Malmö: Ambling to Disgusting Food

I’ve been to a few quirky museums in my travels. Two that come immediately to mind were both in Zagreb, Croatia: the Museum of Broken Relationships and the Museum of Hangovers. Malmö let me add another to my list of quirky museums: the Disgusting Food Museum.

The Disgusting Food Museum doesn’t open until 11:00, so I had time to wander around Malmö some more before visiting the museum.

That timing set me up to finish with the Disgusting Food Museum just in time for lunch. In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t the best programming choice.

Because I started my morning with a walk, I’ll start with that in this entry before getting to the disgusting food.

Ambling in Malmö

The first part of my morning stroll was ambling, but not rambling because I had a destination in mind, Stortorget, the main square. I didn’t go there for the square itself, but rather as a starting point. Off to the side of the square, Malmö’s main shopping street, Södergatan, runs away from Stortorget.

Wait. That’s confusing. Streets just sit there. They don’t run away from anything. They stolidly stand their ground. What I meant to say is that Södergatan begins near Stortoget and then continues in a direction away from the square. Which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say, too, because, if it started at Stortoget, of course it would continue in a direction away from the square, unless it doubled back on itself.

And, of course, if you’re coming from the other end of Södergatan, it doesn’t start near the square. It ends there. Streets can be fickle like that.

But never mind that.

There’s a silent, permanent marching band near the Stortorget end of Södergatan. It’s a brass statue with a baton-wielding leader followed by four people playing different instruments. Obviously, they’re not playing them. It’s an unanimated statue. They don’t move. But it’s a playful statue, so to speak.

Södergatan is normally a pedestrian-only shopping street. There are signs to indicate that. And the marching band is right in the middle of the street. However, direct personal observation led me to believe that delivery trucks are allowed on it in the morning. That same direct personal observation led me to believe that if there’s a major renovation happening to one of the buildings on the street, then two large, motorized pieces of construction equipment are also allowed on the street to facilitate that.

Nevertheless, Södergatan looked like it would be a very pleasant shopping street, were it not for the temporarily allowed vehicles. And there were indeed a few unobstructed blocks that proved it is.

The canal is just past the end of Södergatan. A long, narrow park begins there and hugs the canal for a couple of blocks. It’s Raul Wallenberg Park. A small plaque very briefly tells why he is very worthy of being honoured. And a large commemorative stone blob, the symbolism of which escapes me, honours him there.

I walked along Raul Wallenberg Park to its end. Across the street, another similar park, which Apple Maps labels as Altonaparken, starts and continues along the canal.

Walking through that, I came to a statue of a man. I was taken by it because it looked like he had a long line of tears down his face originating from each eye. I got closer to try to see how the artist achieved that effect. Closer inspection showed that there was real water trickling out of each eye.

I didn’t see a plaque near the sculpture giving me any information about it. I was curious, so I sat down on a bench by the statue, pulled out my phone, and tried to find out. Google Maps put a pin on the statue. It labelled it as “Det Svenska Tungsinnet.” Someone had written a review and said it’s a statue of Gosta Ekman.

This sent me down a web search rabbit hole where I found a web page about the statue. Google got the name of the statue right, “Det Svenska Tungsinnet,” which translates to “The Swedish Gloom.” But it’s not a statue of Gosta Ekman. The sculptor, Marie-Louise Ekman, borrowed features from Gosta Ekman, a now deceased actor, and the sculptor’s first husband, to inspire the sculpture, but it’s not specifically of him. So, now you know.

After I found all of that on the internet, I looked at the statue again from my perch on the nearby bench. I noticed a small, shiny rectangular object mounted flat on top of a curbstone not far from “Det Svenska Tungsinnet.” I walked over and took a look. It was a small plaque that didn’t say much, but provided a QR code that took me to the webpage that I’d just spent time finding on my own.

I then continued walking through Altonaparken. When it ends, a path beside the canal continues beyond it. I followed that until the canal and the path made a right-angle turn. The next leg of the path didn’t look interesting, and the opening time for the Disgusting Food Museum was just minutes away at that point. So I turned around, crossed over the first bridge I came to, continued a little farther on the street running along the canal, and reached the museum.

