Hope you didn’t plan on eating this week: we try duck fetus eggs in the Philippines

So it’s come to this, has it? Rocketnews24, after eating pretty much everything under the sun, has reached the last bastion of disgusting culinary curios.

Of course, we’re talking about Philippine balut, or duck fetus eggs. We’ve been here before, but somehow we felt this needed revisiting.

In a lot of other countries, a duck fetus egg is something you might find among a dozen regular ones that will make you swear off eating eggs for at least a month. In the Philippines, however, somebody, sometime, cracked open an unlucky fetus egg and thought, “well, can’t let a good duck fetus go to waste,” and crammed that sucker in his/her face hole.

Either through some kind of national willful delusion or some uncannily clever marketing, balut took off in the Philippines as well as several other Southeast Asian countries, where it’s known by various names.

Whatever you call it though, the taste doesn’t change, as our pitiable reporter found out when he – despite the measly pay we give him – actually agreed to try one of the damn things.

His impressions? “It tastes like feathers, bones, heart, brain, claws and duck meat,” he reports, noting, in addition to that completely obvious wisdom, that while it didn’t taste necessarily bad, the idea that he was eating a whole duck fetus made him almost throw up in his mouth a little.

Then his Philippine host ever so graciously offered him her unwanted balut, because if you’re crazy enough to eat one, you’re surely crazy enough to eat two.

▼ Note how she attempts to make contact with the balut with as few fingers as possible.