What cuisines have you not tried, or are afraid to try?

I moved to Windsor about three years ago. I can see Detroit from my front door, right across the Detroit River. Because of this, Windsor is awash in Amerikan food. It’s been rather shocking for me to see what Amerikans are forced to eat. It’s no bloody wonder Amerika is so fucking fat and unhealthy. Everything is full of high-fructose corn syrup, processed beyond belief, and packed with a chemistry lab full of ethyl methyl badshit. The flavours are bland, the calorie count ridiculous, and everything is slathered with heaps of salt.

Many years ago, when the first Taco Bell came to my city, I went to try it. I’d heard so much about it from Amerikans that I was looking forward to it. I was therefore shocked when I discovered that all their food tasted like nothing. It was like they set out to produce something which looked and smelled just like food, but had no flavour at all. The tortillas were like cardboard, the cheese was like biting into styrofoam, and the ground beef was like the chopped-up sole of an old sneaker. I tried adding “hot sauce” to try and add some flavour, and the “hot sauce” was also flavourless. All it did was make everything wet. I looked around me at people giving every appearance of enjoying what they were eating and was completely mystified at the time. Having now experienced Amerikan cuisine, I now understand; when all you’ve ever eaten is bland, salty, processed garbage, Taco Bell must seem like Cordon Bleu.

GQ. I’m hoping I learn about some foods I haven’t tried yet. Right now I can’t think of anything, but maybe I don’t realize what’s out there that I haven’t tried.

@SmashTheState Please don’t write America with a k. What is the point of that? It’s rude at least and offensive at most.

I hope you don’t generalize all of America as having the food sense if Detroit. Some parts of metro Detroit have great ethnic food, but I would not disagree that parts a lot of that area and other regions in the US have primarily fatty, chemically ridden options for food. Taco Bell is awful. Ironically, the first time I ate in one was in MI.

The only food I avoided in China and they eat some pretty unusual food over there was the Chongqing hotpot which is incredibly hot and spicy. They eat pieces of fat in their food, I usually avoid all fat but it tasted nice and the fatty pieces of Peking Duck they dipped in sugar. When in Rome as they say but now I am back home a have a hankering to try it again.

I doubt there is any cuisine that I would not try although there might be certain dishes within a cuisine that I would want to avoid. Anything topped with a fried egg, for example is something I would have trouble eating.

I am willing to try almost anything, and I have tried quite a lot.

I’m open to trying almost anything. I have not had a chance to try any food from countries of Africa, other than Morocco, and I have not had much food from South America. I understand Guinea Pig is popular in Peru. It does not sound appetizing but I would try it.

Foods to avoid list is quite expansive. Some near the top percentile are:

• Chitins
• Haggis
• Mountain Oysters (no way, no how)
• Sushi
• Monkey brains (yes they do eat it raw after bashing the monkey’s head open with little hammers)

There are two categories: Those that had the opportunity to try and those that haven’t.

With the former, I just couldn’t handle attempting to eat the Andouillete sausages served in a Paris restaurant that my partner got. The smell was atrocious. Otherwise, I’ve been willing to give anything a go, although in some cases, as long as someone goes first.

I’ve never been to the Far East. Some of their delicacies and street food make shudder at the thought of eating them. Then again, so do some of foods available in the good ol’ US.

There isn’t anything I’m afraid to try. I’ll eat anything if given the chance. But I have to agree with @SmashTheState, and what he says also accounts for a lot of Canadian food, especially fast food. I can’t find anything in supermarkets that isn’t filled to the brim with calories and sugar.
But here in my town we have a vegetable market where farmers bring and sell their stuff. It’s extremely cheap, and the taste between freshly picked veggies compared to store veggies is almost frightening. They definitely do something to vegetables before selling em in stores, because the market ones taste so much better. I’m miserable in the Winter when the market is closed haha.

I am open to virtually any national cuisine, including the laundry list of (mostly) African, south Asian and South American cuisines I haven’t had a chance to try yet. However, there are a few dishes I have heard about that are on my “dishes to avoid” list, including:

squid ink soup
bird nest soup (from China)
octopus eyeballs (another Asian/Pacific Island thing)
Rocky Mountain Oysters
Escargo (apparently properly eaten by sucking intact snails out of their butter soaked shells)
Fugu (pufferfish, which, when improperly prepared, is deadly)
muskrat (yes, there actually is (or was) a restaurant in Delaware that serves it as a seasonal offering)
any dish containing dog or horse meat

@Hypocrisy_Central and @sahID For those dishes that you listed, and others that I am aware of, I am so glad that I am a vegetarian, so I don’t even have to consider eating those things. I was sitting down to lunch the other day, watching TV and that show Unusual Foods with Andrew Zimmern came on. Bad idea! I had to switch it off. Just as I was about to take a bite of my burrito, someone on the show held up the bile sac from this bovine animal that they had just slaughtered and poured it over the raw meat that they were eating, and took a big bite. Then his wife reached into the stomach, which had just been slit open and grabbed a handful of partially digested grass that the animal had eaten and took a big bite herself. Oh, the horror.