Disgusting Food Museum

Coincidentally, the Disgusting Food Museum, is right by the canal, on another pedestrianized shopping street, Södra Förstadsgatan, that’s more attractive than Södergatan. Södra Förstadsgatan has trees down the middle.

The name of the museum, including the sign out front, is exclusively in English. The pictures and text below the name of the museum encourage people to, well, take a look. I posted a picture here.

Upon paying the entrance fee, I was handed a ticket. It’s printed on what colloquially is referred to as a barf bag. I think serious scientists refer to them as vomit bags. Nah, serious scientists probably refer to them as barf bags, too.

Just inside the museum, there’s a chalkboard sign saying how many days it’s been since someone vomited in the Disgusting Food Museum (four days as of when I was there) and how many people in total had vomited there (548).

Signage in the museum is in both Swedish and English.

A poster near the front spends five paragraphs talking about the nature of disgust. Below that, the sign lists seven categories of disgust that researchers have identified: Food, disease-contamination, body excretions, mutilation-deformity, animal-reminder (acting like a wild animal), sexual, and moral. A descriptive sentence accompanies each of the category titles.

Beyond that, the small museum has a few rows of tables. A red line on the floor directs visitors on a snaking path beside the tables.

On the tables there are, mostly plastic, models of particular foods that are, in one way or another, considered disgusting by many, but not necessarily all people. Some of the lesser-parishable foods might have been real, not models. I’m not sure.

The first group is foods that can potentially cause serious or even fatal diseases. For example, Larb, the national dish of Laos, “Is a meat or fish salad with green papaya and sticky rice. The meat can be eaten cooked or raw, the latter having the potential to cause trichinosis, caused by worms in the meat. Larb can also cause fatal streptococcus suis or rabies infections.” It then goes on to describe some of the other possible diseases from Larb.

Fugu, the pufferfish that’s eaten in Japan, but can be lethal if not prepared properly, also gets a mention, along with similar foods from various parts of the world.

Each display shows the country where that food comes from and the problems it can present.

These first displays at the Disgusting Food Museum also talk about some foods that became problems because of greedy or just plain bad choices.

For example, it talks about glycol that was added to wine in Austria in 1982 to sweeten a wine harvest that year that produced sour grapes. When it became publicly known that the wine producers added that toxin, people stopped buying Austrian wine. It took years for the Austrian wine producers to recover.

My country also gets a mention in this category. In 1985, the Canadian Minister of Fisheries authorized the release of rancid tuna from a Starkist Canada plant to save the jobs there. Not a wise decision.

The Chinese melamine in milk scandal also gets mentioned in this category.

Many of the other foods displayed and talked about in the accompanying texts are foods that smell horrible, but may taste good. Or they may be ones that people find disgusting because of the methods for producing them. Or just because it’s not something we’re used to in most of the world, despite it being a popular food in some places.

Next to each of the foods that smell bad, the Disgusting Food Museum places jars with screw-off lids, with an invitation to smell the contents. In each bottle, there is a sample of the food underneath wads of cotton batting. I smelled all of the ones available. They were all extremely pungent. I can understand why some people vomit.

Among those foods that are typically considered to be disgusting because of the way they are made is Casu Marzu, from Sardinia, Italy. I took a picture of the accompanying text: “A whole pecorino cheese is cut open and left outside so that cheese flies lay eggs in it. The fly larvae feast on the cheese, and their enzymes break down the fats in the cheese. The larvae excrement is a partially digested, semi-liquid soft cheese. Warning: eating live maggots is risky and diners need to protect their eyes from jumping larvae, as they can survive inside their new host and bore through intestinal walls. The cheese is banned in the EU.”

Yum.

Some foods are labelled as disgusting not because everyone in the world thinks they’re disgusting—some are almost staples in some places—but because people who are likely to show up at a museum in Malmö (including me) aren’t used to them as a food and for various reasons they have a yuck factor. A variety of bugs fall into this category.

Steaks get a display because they are one of the most greenhouse-gas-producing dietary choices.

