Omnivore - Forget offal. Eat bugs and snakes.

Too busy to impress your friends by joining them for a meal of trendy offal in a trendy restaurant?

Why not invite them over and pop open a can of something even stranger than offal, like scorpions, rattlensake, crickets with eggs or potted possum? It could be your very own dim sum from hell.

Check out the Telegraph’s photo feature of 26 (sort of) exotic canned foods. The pictures brought to mind one of the kitchen cabinets in the home of my Uncle Steve and Aunt Jock when I was a kid. It was stocked with rattlenake, chocolate covered ants, fried grasshoppers and much more.

I think these items appealed more to Uncle Steve’s sense of the absurd than to his actual palate. But all of those items, as I recall, were produced in earnest — not as a joke as a good many of those featured in the Telegraph’s story are.

Probably one of the early identifiers of my interest in food occurred when I tried desperately to open a jar of something strange fetched from that cabinet. When I couldn’t pry the lid off, I banged the jar on the counter. The jar shattered and I cut my self so deeply I had to go to the emergency room for stitches.

It’s odd how early in life our eventual fascinations often reveal themselves.

(Hat tip: Former CL staffer Rob Walton. Photo courtesy of the Telegraph.)