Weird and funny eating habits from around the world

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

The cultural differences of different countries are an inexhaustible source of surprise. How people celebrate the holidays, how they relate to birth and death, what they wear in everyday life or for a wedding, how they relax and have fun, what they believe in and, finally, what they eat - the list of differences between all of us is endless and very informative.

So, speaking of food and drinks - an amazing fact: the most "coffee" country in Europe is not Italy or France, as many are sure. The most popular and common drink coffee is in Finland!

Finns consume 12.1 kg of coffee per year against 5.7 kg per capita in Italy. Perhaps the cold climate is conducive to drinking a hot aromatic cup of coffee at any time of the day or night (by the way, the Finns traditionally drink coffee at night and are not afraid of sleep problems).

It is here that Paulig coffee is produced, it is one of the most popular coffee brands in Europe. Moreover, the Finns traditionally do not like instant coffee, therefore Paulig produces only premium quality natural coffee.

China, on the other hand, is a country where natural coffee is hard to find. As a rule, in stores here you can find an instant mixture of robusta beans, which is sold in 3-in-1 sachets, with powdered cream and sugar to mask the bitterness.

It is also difficult for the Chinese to understand our addiction to putting in tea sugar, in their culture any additives to tea are considered bad form. And it seems to us very strange the Mongolian custom of drinking tea with milk, salt and butter.

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Generally speaking, speaking of tea, we, of course, first of all remember the traditional English tea drinking. But despite the fact that this drink is considered a cult drink in the United Kingdom, leaf tea is practically not found there. Both at home and in restaurants, it is served in sachets. In addition, the British are very fond of adding milk to all types of tea, including green! Some manufacturers, in an attempt to eradicate this habit, even began to write on the packs: "It's tastier without milk!"

The Japanese are surprised by the abundance and calorie content of the traditional Russian meal; they are accustomed to small portions and do not at all understand our habit of eating everything with bread. It is difficult for a European person to perceive oriental cuisine, where a huge variety of spices becomes the head of any dish. And it's hard to imagine that in Peru and Bolivia, guinea pig dishes are more common than in ours - from chicken.

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And what about the Korean traditional meal - eating a still-alive octopus or dog dishes?..

The list of exotic dishes around the world is very long. Many peoples fry, boil, smoke, stew and use frogs in all other ways in cooking. But the Peruvians have gone farthest - they cook frog juice, which has the status of an extract and is called: extracto de rana. It's scary to say - a previously cleaned frog gets into a blender and there it turns … into a powerful aphrodisiac.

According to Peruvians, frog extract is an agent that increases the sexual performance and sexual attractiveness of both women and men. To taste, if you believe those who have tried it, frog juice resembles tomato juice. As follows from its purpose, its age limit is 16+.

They say, bird's nest served in one of the Soviet restaurants. But now in Russia you will not find such exoticism. Swift birds are only found in Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, the Philippines and Vietnam. They build nests from their hardened saliva and algae glued together by fish roe. This combination of products is quite pleasant to the taste, and a fragrant soup is made from them, which tastes like fish.

123RF / Tharnapoom Voranavin

But some species of swiftlet nest only from saliva, and then they become priceless. The cost of such a dish is incredibly high, restaurants pay about $ 2,500 per kilogram of bird nests, and a bowl of this soup costs between $ 500 and $ 1,000. But if the bird decides to add its black feathers to the saliva, which is often the case, then its nest sharply loses in value. The Chinese themselves consume 80% of their nests and export only 20% to Hong Kong and Singapore.

Bedouins eat " matryoshka " - ominously stuffed dish, included in the Guinness Book as the largest in the world. The most outlandish is the top matryoshka - it's a whole camel! The stuffing of a camel is a whole sheep and twenty chickens. Accordingly, a camel is stuffed with a sheep, a sheep with chickens, and chickens with eggs and rice. Camel meat tastes like beef, and the younger it is, the more tender and valuable.

But to taste the exotic, it is not necessary to climb into loose desert sands. There are also some "sights" in Europe. For example, a dish with a sonorous name “ surstremming"- fermented or, as we say in Russian, pickled herring.

123RF / Alexandr Mychko

The fish is caught in the spring before spawning, kept for one or two months in barrels, and then packed in cans.

As the jars continue to ferment, they can explode. Because of this feature, some airlines equate surstremming with explosives prohibited from carriage.

Surstremming has a salty taste and a pungent fishy odor. It is served both with boiled potatoes and simply on bread, and true lovers use it straight from the can. Traditionally, surstremming is used in Sweden, but even there the product is considered to be in short supply.

This is not the end of the Scandinavian experiments with fish. Lutefisk - another dish that requires preliminary preparation of the product. To prepare it, raw cod is soaked for several days in an alkaline solution (caustic soda or ordinary birch ash), and then washed with water. As a result, the cod meat turns into a whitish translucent jelly with a pungent aroma. This fish adventure does not end there - then it is boiled and baked. The Norwegian hostess knows that the main thing is not to use table silver for such a dish, it can darken from lye.