Both Twinkies and Pop-Tarts are on display because of their additives and health profiles.

Some foods on display were once considered disgusting, but are now considered luxury delicacies. Lobster and escargot are mentioned in this category.

I’ve left out some of the categories for memory and post-length reasons. And I left out even more foods within the categories for the same reasons.

At the end of the snaking path through the museum, the red line leads visitors to the tasting tables. Yes, I said the tasting tables.

I got merged with a group of four from Switzerland. The disgusting food guide then led us through a tasting of “disgusting foods.”

It occurs to me that the preceding sentence would benefit from a hyphen. “Disgusting-food guide,” not “disgusting food-guide.” He was quite personable and jovial.

I didn’t count all of the foods, but there were well more than a dozen. The samples were only small morsels. Combined, they didn’t come close to an appetizer-size portion, let alone a meal.

I tried all of them, except one. I’ll get to that.

I don’t remember all of the foods, but I do remember the first three were insects: crickets, black ants, and I’ve forgotten what the third was. The insects are boiled or roasted and then dried so they are crunchy. The crickets tasted like roasted soybeans. The ants didn’t have much favour at all. And the third one, whatever it was, tasted vaguely like roasted pumpkin seeds. None of them tasted like chicken.

Later in the tasting, we also had stink bugs, which neither stank nor tasted foul.

We also had two or three cheeses, including Casu Marzu, which I mentioned with disgust above. It wasn’t bad.

I had a fermented fish from Greenland. I didn’t like that. At all. If Trump is determined to take over Greenland, he should be required to eat massive quantities of that first.

For fruit, we had Durian.

There were also a couple of drinks, a Swiss milk-based drink and sauerkraut juice. Ironically, the guide says that 99% of the visitors like the Swiss drink and 1% dislike it. He said it’s Swiss visitors who dislike it, and everyone else likes it. The Swiss group was silent on this point.

Coincidentally, three or four of the foods were from Switzerland. I don’t remember the others, but I liked the drink and one or two of the others, but I thought one was vile. The Swiss people asked me what I thought of the Swiss food. I wasn’t shy about telling them both the good and the bad.

Oh, I just remembered another of the disgusting foods: Salty licorice. Here’s what you need to know about salty licorice if you’ve never had it before (I hadn’t). The price of salt would crash if they stopped making salty licorice because the demand for salt would drop dramatically. I didn’t taste the licorice, but the salt was just barely this side of bearable.

For the dry, crunchy foods, the disgusting-good guide used tweezers to put them in our palms. For the soft foods, he used toothpicks or the equivalent of tongue depressors. For the drinks, he had disposable, highly flexible eyedroppers that were thrown out after each drink.

I haven’t told you about the one I passed on. The last six samples were all hot sauces, each progressively hotter as we went along. We could, of course, drop out at any point.

The guide used either toothpicks or tongue depressors to serve these, depending on the consistency of the sauce. He never doled out more than a drop.

He said to put that drop in the middle of our tongues because the front is more sensitive and the back would burn our throats.

He also said not to drink water because water intensified it. He said he’d give us some milk when we finished because milk served to cool it down. (He had lactose-free milk for anyone who needed it.)

My tongue burned after the first one. Nevertheless, I persisted. After the third, one person dropped out. Before the fifth, I said I was going to drop out, but I relented.

However, I just couldn’t do the sixth. I felt an urgency to leave and have the hole in my tongue repaired.

Only two people in the group I was with dared to try the sixth. But the process was a little different. For the first five, the disgusting-food guide had us just dab the tiny sample on our tongue.

For the sixth, he had them put the tongue depressor bearing the sample on their tongue and hold it there for fifteen seconds. He counted the seconds. If they succeeded (they both did), they got to spin a wheel for prizes. The prizes were generally either Disgusting Food Museum merch or take-home containers of a specific one of the disgusting foods. One guy got a free cap. The other got her choice of either a free pin or a half-price t-shirt. (There was also a free t-shirt on the wheel. Luck of the spin.)

And with that, it was time to go to a nearby cafe and have lunch. I had a thoroughly not-disgusting sandwich (quite good, actually) and an espresso.