Weird Eats

Eating Bugs, Bacon Cups & More

Here are some more Weird Eats type items, gathered from assorted and sundry points around the Web.

We should start eating insects, or so says Arnold van Huis, an entomology professor in Wageningen, the Netherlands. Read more about it in an article called....We Should Start Eating Insects, in Ode Magazine.

From BuzzFeed, here are a few items of interest:

Edible Martini
Bacon Cups
Savory Lollipops

From The Grinder, at Chow.com, a few more tasty bits:

Robots Taste Better than You Do (robot-tasting technology)
Mean Machines (food gadgets & machines)

Other People's Weird Food News

Weird Eats has been on a hiatus, of sorts, as I catch up with other projects. In the meantime, here are a few links to other sites that are providing admirable coverage of offbeat food-related stuff.

The Grinder
Ice, Ice Baby (ice chewing)
Don't Get It Dipped (pizza in a cone)
Kraft Foods Kill Worms! (foods that kill intestinal parasites)
Tech Nuggets (fast food packaging innovations)
A "No More Tears" Onion?

BuzzFeed
Pickle In A Tube
Bacon Cocktails
Cheeseburger In A Can

Weird Eating At Asylum

From the good people at Asylum, who had the excellent taste and uncommon decency to link to this very site, here are a few articles that are more or less in Weird Eats territory:

Mixed Drink Recipes for the Desperate and Resourceful

Angels of the Morning: The Latest Breakfast Cereals On Our Table

Ramen Noodle Recipes to Turn Cheap Dough into Haute Cuisine

Weird Food At Mental Floss

If you've never had a chance to check out Mental Floss magazine's Web presence, now's as good a time as any to get started.

You could go with their blog post called Frankenfoods: Six Snacks Prepared In The Lab, which covers carbonated fruit, caffeinated donuts and more.

Or you could go with this post, In the Can: 6 Canned Foods We’re Reluctant to Try, assuming you can stand reading about such delights as pork brains in milk gravy.

Last of all, by way of CNN, is an article called Funky Fries and Other Foods That Flopped. Reddi-Bacon, anyone?

Dead Man Eating

(Update)
The gang at Dead Man Eating recently posted Dead Man Eating: A Reenactment, to YouTube. Check it out here.

(Original Post)
Dead Man Eating has been "Chronicling the Culinary Cravings of the Condemned" since April 2002. If it sounds a kind of morbid, that's because it is. If it sounds too weird to be true - it's not. DME regularly lists the contents of condemned men's (most are men) last meals, summaries of their crimes, last words and assorted and sundry other facts.

Thus we find that in Texas, for example, Robert James Neville Jr. had as his last meal, the following, "Chicken Fried Steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, fried okra, bread with butter, mixed fresh veggies, donuts, chocolate cake with icing and sweet tea." A few weeks earlier, also in Texas, Marion Butler Dudley requested no last meal and had to be carried to the execution chamber.

If that's not enough entertainment for you, be sure to check out the ideal last meals sent in by readers, some of them rather on the gluttonous side. Or head to Dead Man Eating's main site and browse the fine merchandise, which includes thongs, mouse pads and more.

The Official Ramen Homepage

A real relic, as far as food blogs go, The Official Ramen Homepage got underway around 1995, long before there was even such a thing as a blog, at least in the strictest sense of the word. Nowadays it represents what must truly be one of the world's preeminent repositories of Ramen information, for whatever that may be worth.

Among the more than 300 tempting recipes currently available at the site are recent additions like Orange Chicken Jailhouse Ramen, Ramen Noodle Salad and Cabbage/Lime Ramen. Other doozies include Hyperactive Candied Choco-Ramen and Girl Scout Thin Mint Ramen On A Stick (aka Ramen Cookie Bouquet).

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Starbucks Gossip

A note at the Starbucks Gossip site points out that it's "not affiliated with Starbucks Corporation," a fact that should be blatantly obvious after you get a load of their slogan - "monitoring America's favorite drug dealer."

Produced by Jim Romenesko, who also oversees a pair of news-related blogs, Starbucks Gossip is mostly a compilation of Starbucks news pulled together from various sources. Though Romenesko has been doing this since August 2004, it's hard to tell if he approves or disapproves of Starbucks - a company that seems to provoke extreme opinions - or if he's committed to neutrality.

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eggbaconchipsandbeans

You've gotta admire people who zero in on an extremely specialized topic and work it to death. Well, you don't have to admire them, actually. But for some reason, I do.

Take Russell Davies, for instance. He's a British chap who works as an account planner, whatever that is (apparently something to do with advertising). Russell publishes a number of Web sites devoted to, as he puts it, "reflecting some of my strange obsessions."

The most notable of these, for our purposes, is eggbaconchipsandbeans. This is a site solely devoted to reviewing - in living color - eateries that offer something called a "fry-up". If you've been paying attention up to this point, you might have guessed that a fry-up is a meal composed of...eggs, bacon, chips, and beans.

This sort of thing is apparently quite a common breakfast meal in Russell's part of the world. On this side of the Atlantic, the notion of eating beans and chips (French fries) for breakfast almost falls into the category of weird eats. But, then again, we all like what we like.

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Other Weird Food Sites

If Weird Eats isn't offering up enough offbeat food-related entertainment for you, here are a few sites you might want to take a look at.

Steve, Don't Eat It! chronicles the adventures of a guy - presumably named Steve - who eats some pretty awful stuff. Potted meat and pickled pork rinds are only the tip of the iceberg. For some truly gruesome culinary thrills, check out his entries on breast milk, prison wine and silkworm pupas, just to name a few.

Rude Food covers a wide gamut of strange comestibles, everything from Aass to Woodii. If, like me, you don't know what either of those are, head to the site and educate yourself.

If you're fed up with all the fuss over obesity, eating right, portion control, and all that junk, SupersizedMeals.com is probably a good place to visit. It's a veritable paean to the joys of overconsumption. Dig in!

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Cheese Rolling & Cheddar Vision

If you ever find yourself truly hard up for entertainment, you might want to tune into Cheddarvision.tv. But only if you're really hard up for something to do. Like really, really, really hard up. For, as you'll see, Cheddarvision.tv consists of nothing more the chance to watch a wheel of cheese age.

Ain't the Internet grand?

If you're looking for something a little more exciting, but still with a cheese theme, you might try your hand at a cheese rolling event. There are several. Imagine that.

Probably the best known of these events is the Cheese Rolling at Cooper's Hill, in Gloucestershire, England. For more details, have a look at their Web site, here.

If you can't get enough of those cheese videos, here's one of the cheese rollers in action.

If New Zealand's more in your neck of the woods, you might prefer to try this cheese rolling event. It just took place a few days ago, but I guess there's always next year.

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