Welcome to Grossology
Let’s investigate all things gross!
From the stinky and slimy to the
crusty and goopy.
People eat the WEIRDEST THNGS!
What would you rather eat?
What would you rather eat
for lunch –
a hot piece of pizza,
a bowl of bugs,
or a fish head?
Tastes Like Chicken
Have you ever heard the expression
“tastes like chicken?”
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Frog legs & alligator
tails taste like chicken
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Boiled cattail shoots
taste like asparagus
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Prickly pear cactus
fruits taste like
raspberries

Fried wax moth
caterpillars taste like
bacon

Giant spiders from New
Guinea taste like
peanut butter
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Fried flour beetle
larvae taste like
sunflower seeds
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Wichetty grubs
(insect larvae)
taste like sweet
scrambled eggs
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Rat meat tastes
like pork
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Alligator meat
tastes like lobster
Worms and Snakes
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In China, earthworm soup is a
traditional fever medicine
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Worm eaters in Australia enjoy 
long white worms dug from rotten
logs and eaten RAW
Rattlesnake is lower in fat than
most meats we eat today. It is
a tender white meat with a
mild flavor and texture similar
to crab meat.
A six pound snake might only
have one pound of meat on its
body
One restaurant buys skinned,
whole snakes (minus the
heads and rattles) and cooks
the snakes skeleton and all.
Next they hand peel the meat
from the bones and add spices
and put it on a beautiful salad.
EEWWW. . . BUGS!

The Australian honey ant stores so much of a
sugary fluid in its body that its hind end swells
to a globe big enough to eat. People bite the
bug’s end off to get at the sweet stuff inside

Termites are a gourmet food to many Africans

People eat fried grasshoppers in many parts
of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East

Pioneer Americans boiled locusts in soup

Aristotle (a Greek Philosopher) said that
cicadas taste best with their eggs inside of
them!
What is your favorite
kind of soup?
How about birds nest soup??
Or, a bowl of hot, tasty
garbage??  In Medieval England, one fancy

One small region o Southeast Asia provides the whole
world’s supply for bird’s-nest soup. Men climb three
hundred feet up vines and bamboo poles and risk their
lives to harvest he nest of birds called “swiftlets.” These
birds fly into huge caves to make nests with their own
spit. But the birds are becoming more rare because
people steal too many of their nests.

A hundred tons of dainty little birds’ nests go into Hong
Kong’s soup pots every year – more than the weight of a
thousand people.
soup served at royal feasts was
called “garbage”. It was made with
birds’ heads, feet, livers, necks, and
gizzards. Soup was often called
“sewe” and the server was called
the “sewer”. Just think how often
kings must have shouted to their
servants, “Get me some garbage
from the sewer and bring it to
dinner!”
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
6
1
Bird’s nest soup gives us just a taste of how daring
China’s cooks have been over the centuries. Here are
some of the wilder dishes – from ancient royal favorites
like owl to the dried jellyfish still enjoyed today.
2
4
5
3
Can you guess what
these foods are?
7
8
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
1
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
1
Baked
Owl
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
2
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
2
Bear Paw
cooked in
a gob of
clay
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
3
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
3
camel
hump
stew
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
4
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
4
Dried
jelly
fish
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
5
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
5
Thousand year
old eggs –
(Actually they are
several months to
several years old)
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
6
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
Barbecued
elephant
trunk
6
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
3
7
3
3
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
3
7
3
3
Breast of
Panther
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese Food?
8
Anyone in the mood for
Chinese
Food?
8
Chicken
Red
(boiled chicken
blood soup)
Popular American foods in
1776
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Soup with marigold petals
Pigs feet
Squirrel Pie
Opossum stew
Dandelion salad
Pickle passenger pigeons
Raspberry Leaf tea
Eat Connecticut’s state bird??
 In colonial times and during
the civil war, both the
colonists and the Native
Americans enjoyed eating a
plump robin for breakfast. Or
they enjoyed fried robins on
toast for a meal.
 Today, the Migratory Bird
Treaty Act of 1918 protects
all wild birds except game
birds like ducks and geese
Don’t be afraid of bees
Honey (worldwide)
Fuzzy bees suck sweet flower juice
to bring back to their hive. There,
the bees pass this nectar around
with their tongues until it starts to
thicken. Bees’ bodies squirt a
chemical into the nectar to help
change it to honey. After puking it
into the honeycomb, the bees fan it
with their wings until it’s just the
right thickness.
You’re so Cheesy!

