Foreigner can eat snail (Vietnamese style)??

I can eat it, but like the baby duck, don't like to.  It's not fear.  I just don't like the viscera.  I eat fish head and durian and all kinds of things westerners don't like but there are a few things like chicken feet that are just over the line for me.

Yes I think that the reason is our culture differance. But I like the way you try new things like this. And I know its so difficult with you in the first time right?

Kat Pham wrote:

Yes I think that the reason is our culture differance. But I like the way you try new things like this. And I know its so difficult with you in the first time right?

Some were hard, some weren't.  I loved durian the first time I tasted it

So far, in nearly 5 years, I haven't found anything I can't eat. There are some things like the stinky purple stuff my wife puts in her bun bo hue, that I prefer not to eat. I love the taste of durian and the smell doesn't bother me at all. The first time I tried it I was amazed that anyone wouldn't like it. I'm still not sure why that is but I think it is like beef liver, some people can eat it all day long and some people can't even take a bite without getting sick.

VungTauDon wrote:

So far, in nearly 5 years, I haven't found anything I can't eat. There are some things like the stinky purple stuff my wife puts in her bun bo hue, that I prefer not to eat. I love the taste of durian and the smell doesn't bother me at all. The first time I tried it I was amazed that anyone wouldn't like it. I'm still not sure why that is but I think it is like beef liver, some people can eat it all day long and some people can't even take a bite without getting sick.

I'm that way with mushrooms.  Little pieces, fine, but big pieces creep me out.  I have no idea what they taste like.

I can eat the snails, but it's either too much work or too much like "I think I'm eating gastropod poo"

Kat Pham wrote:

I really want to know any foreigner dont scare snail???

Well the French population comes to mind with escargot...

I love snails and usually eat them steamed. My wife's family loves feeding me snails because it's far cheaper than beefsteak, which I seldom eat even in the U.S.

My only concern with snails anywhere is that I like to know both the species and where harvested. If they come from downstream of areas with heavy industrial pollution, I prefer to pass. And I much prefer sea and tidal snails to upland snails, and will not eat fresh water or land snails in Bilharzia infested areas.

There is a certain chemical in chicken feet and the crown on the chicken's head that is found nowhere else in the world that is very beneficial to the human body...sorry I forget the name of it. I love BBQ chicken feet, although the crown on the head is a bit fibrous/tough, I will eat it also...for it's benefits. Snails....too rubbery for my palate.

I can eat the snails in the small, leopard-spotted shells. Taste like seafood to me. The restaurant usually provides one of those little two-pronged forks to pull them out of the shell. Dip them in that spicy salted lemon juice. Good eats. Never ate snails before I came to VN. (Never rode a motorbike either.)

Eat the one you love.

stinky purple stuff is mắm tôm (shrimp sauce)

Durian is supper nice

Kat Pham wrote:

stinky purple stuff is mắm tôm (shrimp sauce)

When I ate that in the USA, people were shocked

I saw that many foreinger can eat snail, fish sauce, shrimp sauce, durian, baby duck, chicken legs or anything terrible (like you think before or still now) because you really want to try and love. Maybe you love Vietnam so much; you are brave or you love your lover so so much...

Anyway I really love the way you love Vietnam and you stay here to do good things for sharing and accept our cultures. Like I love Domino, Subway, KFC and a lot of product which from your countries.

I can eat anything as long as there's alcohol to wash it down.

Khanh44

Yes I see. I'm vietnamese so its really easy with me, no need acohol

uhm Kat or is it Kathy? I'm Vietnamese too.

It's just different environment that we were brought up on.

Here people like their food processed and all chopped up like hotdogs and hamburgers. Which are much gross than what Vietnamese eat if they knew what went in them.

My vietnamese name is Mai Ni but when I work with foreigner I use Kat in Katherine.

Em đoán là anh rất thèm món Việt

Kat Pham wrote:

Khanh44
I'm vietnamese, no need acohol

Now that's something I never expected to hear. I've never seen a culture love "beer food" more than Vietnam.

