Having had more than my fair share of delicacies that I did not find appetizing, the concept of this museum is not lost on me. I can laugh, even when the humor is problematic. But of all the museums in all the towns in all the world,  I doubt I will visit this one. After yesterday’s post, this article by Jiayang Fan seems particularly well-timed:

The Gatekeepers Who Get to Decide What Food Is “Disgusting”

At the Disgusting Food Museum, in Sweden, where visitors are served dishes such as fermented shark and stinky tofu, I felt both like a tourist and like one of the exhibits.

In the spring of 2019, Arthur De Meyer, a twenty-nine-year-old Belgian journalist, toured the Disgusting Food Museum, in Malmö, Sweden. As with the Museum of Sex, in New York City, and the Museum of Ice Cream, in San Francisco, the Disgusting Food Museum is conceptually closer to an amusement park than to a museum. There are eighty-five culinary horrors on display—ordinary fare and delicacies from thirty countries—and each tour concludes with a taste test of a dozen items. De Meyer, the son of a cookbook author and a food photographer, told me that he’d always been an adventurous eater. As a reporter, he also prided himself on his ability to maintain his composure. “But the taste test was war,” he said. “The kind where you’re defenseless, because the bombs are going off invisibly, inside of you.” Continue reading →