@JLeslie Yes, I was hoping we could all get into a neat discussion about foods and cuisines that we may not have even tried, even food from the good old U.S.A. The United States is so big and most of its residents have roots in other countries, so there are lots of nifty regional cuisines all throughout the 50 states. Plus there are native American foods that I am only vaguely aware of, but very interested to learn about.

My aunt’s family is from Ecuador. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving, she makes Empanadas as an appetizer. They are one of my favorite things. She also makes empanadas filled with pork. You will find different variations of empanadas in many of the South American countries.

Her daughter, my cousin, spent 5 years in the Peace Corps in Peru. While there, she ate guinea pig, which they call cuy (pronounced coo-ee). It’s very common. I was horrified to hear about it, since it is not common, and probably illegal (because they are considered pets) here. She said it tasted fine, but it disturbed her a little bit, but she ate what was available to her.

It’s too bad that @SmashTheState has such an ugly/narrow idea about “American cuisine” whatever that is. I totally get that a lot of Americans eat way too much fat and sugar and processed food, but there are lots of different regional cuisines in the U.S. that are not Taco Bell. I happen to live in and near some of the greatest food hubs in the world. We get food from all over the world, and we grow the ingredients to create the dishes from other countries, plus there is lots and lots of fusion cuisine, where things are mixed and matched and changed up. The big trend out here in California is farm to table. We do have all of the regular fast food chains too, so we have everything.

In Southern California, where I am, Mexican food is our claim to culinary fame. Yes, we do have Taco Bell, but we also have Gracias Madre (organic, locally sourced, vegetarian Mexican food) and Rubio’s (home of the fish taco) and Cha Cha’s Latin Kitchen (modern Mexican cuisine) and of course there’s the wonderful mom and pop places that abound, like These Places (serving up street tacos on Taco Tuesdays, something we do out here).

There are wonderful regional cuisines all over the U.S. I have not had the pleasure of partaking of many of them, mostly because I am not well traveled, but friends and family have been all over the country and have delighted me with their tales about foods from New Mexico and New England and Southern Cajun/Creole and even Hawaii.

Because I live in such a diverse culinary oasis, I have eaten a lot of foods from other regions of the U.S., just not in those places, I’ve eaten it right here in California. For the same reason, I’ve also had the pleasure of eating delicious food from India, Pakistan, Japan, various regions of China, Russia, Nepal, England, Ireland, Denmark, Poland, Korea, The Phillipines, Italy, France, Vietnam, Eithiopia, Morocco, Mexico, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Hungary, Thailand, The Ukraine, Sweden, Greece, Jamaica, Ghana, Lebanon, and Israel.

When I was in college, I took a class on South American Politics. The professor was really into South American culture and there is a city nearby where a lot of Peruvians live. He had an idea that a bunch of students should meet at a Peruvian restaurant and try some Peruvian food, including guinea pig. For some reason that I can’t remember, it didn’t happen. I was willing, though. It would have been interesting. I still go to that city once in a while but I would be intimidated without knowing the language or what to order.

As far as Afridan, I’m not far from NYC and I’m sure there are lots of African restaurants down there, it’s just a matter of me being ambitious enough to locate them.

@Kardamom Just as I was about to take a bite of my burrito, someone on the show held up the bile sac from this bovine animal that they had just slaughtered and poured it over the raw meat that they were eating, and took a big bite. Then his wife reached into the stomach, which had just been slit open and grabbed a handful of partially digested grass that the animal had eaten and took a big bite herself.
You really had to share that? I am eating right now and I have to struggle to get that visual out of my head, thanks ~~

@Kardamom I have spent most of my life around Latin Americans and I, surprising to me, have never had anyone serve empanadas at home. I’ve only seen them in restaurants, from street vendors, and small shops. I dated a guy whose family was from Equador for over 5 years and never an empanada. I do miss their food though. Lots of rice, lots of lemon on many dishes. Yum.

Since you are vegetarian you would probably really like Arepas. You can have them plain or filled with cheese. Goya makes a frozen arepa with cheese that is very yummy, but not exactly like what I have had homemade. In California (that’s where you live right?) I would guess you have seen or eaten them before. I don’t know if the Goya frozen is vegetarian, you would have to double check the label. My Venezuelan friends make them homemade. It’s reminding me that I like them better than the denser sope (basically a Mexican thick taco that is pan fried) my MIL makes.

@Hypocrisy_Central Sharing is good, right? : P

@JLeslie My aunt has made empanadas since I was a little kid in the 70’s. She learned to make them from her mom and now my cousin makes them. Another cousin, on the other side of the family and her dad, who is Italian by way of Mexico, also makes homemade empanadas. Apparently they’re made in most of the South and Central American countries, but sometimes they have a different name. I had a really good one last week at our weekly Farmers Market. In Puerto Rico, they call them empanadillas or pastellios. I looked up the arepas, they kind of look like a cross between a torta and what they call a flying saucer out here (open faced round of masa with toppings like a tostada). Sounds yummy.

@jca I hope you get the chance to sample some African food. Isn’t that yummy cake we’ve talked about (is it called black cake? Kind of like a fruit cake?) African in origin? Out here, there’s quite a bit of it, but I would say that Eithiopian is the most common and one of my all time favorites. You’d probably like this African Peanut and Sweet Potato Soup