Co le cac co viet khong o tan pho lon khong them uong ruou, nhung cac anh viet thich uong nhieu bia va ruou.

I think it's a gender thing. Maybe Vietnamese girls who don't live in big cities don't crave drinking alcoholic beverages, but Vietnamese males like to drink lots of beer and alcoholic beverages.

Madame L believes that any Vietnamese girls who drink must have started as bar girls (she never saw the old Viet middle class), but I've hung around with enough brothers-in-law and their sons to know that even country Vietnamese men drink like fish when the opportunity arises. We just lost the husband of a niece to cirrhosis of the liver.

Kat, Madame L makes a mean "mam ruoc tom" mixing the mam tom with crushed pineapple and one or two other ingredients. Superb with goi cuon!

Thats "mam nem".

I can drink but dont like so much.

This has been a big issue for me here.  And not only with Vietnamese.  The idea of drinking as a pasttime, as the whole point of meeting, is foreign to me and I haven't run into it since I was a teenager.  In the USA most of my friends drank as in a glass of wine or a beer or two with dinner, but I never heard anyone say, "we're going out drinking tonight."  That strikes me as crude, immature, stupid. 

Then i come here and learn that there is a lot less self-segregation by education than in America; upper class neighborhoods have laborers gathered at tables smoking and drinking and yelling.  When I go to a party I'm the only man not drinking. 

But it's not just the Vietnamese.  Expats seem to be much heavier drinkers than the ones who stayed home and I've heard from people who've lived in many countries that a lot of expats are late-stage alcoholics.i don't know the chicken and egg of this relationship but when I went looking for fellow expats online, the search that led me to this forum, I found a group with a presence in Saigon and every get-together they have sounds like a bar-hopping excursion. 

I tried alcohol as a teenager, didn't like it, could not get drunk without consuming a vast amount, and didn't like the feeling.  After decades of not drinking again it tastes insanely toxic to me and other than alleviating social inhibition in smaller amounts, it really doesn't seem to be doing anyone much good and it does society and its users one hell of a lot of harm.

I can eat real Vietnamese food; I had catfish head back in 1995, before I'd been here once and a decade before I even though about living here.  I can eat shrimp paste and durian and pretty much everything people here eat,though I refuse to eat endangered species or dogs.  This I expected.  I didn't expect to have new issues with alcohol, which I dismissed from my life before I was 18.

lirelou wrote:

Co le cac co viet khong o tan pho lon khong them uong ruou, nhung cac anh viet thich uong nhieu bia va ruou.

Please use the diacritics.  It's really hard to read Vietnamese without them.  Yes I can read it but it's tons of extra effort.

I've never seen such a huge gender difference in chemical vices as here.  Three years living here, four visits prior to that, I've seem a grand total of a dozen women smoking, three of them together in front of the opera house in TPHCM.  Among men it seems universal albeit with a sharp drop among educated young men, who seem to be avoiding it.

I've seen a lot of women have a single beer at a tiệc but never seen a woman go through can after can or take part in that ridiculous red-faced 1-2-3-Ô chanting thing. 

I tend to take a table with mostly women and upwind when I attend those things because I have to finesse turning down a drinking invitation.  I'm too healthy looking to pull off a phony medical excuse and the idea that I don't drink at all, by choice, is foreign here.  But my partner is Vietnamese and he doesn't drink either, so far we haven't had any rocks thrown at the house.

Vietnamese drinking customs mirror Korean, Japanese and Chinese drinking customs, except that in traditional Korea, when men went out drinking, the women would get together and drink as well.

Social drinking is a European custom. The traditional purpose of East Asian drinking is to get drunk. And generally, if they weren't meeting to do so, they drank tea or some other beverage. To paraphrase a well known movie: You ain't in Kansas anymore, Doroteo.

Kat:  in re:

Thats "mam nem"

Perhaps I should have explained that it is a dipping sauce. In Tam Vu it's called "Mam Ruoc Tom" and Mam Ruoc is the base ingredient.

