Why does african food stink

Natto is a super-popular breakfast food, and Japanese school kids love to eat it as a snack. You may wonder why someone might choose to eat something called a stink bean that smells like fart. Although they look very old and smell quite strong, they don't actually ferment for a whole century. This traditional dish from Iceland is eaten at festivals and is made from the meat of the Greenland shark, which is poisonous when it's fresh.

Once it's been prepared by burying it for a few months, then hanging it to dry for a few more, you're left with a safe delicacy with a smell and taste that is similar to cleaning products. Toggle navigation Menu. Explore Videos Games. You can mail order your putrified shark meat right here! Also known as hundred-year egg or thousand-year egg, this Chinese delicacy is loaded with smelly goodness. Lutefisk is usually made with air-dried whitefish and lye, then fermented for a few weeks.

For extra odor, try to find some lutefisk made with cod! You can get some lutefisk direct from the source and chow down on it in no time from here! Leave it to the Swedish to create some of the smelliest foods in the world. Also known as the stink bean or stinker, this pungent bean has a strange smell that some describe as eating natural gas.

However, most people who eat it combine it with garlic and shrimp paste for that extra pungent blast to their nostrils. If you thought your typical fish sauce was pungent, wait until you try pla ra. You can get this fermented masterpiece delivered to your doorstep from here. This helps the fermentation process get that special ammonia smell you love so dearly.

Butter chicken — murgh makhani — is mild, not too spicy, and doesn't stink. It's exotic, but not too exotic. It's Indian, but not too Indian. Butter chicken is tolerably ethnic. But championing only the foods deemed tolerable by the dominant culture is to circumscribe what's acceptably palatable multiculturalism. The effect is to reinforce a certain kind of "Australian-ness" rather than inclusive diversity. So what would diversity smell like?

Pretty rank, I'd presume, as it needs to include De Souza's curried tongue sandwiches that she took to school as a child, as well as one of my favourite dishes — simmered fish head with daikon white radish. Cooked daikon lingers like a lousy fart, so I'd never offer this to the uninitiated for fear of being met with disgust.

Distaste and disgust may seem like random reactions to malodourous concoctions. But they function in society to manage "ethnic excess".

Fish is OK, as long as it isn't pungent. Curry is nice, as long as the spices don't cling to the curtains. Kimchi is healthy, as long as the fermented garlic doesn't linger on the train.

But for the migrant who feels displaced from their homeland, foods that olfactorily offend may play an important role in reinforcing identity, Dr De Souza says. She says cooking and eating a beautiful curry is akin to "putting lotion on the part of me that feels dislocated, lonely, and isolated". But that same curry can reek of spices that ultimately isolate her by making her smell different, even invoking disgust.

The result is a kind of ethnic shame that further reinforces just how out of place a fragrant migrant body really is. In other words, what migrants ingest in order to maintain their identities in the host country can be the thing that viscerally sets them apart. Can kimchi-breathing Koreans or cumin-flavoured Indians ever be rendered acceptably odourless? If I vow to never again revel in my daikon burps, will I feel more Australian? Dr De Souza thinks not. In her view, attempting nutritional assimilation and sanitisation to become odourless rarely leads to a deeper, thicker sense of belonging.

Like citizenship, that belonging feels "thin when compared to the affective power of ethnic identity", she claims.

Ms Jeong also values the inclusive potential of aromatic diversity.