Gross and tantalizing menu from the Explorer's Club dinner

Last week's 108th annual Explorer's Club dinner at NYC's Waldorf-Astoria featured the customary assortment of weird, gross and tantalizing food, starting with cow eyeball martinis (see Paul Adams's photo, below, of the eyeballs). Popular Science has the whole menu. Here's what the canapes were like:

Pineapple towers with scorpion, pea pods, strawberry slices, melon balls and green grapes
Sweet cherry peppers, cucumber flowerets and cherry tomatoes filled with assorted creamed fillings: durian paste, herbed and spiced cream cheeses, and garnished with crickets, mealworms and scorpions
Two varieties of seaweed with mild spices and olive oil
Sautéed and deep-fried earthworms
Orchids (edible) with a honey-sweetened creamed dipping sauce
Chon and Kopi Luwak coffees, made from coffee beans that have passed through the digestive tract of small mammals

A Taste of Exotic Meats at the Explorers Club Annual Dinner (via JWZ)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Food • gross • happy mutants • not food • nyc • Weird

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Shinkuhadoken

The pan… it keeps staring at me!
bcsizemo

It’s things like this that almost make me glad I’m not part of that 1%…
- CH
  
  Yes, but you are part of the percentage that can be squeamish and pick and choose their food.
CaptainPedge

Did anyone else think “Kungaloosh!”
http://plankhead.com Zacqary Adam Green

Good taste: the final frontier.
Halloween Jack

What percentage of people toasting each other with cow-eyeball martinis will go with “Here’s looking at you, kid”?
- Woodrow_Wilson_Smith
  
  No, no. ”Here’s looking at you, CALF.” ”Kid” would require GOAT-eyeball martinis.
PinkWithIndignation

It kind of sounds like they are eating food a crazy hobo found in the dumpster of a fancy restaurant that he decided to spice up a bit with “ingredients” from other dumpsters. Or like food Bender would make. “You meat sacks eat flowers, right?” Or like eating with Ki. Hey, it’s all bio-mass, right? The unappetizing food jokes are endless!
http://www.facebook.com/dwight.friesen Dwight David Friesen

You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
blueelm

Is this the dinner where some one served the hissing cockroaches?

*reads*

Oh I see it is.

Looking at those eyeballs takes me back to high school. Some of those don’t sound so unusual though such as ostrich,elk, grouper, or octopus. Jellyfish is very good I think. I don’t know why it isn’t more popular, it’s also much more sustainable than many meats. The whole thing though does kind of make me think of those stories of the dowager empress Cixi. I guess really though that all glamorous foods are similar in this way. It’s just that we’re not accustomed to thinking of these foods as glamorous.
Hanglyman

Cherry tomatoes? That’s disgusting!
- blueelm
  
  I sincerely agree.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  T4 Angel phobia?
Ambiguity

Orchids (edible)…

Glad they cleared that up.
millie fink

Hey, “seaweed” is NOT disgusting. Unless, maybe, you’re not used to eating it. Enough with the Eurocentric bias, plz.
- Hanglyman
  
  Indeed. I find it hard to believe the same people eager to try scorpions and cow eyeballs have never had a sushi roll before, either.
cdh1971

I’ll just leave this here….click pick to enlarge…
GyroMagician

Are those really cows eyeballs? They don’t look big enough. Pygmy cows, maybe?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Veal eyeballs.
Ninabi

Bovine eyeballs are up there with spinal cords and brains on the list of high-risk-for-BSE animal parts. Not sure the gooey, chewy mouthful would be worth it to me.