Imagine lying on the ground, fully conscious, unable to speak because you have ingested the poison, tetrodotoxin.
All your muscles become paralysed and and it starts getting harder to breathe. As your heart starts to beat slower and slower, you try to call for help but nothing comes out.
When you start to slowly die from asphyxiation, you start thinking why you ate fugu, one of the most celebrated and notorious dishes in Japanese cuisine - the blowfish.
Knowing so many people eat such foods despite the risks made me wonder what other bizarre foods there are out there in the world.
I learned that when it comes to food, if it is edible, it is being eaten somewhere around the world.
Travel Channel's Andrew Zimmern from Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, traveled around the world and did the tasting for all of us who are not adventurous enough when it comes to food. Based on his travels, I started to think what I would serve if I were to open a restaurant of bizarre foods from around the world.
Now, imagine going to the restaurant...
For appertisers, why not try the bird's nest soup (Thailand), a soup which consists of real bird's nest mixed with the bird's saliva and excrement. Or perhaps you'd like the frog ovary soup (Thailand), or bull penis soup (Bolivia). If you're feeling more adventurous, I would recommend soup No. 5 - bull's rectum and testicles soup (Philippines).
While you wait for your main meal, perhaps you can munch on mangrove worms (Philippines), lemon ants (Ecuador), or ant and mosquito eggs (Mexico). You can always go for the beating frog heart (Japan). Yum...
As for the main, perhaps a Moroccan plate of lamb tongue and eyes, cow's heart, and stuffed pancreas, with a side dish of poached calf's brain.
You can also order unborn chicken eggs (Taiwan), tongue sandwiches (New York, USA), guinea pigs (Ecuador), horses (Chile), brain curry (India) and chicken uterus (Taiwan).
For those of you who only eat food from animals that are treated well, such as free range eggs, Kobe beef (Japan) is for you. The cows are pampered every day of their lives, getting massages first thing in the morning, fed high quality foods and given beer to drink - a very happy cow, if you ask me.
If you are vegetarian, there is always stinky tofu - Tofu that literally stinks, usually served with fermented vegetables (Taiwan).
For drinks you can drink sake that is garnished with a freshly killed lizard, or rice wine mixed with turtle blood (both from Japan).
And as for dessert, you can eat cheese flavoured ice cream in a bun (Philippines), chocolate rabbit (Italy), bacon and eggs ice cream (France), chocolate bacon with fried Coke (Texas, USA).
If I were to open such a restaurant, would you come?
For those of you who would rather make your own bizarre meal, you can always learn how to cook meals with semen.Yes you heard right, semen... There's an entire cookbook of recipes called Natural Harvest'
Confession: I have a bizarre food fetish myself: the stomach lining of a sheep, wrapped in intestines, from my native Zimbabwe.
Do you have a bizarre food fetish?