You ate what now?

Man, I love durian. I love the sickly sweet smell, the honeyed, creamy taste. The unforgettable richness, custard and caramelised onion all at once. I love eating it from a stall in Kuala Lumpur, freshly cut out of its spiky home. I love that half the world seems to recoil at this stinky fruit (and the other half adores it). I love that in South East Asia there are signs in hotels and on public transport banning you from eating it or even carrying it onto the premises, a social condemnation of one of the world’s most beautiful flavours. 

I love stinky tofu on the streets of Taipei. It’s undeniably challenging to the nose, but that intense, deep, blue cheese flavour is lasting if you can get into the first bite. And I love how at your first encounter, you wrinkle your nose and cross the street and wonder if somewhere a pipe has gone a little bit wrong. 

I love jellied eels from a London van, gelatinous in aspic, dashed with vinegar and smothered with fine white pepper. I love that it’s a relic of the days when you needed to eat whatever you could catch from the Thames. 

I love offal the world over. Tripe from a Hong Kong stall, or the atrociously named “head cheese” you can get across Europe (in Italy, coppa di testa sounds much better), turned into something delicious through careful cooking, dedication and punches of flavour. Once at a restaurant in Rioja, the kitchen came out to double-check I was certain that I wanted the stewed lamb’s trotters and hadn’t just misread the menu. (They pointed at their hands to explain. I pointed to myself and nodded with enthusiasm.) 

I love the food that gives others pause. Not because it’s “weird” or “foreign” or different for the sake of it, but because at the heart of each of these more unusual foods there lie two simple truths. First, they are delicious – because otherwise, why would we still be eating them? Second, they are expressions of the many ways in which we eat, taste, thrive across the planet. How we take the mundane and turn it into the magical. 

Illustration credit: Comet Wong, Vivian Lam, Tony Leung