Street food adventures: brains, scorpions, intestines and embryos
Why are our kids picky eaters at home, but surprisingly adventurous elsewhere?
Isaw is a popular street food from the Philippines, made from barbecued pig or chicken intestines
When we’re home in Denver, Brooklyn and Colt seem perfectly content living off of cereal and yogurt for breakfast, instant ramen for lunch, and Kraft mac and cheese for dinner. Like, every. single. day. Getting them to eat anything else is sometimes a [losing] battle. “The meat on this pasta is spicy.” “This pizza has too much sauce.” “I don’t like shrimp.” The complaints are constant and often contradictory. It’s a lot to deal with three times a day.
But when we travel — which is about 50% of the time — they’re completely different humans. Even without prompting, they’ll opt for the things that we’d never expect them to try. Things that most of our adult friends wouldn’t even touch. “Kiddos, do you want the bbq chicken skewer or the chicken intestines skewer?” “Intestines, please!” What kind of alternate universe do we enter the moment we step off a plane?
Frog legs are good, but so is the rest of the animal
The list of foods that our family has eaten across about 21 countries so far reads like a Halloween horror film script:
Lamb brains
Fried scorpion (and a range of insects)
Live squid (with ink sack)
Horse sashimi
Whole baby sea eel
Fugu (AKA the poisonous blowfish/pufferfish)
Balut (Chinese/filipino delicacy of ready-to-hatch fertilized duck embryo)
Chicken blood
Rattlesnake
Chicken intestines, pig intestines
Lansiao (filipino soup made with horse and cow penis and testicles)
Tuslob buwa (filipino dish made with pig liver and brains)
Frogs
Jellyfish
And this list omits all of the dishes that are ho-hum for people like us even though they’d be very adventurous for many Americans, including everything from Japanese staples like sea urchin and raw quail eggs to western delicacies like fried skin (pork rinds), shortbreads (thymus or pancreas, typically from a cow) and Rocky Mountain Oysters.
Balut is a Chinese/filipino delicacy of ready-to-hatch fertilized duck embryo (feathers, beak, and all)
Can our home cooking really be so bad that they’d rather eat those things? Maybe. But the more likely scenario is simple: our mission of getting our family out of the office, out of the classroom, and out of the bubble is achieving exactly what we intended, which is to expand our kids’ minds, perspectives, and worldview. To let them experience the depth of the cultures that they’d otherwise be consuming only through textbooks and TV. To let them discover themselves while discovering the world. And if the trade-off is that they find our American kitchen wholly uninspiring in between our trips, well… that’s probably a relatively easy thing to swallow.
