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.”

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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!

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The Oxbow Brewery in Newcastle, Maine, has come up with a brand new brew that combines two of the state’s summertime favorites – beer and lobster. The offbeat lager, called ‘Saison dell’Aragosta’, is made by cooking live lobsters in unfermented beer.

‘Aragosta’ is Italian for lobster or crayfish. The name was chosen to honor Giovanni Campari, the brewmaster of one of Italy’s finest breweries, Birrificio del Ducato. According to Tim Adams, co-owner of Oxbow, Giovanni travelled all the way to Maine last summer to work with him. The duo initially wanted to brew an “esoteric German beer that was low in alcohol and used wheat along with barley.” They wanted a tart and acidic flavor profile, with salt playing an important role. But the evening before they set to work on the new brew, they happened to eat lobster rolls for dinner. That, instead, proved to be their inspiration.

“Giovanni turns to me and says, ‘We gotta put some lobster in the beer we’re brewing,’” Adams said. “I was slightly taken aback and hesitant, but I couldn’t say no to him. The guy traveled all the way from Parma to Maine.”

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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.

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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.”

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Lots of people love Chipotle, but how many eat there every single day? According to recent news reports at least two. Mark Rantal and Andrew Hawryluk have been at the popular Mexican grill for over 100 days straight!

Rantal, 30, who has been eating at the restaurant for 108 days now, said he got into the practice by accident. “On Monday, I decided to get Chipotle and on Tuesday, I made the same decision, then got lunch with my friend there on Wednesday,” he told reporters. “We laughed about it at lunch and he asked how long I thought I could go. And that began the thought.”

Soon, Rantal hit one week, and then a month, and then he just kept going from there. “Every time I hit a milestone, it was very easy and convenient to imagine hitting the next,” he said. And he got the same meal every single time – a burrito bowl with white rice, pinto beans, fajitas, sofritas, mild salsa, corn, medium salsa, cheese and lettuce.

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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.

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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.

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A video of a piece of beef twitching as if it were alive has been doing the rounds online for the last two weeks creeping out viewers and even turning some of them into vegetarians.

Chinese meat has been getting a lot of news coverage lately. Just last week we reported about the now-famous “zombie meat” – cheap meat as old as 40 years smuggled into the country and sold to small restaurants – and these days everyone’s talking about “Frankenstein meat”. Luckily, this one is actually safe for human consumption, although it looks arguably creepier than zombie meat.

So what’s this all about, then? Around two weeks ago, Cheng Tan, a woman from Shandong Province, China, bought a piece of fresh meat, and just as she was getting ready to slice it on her kitchen table, she noticed it was moving. She quickly reached for her smartphone, recorded a video of the creepy twitching meat and posted it online. The minute-long clip was viewed tens of millions of times on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter and eventually found its way onto Western websites, where it went viral again.

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Popular whisky brand Johnnie Walker has launched a bizarre new product that they claim will enhance the taste of your drink. ‘The Johnnie Walker Boldest Wax’ collection is a flavored mustache wax that when applied generously makes every sip of whisky taste better!

Priced at about £7.99 ($12) a pot, the hand-mixed waxes are made of 100 percent natural beeswax. They come in three flavors – Piperine Pepper, Citrus Essence, and Ginger Root – and are designed to complement the Johnnie Walker and ginger cocktail serve. They supposedly carry a scent that “lingers beneath the nostrils.”

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A major food safety scandal involving fake rice recently rocked China; news reports suggested that the grains were made by mixing potatoes with industrial synthetic resin. There were also rumors of the “cheap but profitable” rice being exported to other Asian countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India.

The fake grains supposedly cannot be distinguished from natural rice when raw. The only way to identify plastic rice is by cooking it – it remains hard and is difficult to digest. One publication explained that soup cooked with plastic rice will form a plastic film over the top, which burns when heated.

Health experts are warning people that these grains, if consumed, could wreak havoc on the digestive system. According to an official from the Chinese Restaurant Association, eating three bowls of plastic rice would equal consuming one plastic bag!

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Looking for super-fresh mushrooms? Head on over to a Kroger grocery store in Indiana, where you can pick them yourself.

Instead of selling already picked and packaged button mushrooms, Kroger grocery stores in Indianapolis and Bloomington, Indiana, give customers the chance to pick them by hand from a compost stand. Sure, you have to get your hands a little dirty, but at least you know they are as fresh as can be.

Photos of the unique pick-you-own stand at Kroger were first posted on Reddit a few months ago, and got mostly positive reactions from users of the popular news sharing website, while some expressed concerns about food waste, since the pictures showed a lot of already picked mushrooms left on the compost stand by picky customers. However, as one user pointed out, there’s really no waste with mushrooms, as the staff can just make new compost out of them and grow new ones.

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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.

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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.

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