Korean Sashimi.

I also had squid that served as sashimi in Sokcho, Korea. While the squid we ate was cut into various pieces (see link: Squid Photo), parts of it continued to move long after it was prepared.

Ok, I know this doesn't count but I'm saying it anyway. I had a perfume/oil (about 25 years ago) called "Civet"....."allegedly" the substance was scraped from the genitals of a civet cat. It's been banned in the US for many years. Hate to say it but it was fantastic.........finally found it on ebay a year ago.

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