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MALMO, Sweden – Sheep eyeball juice. Testicles of bull. Cheese infested with flies. American root beer.
These are among the items considered acceptable or even considered as delicacies in some cultures that the museum of the disgusting food of Malmo in Sweden serves.
The temporary museum, which opened on Wednesday, was clearly intended to allow rebellious visitors to gag in front of exposed foods, most of which can be smelled or tasted. Tickets came in the form of vomit bags.
Curator Samuel West said the purpose of the exhibition was to entertain, but also to convey a thought-provoking message: what is considered appetizing or repellent learns and can change. He hopes visitors will be encouraged to try more sustainable food products under development or marketed, such as insects and lab-grown meat.
"Disgust is one of six fundamental human emotions, and the evolutionary function of disgust is to help us avoid potentially dangerous, contaminated, toxic, missing food," said West. "Disgust is an emotion, but what we find disgusting is culturally learned."
The idea of exploring raw food came to him with the awareness that "the most impactful way we can have for the environment is to eat less meat," he said. declared.
"This is an exhibition that asks visitors to question their ideas about what is disgusting and delicious, and the goal is to make people understand that there is no objective measure of disgust," said West . "For some, the revelation could be that" maybe the insects are not as disgusting as I thought. "
The museum's exhibition includes 80 foods, including a bull penis, frog smoothies from Peru, a wine made from baby mice eaten in China and Korea, and a Swedish "herring", a fermented herring to the sadly putrid.
Visitors are also introduced to "balut", partially developed duck fetuses boiled inside the egg and eaten directly from the hull in the Philippines, as well as to the "casu marzu", a Sardinian pecorino cheese infested with larvae.
Many Western visitors may not look disgusted at all. Swedish visitors are surprised to find salty licorice, popular in Sweden but perceived as disgusting for many others.
The US foods presented include Jell-O salad, made of gelatin and usually fruit; canned pork brains with milk sauce; and root beer, a sugary soft drink that, according to the Swedes, tastes like toothpaste.
"I think when we look at Swedish or American food culture, we say, we treat everyone the same," said West.
West said he had managed to sample only half of the more exotic collected consumables. When asked if he had already vomited during the preparation of the show, he replied, "Every day".
Some of the delicacies are so bad that they are kept in glass jars. During a preview of the museum last week, people tried to sniff the displays before going back with grimaces.
"The real food in the museum can be a problem," said Andreas Ahrens, museum director and curator. "You have to change things fairly regularly. You must make sure that it does not start to rot. "
Or, as West said, "You can not leave the bull testicles out too long."
West, a clinical psychologist and California researcher, also created the Museum of Failure, a successful showcase of products that failed consumers. It has also opened in Sweden and will soon be presented in Shanghai.
Hakan Jonsson, professor of ethnology at Lund University, who contributed to the research for the exhibition, explained that the notions of what people find delicious and disgusting are already changing .
"Many of the big groups in the western world suddenly think," The meat has become disgusting, something I could never put in my mouth, "he said." And that's something of "New enough in history here, where something considered normal and prestigious, was the goal you were aiming for Sunday, and that suddenly had become a matter of disgust for many people."
The museum of disgusting food should run until 27 January 2019 at Slagthuset MMX in Malmo.
Museum organizers said the museum's shop offered a selection of "unusual" drinks and snacks and that the promise that a restaurant operating in the building was "not disgusting".
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