How do you know what "snotters" taste like?

My congratulations to the one who's never had a really bad cold or real hay fever.


Everyone with an aversion to "strange foods" should have at least one opportunity to be entertained in Japan by "corporate executives."

While the French (a generally disgusting lot, but that's just a traditional opinion I've not had countered by experience) do a thing with the snails that actually conceals the "snailness" by mincing, garnishing, grinding, mixing with exotic spices and other unknown "stuff," otherwise concealing what they are/were - except for the presence of the shell (sometimes), any "foreigner" (translation: "American") shown about by Japanese executives will invariably be "treated" to cuisine that includes numerous indescribably ugly creatures deliberately prepared so as to emphasize how repellant they are, including shellfish of various kinds that are simply "boiled in the shell" and laid (with elaborate traditional decoration, of course) on a plate.

Thanks largely to my early youth subsisting on the fish and game of Kansas (much of which resembles the date you did not bring home to mother) a trip to Nagoya a few years back did not result in my public regurgitation; a fact that I'm sure was a great disappointment to my hosts (especially to one Nagoya VP who tried very hard). Others of my party provided much more traditional entertainment, which I am convinced was the intent of the "traditional cuisine" to which we were "treated." My "trip diary" lists "rubber bands," "shoe soles," "snot globs," "rubber heel with Tabasco," and "unidentified eyeballs" among the "delicacies" we were served - the closest I could come to describing the cuisine.

That aside, if it was once alive and now might be dead, and has been prepared in a manner that elicits its food qualities without emphasis on "you gotta be an idiot to try this," it probably is an acceptable item on my menu.

I seldom see whelks on the menu here, but I don't eat out a lot.

John