Welcome to Grossology

1. Welcome to Grossology Let’s investigate all things gross! From the stinky and slimy to the crusty and goopy.

2. Foods Eaten Around the World

3. People eat the WEIRDEST THNGS!

4. 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?

5. Have you ever heard the expression “tastes like chicken?” Tastes Like Chicken Frog legs & alligator tails taste like chicken Boiled cattail shoots taste like asparagus Prickly pear cactus fruits taste like raspberries Fried wax moth caterpillars taste like bacon Giant spiders from New Guinea taste like peanut butter Fried flour beetle larvae taste like sunflower seeds Wichetty grubs (insect larvae) taste like sweet scrambled eggs Rat meat tastes like pork Alligator meat tastes like lobster

6. Worms and Snakes 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. • In China, earthworm soup is a traditional fever medicine • Worm eaters in Australia enjoy long white worms dug from rotten logs and eaten RAW

7. 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!

8. What is your favorite kind of soup? How about birds nest soup?? Or, a bowl of hot, tasty garbage?? • In Medieval England, one fancy 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!” • 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.

9. 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. 7 5 2 4 8 3 Can you guess what these foods are?

10. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 1

11. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 1 Baked Owl

12. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 2

13. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 2 Bear Paw cooked in a gob of clay

14. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 3

15. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 3 camel hump stew

16. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 4

17. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? Dried jelly fish 4

18. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 5

19. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 5 Thousand year old eggs – (Actually they are several months to several years old)

20. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 6

21. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? Barbecued elephant trunk 6

22. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 333 7

23. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 333 7 Breast of Panther

24. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 8

25. Anyone in the mood for Chinese Food? 8 Chicken Red (boiled chicken blood soup)

26. Foods Eaten in Colonial America

27. Popular American foods in 1776 • Soup with marigold petals • Pigs feet • Squirrel Pie • Opossum stew • Dandelion salad • Pickle passenger pigeons • Raspberry Leaf tea

28. 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

29. Food that you have in your Fridge!

30. 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.

31. 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

32. 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.

33. Cheese Trivia Question: How many bacteria live in one bite of cheese?

34. Cheese Trivia Answer: One mouthful can hold over a trillion bacteria – almost two hundred times the total number of people in the world!

35. 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.

36. 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. • 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. • 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!!!

37. So what happens after we eat all of this Gross (or not so gross) food? • 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.

38. The End??? • 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.

39. Stay tuned next time for: The Scoop on Poop!

40. References • 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: • 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