Our strange obsession with food: Eating beating cobra hearts in China and visiting the world’s smallest carrot museum in Belgium

(Beating cobra heart plus blood chaser)

People have a strange relationship with their food. Of course, the problem with relationships is that people want to talk about them obsessively. Which, on TV, leads to endless talk shows about (failed) relationships and an endless stream of cookery programmes. At dinner parties, this means that relatives, friends and perfect strangers will bore you with all the details of their failed or failing marriages and/or diets.

Still, there are some slight compensations. It’s kind of fun to read about the mad antics of our mostly useless celebs, whenever their marriages break up. Granted, it’s more than a bit voyeuristic and closer to watching a car crash in slow motion and licking the blood from the windscreen afterwards than it has to do with fulfilling our civic duty to keep up with current affairs…

… and yet, it is rather pleasing to hear, during these divorce proceedings, that Madonna ordered Kabbalah water for her swimming pool or that the daughter of Paul McCartney makes pendants in the shape of a single woman’s leg. (You have to admit though that, if King Lear had inspired such loyalty and single-mindedness in all three of his daughters, Shakespeare would have had almost no material to speak of for his play.)

Back to food though - and our often strange and quite dysfunctional relationship with it. Apart from the already mentioned and decidedly twisted world of dieting, we also have things like anorexia and bulimia. Made to be omnivores, millions of us decide to become vegetarians, Vegans or eat nothing but the utterly soulless crap that our fast food industry produces.

Then, there are the various religions that tell us that it is not kosher (or halal) to eat pigs, or shellfish; or that it is sinful to eat any meat on certain days.

However, possibly the strangest thing about our culinary habits is our ceaseless hunger for variety. For every person who insists that you can live perfectly well on Happy Meals alone, there will be, at least, two persons who won’t be content until they’ve tried each meal that any of the world’s cuisines have ever come up with.

The human mind is a strange and wondrous toy but it can be used for quite disturbing purposes. Go to any museum of medieval torture devices and you will be amazed about all the various ways of systematically hurting people we invented. Same with food, really: There are some very weird and quite disturbing dishes out there.

There’s a Chinese dish, for instance, where people eat the beating heart of a cobra. A live snake will be brought to the table, where it is cut up, after which the still beating heart is put on a plate. You can imagine the fun chasing that morsel around same plate with a pair of chopsticks. (Though mostly, people just put the heart in a glass and swallow it like they do with oysters.)

They then wash this delicacy down with a glass a snake blood…

Nice, no?

There are, of course, many more examples of this type of ‘extreme food’. These days, people even put clips up on YouTube, to share their culinary experiences with other folks. (You can watch one of those cobra heart clips here, if you so want. It’s a mercifully short clip. If you want more gruesome details, go find your own clips. There are plenty of them, of course.)

Still, sometimes, this obsession with certain types of food leads to things that are actually quite cute. Take the carrot museum, in Belgium:

"People in Berlotte, in Eastern Belgium have created and maintain the Carrot Club & Carrot Museum just. It is in a village of about 30 houses, a chapel and a Carrot Museum. The museum is 100% dedicated to carrots and has carroty exhibits, which all have neat labels, and are visible through a window in a former electricity tower. To see each exhibit you have to turn a wheel which moves the display around; you can’t go into the building because it’s too small. Outside the tower is a carrot clock, carrot weather vane, carrot design on the ground in stone, and a carrot light."

Ah well, I’m not exactly squeamish myself and I have eaten - and enjoyed - most of the food served to me on the world’s various dinner tables but I have to say that, to paraphrase the old proverb, it would be much, much easier to lead me to food with a carrot museum than by sticking a beating cobra heart under my nose.

(Belgium’s carrot museum)

(Plus: Bonus Monty Python clip, in which the world's biggest food fan comes to a sticky end...)