Eating Offal and Loving It: New Zealand's Wildfoods Festival

I don't know if I'd be brave enough to eat most of what's on offer at New Zealand's annual Wildfoods Festival, but I'd love to watch other people try. Vendors from all over the country come together to sell people dishes that might seem more at home on an episode of Fear Factor, like wasp larvae icecream, giant horrible bugs called wekas, live grubs, scorpions (raw or cooked), pickled slugs, worm sushi, grasshopper, crickets, beetles, ostrich sandwiches, and craziest of all, horse semen shots with a Red Bull chaser. If the latter offering sounds stomach-turning to you, the vendor, interviewed here in Stuff Magazine, assures us it's safe: "We're getting the semen in the same way breeders do, using an artificial vagina and storing it in the formula they use. It will be like a milkshake." To make it more palatable, some of the shots are flavored, and horse-racing fans can sometimes request the, er, product of a particular horse.

Festival organizers put together this rather entertaining highlight reel of people downing revolting things:

If all that sounds tempting, you can attend next year's festival on March 10th, 2012 in the South Island town of Hokitika.