Neon udon noodles are the latest addition to Japan’s ever expanding list of bizarre foods. Taking their place among winners like poop-flavored curry, deep-fried maple leaves  and citrus-scented eggs, these psychedelic noodles hardly look appetizing.

Food writer and mad scientist Kurare Raku, who invented the glow-in-the-dark noodles, posted a couple of photographs on Twitter last week. One displayed neon pink noodles swimming in a neon green broth, topped with slabs of blue tofu. The other bowl had dark pink noodles topped with tofu that suspiciously resembled strips of Scotch Brite scrub pads.

Read More »

Flour, butter, eggs, and sugar were apparently too boring for this super wealthy Arab family, so they decided to throw a few diamonds into their cake mix. They recently splurged an eye-watering $75 million on a bejweled cake for their daughter’s birthday-cum-engagement party.

British designer Debbie Wingham, who turned to baking after previously creating the world’s most expensive dress, was commissioned to make the cake. The identity of the family – living in the UAE – has not been revealed, but there are plenty of pictures online of Debbie and the extravagant dessert.

Read More »

Pig’s meat is undoubtedly delicious, but I’m not so sure you could say the same about its milk. Nevertheless, a family-run farm in the Netherlands has produced the world’s first cheese made from pig milk. They’re selling it at a whopping £1,500 ($2,300) per kilogram – more expensive than the former world’s costliest cheese, made from Balkan donkey milk!

Erik Stenink, free-range pig farmer and owner of ‘Piggy’s Palace’ is the brains behind pig milk cheese. He decided to do it because mainly because he was curious to see if it would work, given that pig’s milk is richer in protein than cow’s milk. But milking pigs is quite a labor intensive process, so he only managed to produce half a kilo of the “chalky” cheese. A bit of it was sold to an anonymous buyer last week, and the proceeds were donated to a children’s cancer charity.

“It’s a product which has never been made before and a lot of people are very interested in it,” Erik said. “We’ve only just recently tried to milk the sows. We’re very happy with it all and although for us it’s a one-time thing, if someone wants to give us £1,500 we’ll make a kilo, but it’s too intensive to make without an order.”

Read More »

Archaeologist-turned-entrepreneur Nancy Warner is making headlines for creating the world’s first jam made purely from beer. But before you get too excited, let me tell you it’s non-alcoholic, so there’s no real chance of getting tipsy at breakfast!

Nancy had already quit her job as an archaeologist to start a preserves company called ‘Potlicker’, when she stumbled upon the unique recipe by accident. She had run out of fruit to make jams and jellies one day, so she reached into her beer cupboard instead. After much experimenting, she managed to come up with a clear ‘Beer Jelly’. It is now so popular that she’s producing about 3,000 jars a week!

“I’m actually an archaeologist by trade and spent close to 10 years working in south eastern US archaeology before my husband Walter and I moved to Vermont,” the 34-year-old said. “I could not find archaeology work, so I developed a food blog hobby to keep me busy. The blog lead to a canning addiction, the canning addiction turned into a small business. I had bills to pay and lots of jam on the shelf so Walter packed me up and sent me to the farmer’s market.”

Read More »

For the past 60 years, this Florida couple have been celebrating their anniversary by eating a piece out of their wedding cake – not a replica, the original one!

Ann and Ken Fredericks were married on 19 August, 1955 and Ann’s grandmother had baked a three-layer fruitcake for the occasion. The top layer of that cake, baked six decades ago, still exists in a metal Maxwell Coffee House can. “Every year, we unwrap it, pour brandy over it – because you need to moisten it – and we break off a piece,” Ann said.

“Everybody just looks at us with amazed looks when they hear about it,” she added. “Our children are appalled that we would be eating something that’s 60 years old. But believe me, it’s quite tasty, as long as it’s got enough brandy on it. And it’s never made us sick.”

Read More »

We’ve featured our fair share of bizarre foods on Oddity Central, right from jam-filled sausages to charcoal cheddar cheese, but this latest dish in Japan definitely takes the cake as the weirdest ever. A new eatery owned by Japanese adult movie star Ken Shimizu has actually chosen to serve poo-flavored curry!

The dish is meant to be a tribute to Shimizu’s debut film – he apparently made it big by eating poop in a movie. So he decided to make ‘unko curry’ (poop curry) the signature dish at the newly opened ‘Curry Shop Shimizu’. The curry is supposedly made of ‘healthy ingredients like green tea, goya(bitter gourd), and cocoa-powder. But it looks at tastes like crap – and to amplify the gross effect, it is served in a toilet-shaped bowl!

Read More »

Savory ice creams have been around for some time now, but none quite as hot as the Ghost Pepper Ice Cream. This bad boy is so spicy that you actually have to sign a legal waiver before attempting to eat it.

The frozen treat is available at The Ice Cream Store in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It’s basically a vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce streaks, but it’s also infused with some of the world’s hottest chillies and capsicum sauces. These chillies are so hot that villagers in India actually smear sauce made from them on fence posts to keep elephants away!

According to Delaware Online, the first mouthful tastes of a “deep, rich, creamy vanilla with a hint of sweetness,” but that’s quickly followed by “a Mike Tyson worthy wallop of mouth-searing heat.” The paper warns people to “be prepared for a loitering burn that outstays its welcome.”

