12557. Food Facts

In southern Africa, large caterpillars called mopani can be bought in tins.

12558. Food Facts

In Hubei province, China, eels are served whole.The correct way to eat one is to bite though just behind the head and pull out the insides with chopsticks.

12559. Food Facts

In Hong Kong, you can buy packets of crispy fried crabs like packets of crisps.

12560. Food Facts

Rocky Mountain oysters, or prairie oysters, are calves' testicles – enjoyed fried in parts of the USA.

12561. Food Facts

In some rural parts of China, you can get owl soup.

12562. Food Facts

In Korea, it's possible to buy canned silk worm pupae, or bags of silkworm from street vendors.The idea is to crunch the end off the grub and suck out the juices.

12563. Food Facts

Spider wine, from Cambodia, is actually rice wine – the spiders are added later.

12564. Food Facts

The Japanese dish shiokara is made by fermenting squid in old fish guts.

12565. Food Facts

Henry V of England once held a Christmas feast at which the menu included carps' tongues, roasted dolphin and flowers set in jelly.

12566. Food Facts

Honey is bee vomit. Bees drink nectar from flowers which they turn into honey before sicking it back up to store in the hive.

12567. Food Facts

Argentinian Gauchos keep a piece of beef under their saddles so that it is pummelled until tender as they ride around all day. It's said that the dish steak tartar came from Mongolian warriors doing the same and then eating the steak raw.

12568. Food Facts

The Roman emperor Nero kept a ‘glutton' – an Egyptian slave who ate everything he was given to eat, including human flesh.

12569. Food Facts

To make especially tender beef, the Japanese shut cattle in the dark, feed them beer and employ special cattle masseurs to massage them by hand three times a day.

12570. Food Facts

Stink-heads are a traditional Alaskan dish. Fish heads – often from salmon – are buried in pits lined with moss for a few weeks or months until rotten. They are then kneaded like pastry to mix up all the parts and eaten.

12571. Food Facts

Flavours of icecream available in Japan include octopus, ox tongue, cactus, chicken wing and crab.

12572. Food Facts

In 1919, a tidal wave of treacle swept through Boston, USA. A storage tank burst, spilling 7.5 million litres (2 million gallons) of it into the streets. It poured over houses, knocking them down, in a wave two storeys high.

12573. Food Facts

The Spanish eat the cheese cabrales when it is ‘con gusano' – crawling with live maggots.

12574. Food Facts

In India, ants are roasted, ground to a paste and served as chutney.

12575. Food Facts

A stew eaten at a funeral in Stone-Age Wales was made from shellfish, eels, mice, frogs, toads, shrews and snakes.

12576. Food Facts

An eighteenth-century recipe for making an enormous egg suggests sewing 20 egg yolks into an animal bladder, then dropping it into another animal bladder filled with 20 egg whites and boiling it all together.

Fact
The surface area of the Earth is 197,000,000 square miles      .. More >>