Served as part of a mezze type affair in Barcelona.

They were rather good as I recall and required a cocktail stick to extract them from the china snail shell they had been cooked in.

Average 60 aphids per 100g serving.

I've also eaten dog - in a spicy stew in North Korea - but the weirdest thing was probably being served hoof of donkey in Dandong, China.

Basically coffee made from beans shat out of the rear end of a small furry forest creature. They had some in a cage there. I offered them sweetcorn but for some reason they weren't interested.

I like to feel that if I eat cows / lambs etc. I should be up for eating any animal.

However, having read the thread, and the article, I feel decidedly queasy.

There's no two ways about it, I'm a massive hypocrite. Damn.

...But the durian fruit i ate in Singapore was the vilest thing I have ever eaten.

A fruit that smells & tastes of rotting flesh?

Once tried, never repeated.

Nothing too far out of the ordinary for me:

Reindeer meat in Stockholm - very nice, like spicy ham.
Bison sausages here in Canada - extremely tasty, like beef but with a bit of a kick (probably like Mr Bison himself before he ended up on the plate, I expect).

China seems to be home of the unpalatable for many. Once in Guangzhou a client tried to impress by ordering the Camel Hump. Tough, chewy, tasteless and utterly abysmal.

I once ate a chocolate-covered cicada. Cicadas are these bizarre bugs that stay underground for 17 years (another variety stays under for 12 years) and then they come up in the summer of the 17th year by the hundreds of thousands, infesting trees and shrubs, and generally making enough racket that you have to close your windows unless you like the sound of a jet engine droning next to your house. They lay eggs, die, and then the new ones are born and crawl back into the ground for another 17 years. The noise and smell of dead bugs everywhere is annoying as hell actually, but it is quite a phenomenon of nature to witness.

So, naturally, we had a cicada party where people brought cicada-flavored dishes. And they were all fairly awful.

in China once. Only the once.

I used to nibble coal quite regularly when I was around ten. Quite nice, as I recall.
Apart from coal, I've eaten kangaroo, camel, croc, & gator. The kangaroo was great, the rest not so great.

It was fairly heavily disguised in a cheese sauce, but was still a bit chicken-y. In the same meal, alligator tails: these were heavily disguised as scampi, and were also a bit chicken-y. These were followed by a bison burger - excellent. This was at the Buckhorn Exchange, the oldest restaurant in Denver, which currently has a big notice on its website that rattlesnake is off the menu for the foreseeable future.

Elk paté, and sheep's brains are other things I've tried, and I'm an impossibly fussy eater.

...not much to say about this, but it wasn't great.

I wrote about it here:
http://simonfenton.blogspot.com/2011/04/food-glorious-food.html
and:
http://simonfenton.blogspot.com/2011/05/further-culinary-adventures.html

a Pot Noodle. Does that count?

pot noodles to bear guts and chicken bollocks, if I'm being honest with myself.

.... in a Chinese in Manchester. I forget which one but it may well have been the Yang Sing. Both utterly delicious.
I've had roast squirrel in St John in Spitalfields but it was nothing special, I prefer the calves sweetbreads which are very special indeed.

quite tasty
Snake - very like chicken
and bizarrely, Leaf-Cutter Ants from Venezuela which had been dried and salted. Seemingly hugely popular at sporting events, like peanuts. It was a bugger getting their antennae and legs out from between your teeth, though

I have eaten pretty much all of: lambs fries and all that bollocks.

They are crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy in the inside.

Cheek - good
Ear - not so good
Eye - very bad

Tasted a bit like chicken

Uncle Bens cook-in sauces. It doesn't matter what you put in there it will taste of flavourings, preservatives and Uncles Bens, whatever that is.

But I caught it myself in a big net.

... then names have to change. 'Maggot' especially is too embedded in a matrix of negative associations.

I have to admit, I couldn't actually watch this all the way through

Their moniker was inspired by a sign outside a fishing tackle shop, apparently.

Inexplicably, World domination eluded them.

A clean original copy of the LP will set you back over 200 quid these days, however.

I once had a minced mixture of lips, gonads, eyeballs, sphincters, glands, hoof, random adipose tissue and, I suspect, some lung. It was stewed in tepid grease for some hours and served between two bits of bread with a lot of onions. The bloke at Fratton Park told me it was called.. let me try to remember.. oh, yes. A "burger".

Has anyone had a crack at these? Generally accepted as the most vile things one can possibly eat or smell.

Surströmming is fermented herring. Pasting from Wiki, it "is sold in cans, which often bulge during shipping and storage, due to the continued fermentation. When opened, the contents release a strong and sometimes overwhelming odor, which explains why the dish is often eaten outdoors. A Japanese study has shown that the smell of a newly opened can of surströmming is the most putrid smell of food in the world, beating similar fermented fish dishes such as the Korean Hongeohoe or Japanese Kusaya."

I've not come across the above.

I've tried these, though. Vile. Utterly vile.

Andouilette is a French chitterling sausage. Chitterlings. Intestines. Generally given a fairly cursory rinse-out prior to being chopped up a bit and stuffed into another bit of intestine, the partially-digested contents lending andouilette their charicteristic taste and aroma.

Of sort of shit. And vomit. Mixed together. And cooked a bit.

I also saw a smilar thing being cooked and eaten in South Africa. The entire small bowel of a sheep, including contents, dropped straight onto a grill.

Too strong for me.

Solenepsis geminata - that's the red fire ant to you and me - blitzed into a paste. Served with grilled fish on the Orinoco.

It just tasted like Tabasco, to be honest.

Had a number of tasty treats when visiting South Korea with my Dad. Barbecued freshwater eel which was outstanding. Raw jellyfish in a mustardy sauce - not particularly remarkable, a little stringy. Rotten duck egg - tasted much like a non-rotten egg.

My Dad was there helping our hosts to train some dogs for search and rescue and The topic of dog-eating came up at one point. The basic set-up seemed to be that there were separate dog breeds for different functions. These are the dogs for petting and working, these are the dogs for eating with chips.

It was OK, but it repeated on me something rotten.

Don't worry. I wasn't wearing a coat.

I though I'd eat pretty much anything. And then I saw something which provides me with a line I will not cross.

Fourth picture down: http://stuff-only.blogspot.com/2011/09/pizza-surprise.html - click to enlarge.

The horror.

With the roots attached they look like a big spider (or weta). Don't taste like the rest of the duck. I'm sure the duck would beg to differ and say they are the only think that tastes like a duck.

Deep-fried bee larvae: taste like teeny weeny chips, fiddly to eat with chopsticks.

And finally, confirmation, if it were needed, that the cheeks of any fish really are the best bit.

So quite a few "delicacies" but the one that struck me most was goose intestines, deep fried at the hot-pot table.

To replicate the taste, colour and texture of deep fried goose intestines just boil knicker elastic for 10 minutes.

Chicken feet are pretty foul, as are guinea pigs, alligator, camel and yak butter tea, but I'd rather live on them than have to eat cucumber or marzipan.