Weird foods and food combinations often become the subject of social media posts in both laughter and debate. Certain food combinations are beloved by some and derided by others. Some have never been heard of outside of a particular area. These foods can be deeply defended as being okay and others are just somehow seem to be taken as a normal occurrence to the eye of the outsider. Quite frankly, regardless of how beloved a food may be, they just plain receive the common reply of “Why would you eat that?” or “Why is that a thing?”.
One of the more common foods that is debated on social media is pineapple on pizza. If you haven’t heard of this debate, some people like to have pineapple on their pizza as a regular topping while others think it is disgusting. Personally, I find the debate very amusing. This is mostly because the default pizza in my house, the one we order if we had to only order one pizza for everyone, is called Hawaiian. This pizza contains what I believe is Canadian bacon and pineapple. It may also contain onions, but I am not sure about that. Either way, whenever my family has to order pizza, we don’t order one of the typical three: cheese, sausage, or pepperoni. We order a large, deep-dish Hawaiian. I will not apologize if you think that the pizza my family eats is disgusting.
Now while pineapple on pizza is not common enough for it to be a topping on pizzas a school, there are foods or food combinations that are apparently common enough to be served in cafeterias. While I was studying abroad in Valencia, I came across salads that were somewhat different than those in the US and I am not referring to the fact that the only salad dressing as far I could tell, was served as a bottle of vinegar and a bottle of olive oil in a tray. In the residence hall cafeteria, when they created a pre-made salad as a first plate (there are two plates for meals), it would contain the normal lettuce and shredded carrot which can be found in American salads. The part that I would not necessarily have thought of prior, was the tuna chunks and corn. See above. The tuna and corn seemed to be somewhat normal additions to salads as I had them in salads at restaurants. I hope you realize that I was somewhat baffled by salads during my time in Spain. To me they often created food combinations that were strange to me, not because of the ingredients but because of the context in which they were being used.
Back to the US, one food combination that some may adore and I had never heard of until watching a YouTube video (credit to emmymadeinjapan) was chili on spaghetti. Now this can seem very odd to many people but apparently can be found commonly in Cincinnati. After thinking about it for a while, I could somewhat see how it was created or at least how it wouldn’t taste disgusting. Chili, at the least the version you can get around where I live, is made with meat and tomatoes just like spaghetti sauce. Really the main differences are that chili has beans and chili powder. If you can get over the texture differences, the flavor should theoretically be very similar (note: I have never tried chili on spaghetti). This is a food that while containing the possibility for derision, especially on social media, appears to be a local favorite that doesn’t seem to have traveled very far.
Some foods are just plain going to come across as weird to those not familiar with them, bugs tend to come to mind. Others may be more acceptable to some people since they use familiar ingredients. Regardless, sometimes when we are faced with unfamiliar foods, we just go: “I really don’t want to eat that.” It doesn’t matter who is serving it to us, nor how common a food may be, we just say no to eating something. I would suggest that we at least try a food even if we are aware that we will not like it. In Spain, one of my salads came with Roquefort cheese. Once I saw it, I realized that it was a relative of the dreaded blue cheese, which I very much dislike for it’s taste. However, I still tried a few crumbs of the cheese but found myself pushing it off to the side and eating the rest of the salad. The waiter was not offended; in fact, I think she may have laughed a bit and commented on the obvious omission. Like I said, try it but you don’t necessarily have to finish it. Do you have foods that you think are weird but have eaten anyways? Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment below with your answers.
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