9 disugusting recipes you'll wish you'd never heard of

    There are plenty of repulsive 'bush tucker' foods in the world, from witchetty grubs to monkey brains, but for sources of truly horrifying foods, we have to look closer to home. Much closer. Too close, in fact.

1) Foreskin banana

    Oh no, this is totally not the worst one on the list!

    The Sakalava tribe of Madagascar are all for recycling. They also practise circumcision. (You know what they say about circumcision? - It's no skin off my nose!) Put the two together, add a banana, and you have a delicious item of quaint ethnic cuisine. Seriously, at the boy-child's circumcision ceremony, the severed foreskin is placed on the end of a banana (Sigmund Freud will be spinning in his grave) and eaten by the child's grandfather. Chewy!

2) Foreskin Soup

    It's not only Madagascar where folks like to chow down on a morsel of dick skin: they're at it in Canada as well. In 2009, no less a personage than the Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean, participated in a Hasidic ritual which involved her eating actual foreskin and lentil soup. She is reported as saying that it was 'kinda like chicken, but more tender'. Eeewww - lentils!

3) Placenta Lasagne

    There are apparently many health benefits to be gained by a mother eating the placenta after giving birth, both for herself and the baby. I suppose it's no more disgusting than . . . nope, can't think of anything that even comes close.

    There are many (way too many) placenta recipes on the Internet. Most of them start by telling you to cut off the cord and the membranes (excuse me while I hurl), and that the placenta must be fresh - no more than three days old. Well, you wouldn't want to eat a mouldy placenta, would you?

    This recipe for Placenta Lasagne is fairly typical:

    Ingredients: 1 to 3 lb minced placenta, depending on how many portions you're serving.

    (Wait a goddam minute! You're gonna serve up your afterbirth at a fucking dinner party? Do your guests know what they're gonna be eating? And what wine would you serve with that, anyway?)

    I'll spare you the details. Basically, you make it like regular lasagne, using minced placenta instead of minced beef. I'll just have a salad, thanks.

4) Urine Cocktail

    While there are many who espouse the health benefits of urophagia, there are just as many who warn of the health dangers of the practise. For the undecided, here is a (physically) harmless substitute:

    Ingredients:

    2 oz gin
    1 oz lime juice
    3 oz club soda

    Serve warm.

    "Serve warm" ? That is just wrong. So wrong.

5) Urine avec les champignons psychedeliques

    Interestingly, the Koryak people of Siberia are reported to have used the psychoactive Amanita muscaria mushroom, commonly known as fly agaric, as a ceremonial entheogen (ie, it makes you see gods, or at least pixies). The mushrooms have side effects which include nausea, twitching, sweating and drooling. These undesirable effects can be avoided by passing the mushrooms through a human filter, since the active alkaloids are unchanged as they pass through the human body, allowing the urine to retain the intoxicating effects of the mushroom: those who drank the urine of those using the mushroom would experience the psychoactive effects themselves. Tribesmen who could not afford the mushrooms drank the urine of those who could; tribesmen drank their own urine in order to prolong the experience; and tribesmen on trips (in more ways than one) carried their own urine with them. They sometimes concentrated their urine by partially freezing it and ingesting the remaining unfrozen liquid.

6) Placenta Smoothie

    This one would be pretty revolting even without the placenta. If you can drink this without gagging, I salute you (and move a long, long way away from you).

    Ingredients:

    1/4 cup fresh raw placenta
    8 oz V8 juice
    1/2 cup carrot
    2 ice cubes

    Blend at high speed for 10 seconds and serve.

    Serve to who? Not me, lady! The online recipe describes this as "a tasty thirst quencher". I will never, ever be that thirsty.

7) Turd Cake

    I hope this novelty cake is made out of chocolate. Mind you, it's Japanese, so you can't be sure . . . (Google 'Japanese scat girls' and you'll see what I mean. Or rather, don't.)

8) Turd Burgers

    A Japanese scientist, Mitsuyuki Ikeda, has developed a way to produce synthetic meat from human faeces. He was approached by Tokyo Sewage because of an 'overabundance of sewage mud'. They asked him to see if he could find a use for it, and he came up with a method to extract protein from the sewage and form it into steaks coloured with red food dye and flavoured with soy extracts, which have been called 'poop burgers'. Test subjects have reported that it tastes remarkably similar to beef.

9) Placenta Pate

    In 1998, Britain's Channel 4 was reprimanded for broadcasting a programme in which a woman's placenta was served to, and eaten by, twenty relatives and friends. A spokesman for the Broadcasting Standards Commission described the programme as 'disagreeable'.

    The presenter, a TV cook called Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (no, honestly, that's his real name!), devised a recipe using the afterbirth of a lunatic- er, I mean, a woman called Rosie Clear to make pate to be served at a party to celebrate the birth of her daughter, Indi-Mo Krebbs (see, told you she's a lunatic. 'Indi-Mo Krebbs' ?).

    The placenta was fried with shallots and garlic, flambeed, pureed, and served on focaccia bread. Mrs Clear's husband, Lee, had seventeen helpings (weirdo!) but the other guests were 'less enthusiastic'.