It turns out, there are a lot of edible flowers. They don't always have much of a taste, or even taste good, but you can eat them. More importantly, you can use them to make even simple food staggeringly beautiful. TasteSpotting has several pages of flower food which, even if they don't please your taste pallet, will definitely thrill your color palette.
Insects, worms, and all manner of creepy crawlies are a legitimate source of food in other parts of the world. And not just the parts suffering from famines. The blog Girl Meets Bug is devoted to exploring edible insects. This gives us all a chance to consider the reality of buggy treats like Scaramal Apples, without having to be in the same room as them.
Have you ever tried Persian Fairy Floss? How about Sri Racha Candy Canes? Oh! Tell me you've had a chance to taste Cheri's Desert Harvest Prickly Pear Cactus Jelly Candy! No? Then you need to read the Candy Gurus blog. Because these guys are determined to taste every candy on Earth, and write funny reviews afterwards. Note: That Persian Fairy Floss…not so great. Apparently they consider "rose" a candy flavor in Persia.
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Artist Samantha Lee works in a special medium for what was once a very limited audience. What began as a way to urge her young daughter to eat became an internet sensation. With a plate for a canvas and kid-friendly foods for paint, Lee creates amazingly sweet and tasty looking lunches. And makes me mildly resentful of all the soggy tuna fish sandwiches I had to eat as a child.
Restaurants and grocery stores will often throw out food for baring the slightest blemish. This practice has spawned "freeganism," in which people dive through dumpsters in search of dinner. Some do it as a protest against food waste in the western world, some do it for the thrill of reverting to our hunter/gatherer roots, and some do it because they're simply poor. The blog Eating Out of Garbage Bins chronicles one man's year inside the dumpster, and all that he found foul and fantastic buried within.
We all have something we like to eat that grosses out our friends and family. (I think raisins, cashews, and hotdogs make an awesome hot trail-mix. Then mix it with the coolness of cottage cheese…oh yeah). Someone Ate This is here to celebrate those differences with a gallery of the gross and baffling. And if it starts to cross your mind that those baloney cones don't look half bad, the site provides hilarious and unsettling captions that will likely change your mind.
The recipes in your grandmother's 1952 edition of Betty Crocker are just tragic, aren't they? So much canned food. So much pulverized tuna shaped into molds. A complete abuse of pineapple rings and toothpicks. It wasn't their fault, of course. They had nothing even close to the variation of food we have. They had to gussy up whatever canned practicality was in their pantry. Mid-Century Menu, however, poses the theory that not all of these archaic recipes need be appalling. Some will be, (hello Cold Aspic Glazed Lamb Loaf) absolutely. But Ruth Clark actually makes them first (and forces her poor husband to taste them), so we can find out which casseroles and pates survived the test of time.
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