Foreign Queasine: Difference between revisions

* In [[Willy Wonka and& the Chocolate Factory|both]] [[Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (film)|adaptations]] of ''[[Charlie and the Chocolate Factory]]'' there are scenes of the Oompa Loompas offering Willy Wonka a sample of their local cuisine, depicted as an slimy substance in the 1971 film and as crushed bugs in the 2005 one. In both versions, Wonka barely disguises his disgust.

* In the [[Discworld]] book ''[[Discworld/Jingo|Jingo]]'', Klatchians (a sort of Arabia-meets-India [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]]) offer sheeps' eyes and similar disgusting things to foreigners who visit them. It turns out they don't actually eat these things but only do it to screw with tourists.

** Pratchett also played with this in ''[[Discworld/Witches Abroad|Witches Abroad]]'', by describing the unusual (but delicious) cuisine of Genua being born of desperate ingenuity: "No one would eat shark's fin soup if they were allowed to eat the rest of the shark."

*** A joke he later used in ''[[Discworld/Interesting Times|Interesting Times]]'': "The big meal here is pig's ear soup. You know what that tells me? ..... It tells me someone else already pinched the rest of the pig."

** Finally, in ''[[Discworld/The Last Continent|The Last Continent]]'', one of his asides describes "local speciality" as "stuff that people from everywhere else run away from really fast", or something to that effect.

*** ''[[Discworld/Witches Abroad|Witches Abroad]]'' mentions that some of the greatest chefs come from places where you ''have'' to be a damn good cook because your only ingredients are something small and hairy that hates you, and mud; "no one would make shark's fin soup," it says, "if they were allowed to eat the rest of the shark." This gets thrown out the window by The Last Continent when Rincewind notes that shark meat tastes like boots that have been pissed on.

* This trope played straight through as a running gag in the sitcom ''[[Perfect Strangers]]''. Numerous times throughout the show's run Balki Bartokomous (Bronson Pinchot) will often make and serve dishes from his home country of Mypos to his cousin Larry Appleton (Mark Linn-Baker), that contain such bizarre (and vomit-inducing) ingredients such as yak bile and the bladders of sheep and pigs. The season three episode "Come Fly with Me" centers on this, as Balki and Larry's flight attendant girlfriends [[OneOnly Sane Man|Jennifer]] and [[Genius Ditz|Mary Anne]] get sick from eating Halkidikis (coincidentally sharing an alternate spelling of a Greek peninsula), described by Balki as the "travel food of Mypos", whose primary ingredients are the standard ingredients of milk, eggs, flour and honey, and goat spleen with mold aged to the point where it developed green fur on it. This is inverted however in the season three episode "Just Desserts" with a dessert known as the Bibi-babka, which contains typical dessert ingredients and which Larry attempts to market (though he tries to make it in such a rushed fashion that they explode because they weren't made with love and care).

* Wilson on ''[[Home Improvement (TV series)|Home Improvement]]'' is famous for his eel pies, tadpole soup and kung pao crickets. And in one episode, [[Stock Yuck|haggis.]]

* In an episode of ''[[The Grim Adventures of Billy and& Mandy]]'', everybody loves the cookies that Grims's aunt makes, to the point that even when it's revealed that the cookies contain such ingredients as nightcrawlers, mashed crickets, and dung beetles (with said bugs still alive and squirming), people pause only a moment after this revelation... and then continue munching them (although one person does passes out, but only to spring out immediately and praise the cookies. They are truly ''that'' good.)