[Music] hey Majors so I'd like to start off with a little biology lesson when a species finds itself living on an island it can start to evolve in strange ways based on the different pressures applied by the new environment this is called Island syndrome and while it can manifest in a lot of ways the biggest driving force is often a lack of predators for example the dodo lost its ability to fly since there was nothing to flee from the saint kill a field mouse got twice as big since it no longer had to hide and
with no one around to bully them the sardinians started putting maggots in their cheese meet kazum marsu literal translation rotten cheese it's made by taking a perfectly good wheel of peino and letting a special type of fly lay eggs in it the fly babies then work to partially digest the cheese rendering it goopy and wet and maybe quite tasty and worm filled now cheese as a concept is already quite suspect it's clotted milk that you fill with bacteria and mold and let sit for a while but cheese is safe and delicious cheese is my friend
I trust cheese so my guard would be down around kazum marsu I've learned to look past to Cheese's childhood strange upbringings are what give them their character but it turns out those maggots are still alive and if you don't chew well enough they can cause anic myiasis which is a fancy term for fly larvae living in your intestines symptoms are similar to food poisoning except with the added psychic pain of knowing that again your bowels are full of squiggly new friends it's for this reason that kazum marsu was banned in the EU and elsewhere a
black market still exists which is wild and it's not a small one 2019 the illicit kazum marsu trade was estimated to be worth € 2 to3 million annually personally I would just do it prohibition style like definitely don't put these fly eggs on this Sumptuous wheel of peino but if you do you absolutely shouldn't keep it warm and damp for a week but although it's traditional to leave the larae alive when you eat your mag and cheese some consumers still prefer them dead shockingly in that case one puts the cheese in a sealed bag and
when the maggots run out of oxygen they ride around and fling themselves all over the place this is heard has a distinct pitter patter against the walls of the bag and when the sound stops the contents are ready to eat like popcorn shark fin soup is one most of us have heard about already mostly in reference to its effect on shark populations and the wastefulness that goes into making it until recently though I never looked into the nature of the dish itself I figured right the fins are just the only part of the Shark worth
eating big whoop it's probably not much different from like swordfish apparently though I had it backwards shark fins aren't even meat they're made almost entirely of cartilage and collagen they are the last part we should be eating that's why it's only made into soup because without being soaked in broth it has zero flavor or nutritional value on its own their only redeeming quality is their unique mouth feel due to how stringly the collagen grows in structures called serat treia the texture has been described as somewhere between chewy and crunchy which I find describes most things
actually other adjectives present on Wikipedia include Snappy gelatinous and siny the exact sensation of eating this substance remains a mystery to me and the unintended side effect of of all this research is that I now really want to try it like it's a big trade I've got to be the one that's wrong there is imitation shark fin soup available but I've already decided that it's not nearly as good so I've come up with a compromise to this controversy everyone on Earth gets just one bite say there's 10 bites to a fin four fins to a
shark 200 million sharks die sure a necessary casualty but then we can end the practice forever all done you can finally rest Mr Ming come here baby a Aki what Aki where Aki the Aki is a fruit originally from West Africa which is most commonly associated with Jamaican Cuisine where it appears in such dishes as Aki and saltfish these alien kidneys here are called the arrows and they're the only part of the fruit that's actually eaten the flavor is on the Savory side being described as kind of nutty or bean-like what makes the Aki controversial
though is the effects you can cause when prepared improperly if the arrows are allowed to completely ripen they're harmless but if you eat them too early or don't thoroughly clean off all the non- Aral stuff they can cause Jamaican vomiting sickness this disease doesn't sound real it sounds like it belongs next to Eastern sweats and tangeri and Bone grindings but that's actually an official term and as for symptoms it does what it says on the tin plus maybe death while Aki based products aren't outright illegal in the United States they are very tightly regulated and
the raw fruit itself cannot be imported so if you're American and want to try it your options are fully cooked canned aie or going to Florida where a few people grow it domestically next we have bird's nest soup this is another one that I've vaguely heard of and for years I just assumed the name was a playful metaphor like ants on a log or on on a shingle turns out nope this dish contains an actual bird nest not like a pile of Twigs like I was picturing but rather a specific type of Nest only made
by certain species of swiftlets these nests are mostly made out of mucins which are a set of proteins that among other things serve to thicken all those wonderful secretions our bodies make there's a little bit in human saliva a little bit more in mucus and in swiftlet saliva look out pal so all the swiftlet does is it finds a nice wall starts laying out fat strings of slobber which dry and eventually she's got nice place to roost that is right up until some Gourmand says today I crave bird spit you can keep the eggs though
and they then reconstitute it back into its original gelatinous texture unfortunately these nests can't enter the us since believe it or not eating bird saliva is a great way to catch bird flu and now the time has come to speak of the ortalon the ortalon is a kind of bunting which is a sort of passerine which is a type of bird they're birds like many animals they have a long history of being eaten by the French but what separates the ellon from your average squab or pheasant is the unique way in which it is prepared
and eaten they're typically caught with Nets and kept in the dark which causes them to overeat for some reason once it's about twice as fat the entire bird is then thrown into a container of Brandy alive and sealed in while this serves to marinade the creature it also drowns in the process thereby killing one bird with no Stones the orelon is then roasted plucked and presented whole to the consumer who inserts the carcass into their mouth feet first as they chew one hand continues holding the bird's head while the other picks out the larger bones
this whole ritual is usually performed with a towel or large napkin over one's head there's a few explanations for the purpose of the towel some say it's just there to keep the Aromas in While others say it's there to quote shield from God's eyes the shame of such a decadent and disgraceful act yeah this one I'm okay with not trying actually notable fans of this dish include not joking Bill Cosby and the guy who invented the labotomy ah to be part of that so Social Club our mission is to eat Bird's whole and then make
people not remember things killing Orlons was banned across the EU in 2007 not for any ethical reason but because French people did this so much that the entire ortalon population was threatened thankfully as of 2018 their conservation status is under least concern so hopefully the French can get back to it soon anyway that's all I have for today till next time I'm samonella and thank you for watching