Cheese is made when special
bacteria and chemicals act on
milk. Bacteria make your feet
stink and give cheese its odor.
Some of the bacteria in cheese
are the same as the ones that live
in your body to help digest food

Cheese makers use an enzyme
from animals’ stomach linings to
curdle milk. They drain off the
liquid, leaving behind curd, the
first stage in a cheese’s life. As
the bacteria grow and spread,
they give different kinds of
cheese their special flavor
Do bats like cheese?
Gorgonzola cheese is made
from cow's milk. The veins,
blue/green/gray, are Penicillin
Glaucum, (similar to the
medicine you take if you get
strep throat or an ear infection)
a spore native to Gorgonzola,
Italy, that would attach to the
ripening cheese curds and
hang from nets in local caves.
Today, the cheese is made in a
factory.
Cheese Trivia
Question:
How many bacteria
live in one bite of
cheese?
Cheese Trivia
Answer:
One mouthful can hold over
a trillion bacteria – almost
two hundred times the total
number of people in the
world!
More
cheesy
trivia
 In 1841, the Urauguayan navy
ran out of cannonballs during
their battle with the Argentinian
navy. They used Dutch edam
cheeses instead!!
 Cheese can be made fro the
milk of many types of animals
such as cows, goats, sheep,
buffalo, camels, mares and
even reindeer.
Do you know that
you eat fungus all
the time?
And you probably
love it!

Bread is made with flour and yeast. Yeast is a fungus and the fungi are so small that 4,000
could stand in a single file on your thumb! They are much too tiny to see, but they are what
makes bread dough rise. For the dough to rise, it has to get a fungus infection. As the
yeast grows, it gives off gases that puff the loaf up.

Mushrooms are also a fungus. The rarest and most expensive mushrooms on earth cost
about $640 a pound. These are rare, wild fungi – called truffles – that grow underground.
(This makes them very hard to find!) Some animals can smell them while they are still
buried. Truffle hunters use dogs and PIGS to sniff out these warty looking globes for us to
eat.
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Always check with an adult before eating mushrooms. Some may grow in your backyard,
but that doesn’t mean that they are safe for you to eat. The mushrooms that you buy in the
grocery store are edible and delicious.
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Make sure you don’t eat other fungus such as the type that grows on dead animals in the
forest or between your toes. Fungus known as athlete’s foot can make your feet stink and
itchy. So now you know, not all fungus is edible!!!
So what happens after we eat all of this Gross
(or not so gross) food?
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Digestion starts with your teeth as
they bite off chunks of food, and
break it into bits. As you chew,
the food mixes and moistens in
your mouth from saliva.
As you swallow, your muscular
tongue pushes the food to the
back of your mouth and you
swallow the lump of food (called a
bolus)
Your esophagus is the pipe that
squeezes the bolus into your
stomach.
In the stomach, the food mixes
with lots of digestive juices that
help break down the food and it
also gets churned and squeezed
through to the small intestine.
The End???
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The small intestine isn’t very small
at all – it is about 23 feet long (the
length of an SUV)
Both the large intestine and small
intestine are lined with slimy mucus
that protect their walls.
The small intestines work with
other organs in your body like the
pancreas, liver, and gallbladder.
Once the small intestine has done
its job and removed most of the
food’s nutrients, the food moves
onto the large intestine also called
the colon.
Once the food gets to the large
intestine, your body takes any last
nutrients before it creates the
waste and shapes it into stool.
Stay tuned next time for:
The Scoop
on Poop!
References
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Its disgusting and we ate it by James Solheim
You Burp – The most interesting book you’ll ever read about eating by
Diane Swanson
Other interesting books:
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Cows sweat through their noses by Barbara Seuling
Don’t touch that – The book of gross, poisonous, and downright icky
plants and critters by Jeff Day
Poop – A natural history of the unmentionable by Nicola Davies
Gee Whiz – It’s all about pee by Susan E Goodman
The truth about poop by Susan E Goodman
Tracks, Scats, and Signs by Leslie Dendy
Exploratopia by Pat Murphy