> nearly constant cultural boundaries is fermented foods
Interesting point. I think with horror of the "1000 year old eggs" in China. Kimchi is somewhat more agreeable... somewhat.
Interesting point. I think with horror of the "1000 year old eggs" in China. Kimchi is somewhat more agreeable... somewhat.
I'm American and grew up with cheese and love cheese, but after having eaten all of those other things, you realize that the disgust factor of, say, a colorful, pungent chunk of blue cheese is exceptionally high. The smell, the texture, the mouth feel, the method of preparation, the source.
If you're a cheese lover than you're pretty much already at the top of the mountain in terms of disgusting foods. Internalize that notion and most other foods from around the world are a breeze.
A Chinese friend of mine loves to regale listeners with tales of eating things consider outre even by famously expansive Cantonese standards (live mice etc), but he considers the idea of eating rotten, moldy cow lactations (blue cheese) to be beyond the pale.
(although depending on cheese, animal rennet may not be used)
Disgusting foods tend to strongly correlate with certain types of preparation, like fermentation, involve animals or animal byproducts, exhibit certain kinds of textures (e.g. soft or mushy), or have certain types of odors (e.g. rancid). That's what I meant by cheese being objectively disgusting--all the characteristics of cheese fall into categories that strongly correlate with disgusting foods.
Obviously each person's particular tastes and preferences are highly subjective. But from an anthropological viewpoint we can make some objective classifications because there are near universal qualitative characteristics of foods that various cultures find disgusting.
Some types of disgust are likely strongly innate rather than cultural, but that's beside the point. For example, for all I know Inuit might be much more likely to find simple vegetable preparations disgusting, so that the objective quality of vegetable soups generally being non-disgusting might simply be an artifact of the dispersal of human populations. But that wouldn't make qualitative classifications any less objective. A factor doesn't need to be innate, it just needs to be common.