Read More »

Paying $100 for a donut seems crazy, but Donutopia is no ordinary confectionery, it’s a culinary masterpiece covered in 24-karat gold flakes and edible sugar diamonds. These treats are made with the finest ingredients, including $39 Bling H2O water.

“Each one takes three to five hours to make,” says Jeanne Kaminski, co-owner of Dolicious Donuts in West Kelowna, Canada, where the delectable donuts were invented. They were inspired by a loyal customer who wanted to use one of their creations to propose to his girlfriend. He asked for a cream-filled Bismarck donut to act as a pillow for the engagement ring, but they decided to make him something truly impressive. The first Donutopia got such positive feedback that they decided to include it on the menu.

Read More »

If you love odd culinary combinations, then the ‘dausage’ is just the thing for you. The half-donut, half-sausage is a savory-sweet mash-up of pork or beef and jam or custard, invented by web developer and food lover Liam Bennett.

“I was inspired to invent the dausage by the success of the cronut and the duffin,” the 37-year-old from Wales said. “I love jam donuts, and I really love those products, but I wanted to make something a bit different, so I came up with the idea of trying a sausage. I was trying to think what else you could mix with a donut. I was looking at things that go well with sweet things, duck with plum sauce. I thought I’d give the sausage a go because, well, I eat sausages.”

Read More »

Every year, during the rainy season, trillions of midges – small flies – rise from the water of Lake Victoria, in Africa, and fly in giant swarms that are said to be so dense they can suffocate a person. However, for the people living on the shores of the great lake, they are just a welcome source of protein.

Some bird species migrate to Lake Victoria during the rainy season so they can take advantage of this free feast. The flies create a sort of constantly buzzing living smog and cover every available surface as they break off from their mating ritual. But no matter how many of them are gobbled up by birds and other natural predators, there are always more than enough for the locals. As disgusting as eating flies may seem, the reality is they make up a huge quantity of biomass equivalent with large herds of big game. People living on the shores of Lake Victoria simply can’t ignore the nutritious protein flying all around them, so they catch the flies and cook them as charcoal-black fly burgers.

Read More »

Researchers at Oregon State University have made the mother of all discoveries – they’ve recently patented a strain of seaweed that’s not only rich in protein, but tastes remarkably like delicious bacon when cooked.

Dulse (Palmaria sp.) is a red marine algae that grows along the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines and is sold for up to $90 a pound in dried form as a cooking ingredient or dietary supplement. However, Chris Langdon and his colleagues at Oregon State University have patented a new strain of dulse that’s bound to revolutionize the health food industry. Not only is it an excellent source of minerals, vitamins and antioxidants and contains up to 16 percent protein in dry weight, but it actually tastes amazing. How amazing? Bacon amazing, according to Langdon.

Read More »

Believe it or not, the world’s most expensive cheese doesn’t come from cows or goats, but from donkeys. Made on a farm in Serbia, ‘Pule Cheese’ is made from Balkan donkey milk and costs a hefty $1,000 per pound! It is a crumbly white cheese, apparently popular for its intense flavor and natural saltiness.

The world’s supply of pule comes from a single herd of Balkan donkeys that live on a farm in the Zasavica Special Nature Preserve, Serbia. Part of the reason this cheese is so expensive is that donkeys don’t yield too much milk, and they all have to be milked by hand, three times a day. Apparently, 15 donkeys yield about a gallon of milk, and it takes 3.5 gallons to make a pound of pule cheese. The donkeys of the Zasavica Special Nature Preserve only produce enough milk to make around 200 pounds of pule cheese a year, which makes it very hard to come by.

Read More »

Due to inconveniences caused to the Andersen family, we have decided to remove this article, but you can still read their story on Zero Carb Zen.

Inspired by the growing trend of photographing your food and sharing the photos online before tucking in, a Tel Aviv restaurant has launched a special program that allows patrons to take the best food photos possible. Called “Foodography”, the unique concept relies on color-coordinated dishes, perfect lighting and custom-designed plates that either spin around to offer different photo angles, or come with a smartphone holder, to make the photos worth sharing on sites like Instagram or Pinterest.

“We wanted to reconnect with a new generation of customers – youngsters who connect with food through the lens of a smartphone,” said a spokesman for Carmel Winery, the company that developed the concept along with Baumann Ber Rivnay advertising agency.

Read More »

35-year-old Debbie Taylor loves cooking big meals for her boyfriend and teenage son. But when the time comes to sit down at the table and dig in, she just pulls out a packet of Beef-flavored Monster Munch crisps instead. In fact, that’s about all she’s been eating for the past decade!

Debbie, a hotel chambermaid in Harlow, Essex, is so paranoid about food that she actually takes a packet of crisps when she goes out to restaurants, and munches on them while her boyfriend Gerald indulges in a traditional meal. She takes them everywhere. For example, when the boyfriend took her and her son Luke for a holiday in Spain, she actually packed a separate suitcase full of Monster Munch for the trip!

“I’m not a fan of the cooked meal,” she wrote in a life and style experience article in The Guardian a few years ago. “I’m much happier with Monster Munch crisps – beef flavor; I wouldn’t touch pickled onion. When I open the bag, I check if they have enough beef coating on them; if it’s not enough, I’ll throw them away.”

Read More »