Sick to the stomach? That’s just a socially acquired response, says Berlin’s Museum of Disgusting Food

Visitors to the German capital’s newest ­museum are not given entry tickets – they get sickbags.

European crickets are offered as a light entrée by the Berlin museum — with far worse to follow. Picture: Instagram

Visitors to the German capital’s newest ­museum are not given entry tickets – they get sickbags.

That is just as well because there are things in the Museum of Disgusting Food that would make most people want to lie down in a darkened room.

A cheery sign near the ­entrance says: “Days since last vomit: 2.” With a tasting menu that includes German cheese ­encrusted with living maggots, and a bitter liqueur fortified with secretions from the anal glands of a beaver, that number is testament to the strength of the average Berliner’s stomach.

Further inside, in what used to be the city’s currywurst museum, breaded cows’ udders glisten next to a panel depicting eggs pickled in the urine of Vietnamese boys.

Three jars of Japanese ­habushu wine contain snakes that have been frozen alive, gutted, sewn back up and then defrosted to briefly awaken and die.

There is a Chinese spirit blended from the distilled penises of seals, deer and dogs, whose taste is described as “a mixture of expired port, pungent vinegar and prune juice”, and another created by drowning baby mice in alcohol.

Yet revulsion is a matter of perspective: there is also haggis, Spam, root beer, a box of Pop Tarts and a bottle of eggnog.

“Germans drink it in little glasses at Christmas time,” Martin Volker, the museum’s director and an expert on ethnology, said. “Then they lick the glasses clean with their tongues, like animals.”

The museum, set up by Germany’s Humanist Association, is based on a similar institution in Malmo, Sweden. The idea behind it is that disgust is a socially ­acquired emotion; an abhorrence for the unfamiliar that sets humans apart from animals. As such it is relative: one person’s haggis is another person’s heart carved out of a live cobra. There are tins of tote oma (dead grandma), a distant cousin of the haggis once eaten in socialist East Germany. “It looks like your grandma after she was run over by a lorry,” Volker said.

At the end of the tour comes the degustation. The entree was three species of insect: buffalo worms, mealworms and Euro­pean crickets. The texture resembled crispbread and the taste was neutral with a faintly nutty overtone, like a grated Ikea cabinet.

The beaver-bottom liqueur was almost pleasant, reminiscent of Ramazzotti with a teasing note of urine. Even the maggoty German cheese, said to have been one of Martin Luther’s favourite delicacies, is manageable if you close your eyes and think of tile grout.

The real issue was the hakarl, an Icelandic speciality made from fermented shark flesh.

The late celebrity chef ­Anthony Bourdain was understating it when he once said it was “the worst, most disgusting, most terrible-tasting thing” he had ever eaten.

The Times