This seems to have fallen out of favor in the USA in my lifetime.  I see a general increased intolerance toward addictive behaviors of all kinds, including immoderate alcohol consumption.  The only times I've been around drunk people in the USA since, oh, 1970 were at office Xmas parties, with shy people opening up, freed by a few drinks to act like fools, and a lot of people getting slurred, loud, and sloppy. 

Of course I knew that social drinking still goes on here, and yes I can finesse turning down an invitation to drink-with-us without offending, but I didn't expect it to be a big deal in meeting other expats.  And I have met a few raging alcoholics, like one Australian guy I liked a lot until he started calling me at 3AM babbling incoherently; I've seen him alienate his friends and lose in fiancée and still refuses to face that he has a real problem. 

Even my friends who do drink agree that being around a bunch of people getting plastered isn't a lot of fun.

This is one issue I'd thought was settled for me a long time ago.  Have a few beers, knock yourself out.  "Go drinking," I'll pass.

Kat Pham wrote:

Thats "mam nem".

I can drink but dont like so much.

Kat we need to go drinking some time

I love Snail very much!!!!! that's my fav food. ). I think foreigners will love " ốc chuối đậu" .
Anyone could eat all of this list 10 foods that foreigner could not eat:
http://hanoifoodtour.com/hanoi-cuisine- … oreigners/
I could eat all. lol

saigonmonkey wrote:

I can eat the snails in the small, leopard-spotted shells. Taste like seafood to me. The restaurant usually provides one of those little two-pronged forks to pull them out of the shell. Dip them in that spicy salted lemon juice. Good eats. Never ate snails before I came to VN. (Never rode a motorbike either.)

))
There are many snail you could eat in Vietnam. From river snail to seafood. i think you ate snail in the sea ^^. I also love lion snail, grill and enjoy with sauce. I can not talk all the food from snails. they's so deliciouc =p~

A lot of westerners don't like nước mắm.  I can't imagine that.  First of all, it's the absolute foundation of Vietnamese cuisine, second, I totally love it and I like the #63 full-strength kind most of all. 

But the first few (dozen) times I had it as a dipping sauce with the water, lime, etc. it was completely tasteless to me.  I couldn't figure out why I got it with every meal when it had no taste.  Then suddenly I could taste a faint flavor, then clear, and now I can tell apart different kinds.

All meat look the same to me. Can't tell if it's dog, cat or rat so no problem eating them.

Don't know if I can do blood pudding. Never tried it but if it's thick as blood man that's going to need lots of beer.

Eating worms and nymphs would be tough because of the appearance. But I do like to eat crunchy tadpoles I think that's what it's called.

Don't get why people are scared to eat shrimp sauce. It's not gross or anything. The taste may not be appealing to some but it's not something to lose sleep over.

khanh44 wrote:

Don't get why people are scared to eat shrimp sauce. It's not gross or anything. The taste may not be appealing to some but it's not something to lose sleep over.

I just don't like the smell and the only way I would lose sleep over it would be if it was in the room while I was trying to sleep

I ordered a noodle soup with shrimp paste at a restaurant in Seattle that very rarely had Caucasian customers.  When they brought it to the table they handed it to my (Vietnamese) partner.  When he indicated it was for me, the waiter's eyebrows shot up.  No way!

Stuff really stinks up a house, though.

khanh44 wrote:

All meat look the same to me. Can't tell if it's dog, cat or rat so no problem eating them.

Don't know if I can do blood pudding. Never tried it but if it's thick as blood man that's going to need lots of beer.

Eating worms and nymphs would be tough because of the appearance. But I do like to eat crunchy tadpoles I think that's what it's called.

Don't get why people are scared to eat shrimp sauce. It's not gross or anything. The taste may not be appealing to some but it's not something to lose sleep over.

I love blood pudding and if you think you will try it, you should drink rice wine. And put a little lemon juice on blood pudding :3

hwanghuydo wrote:

I love blood pudding and if you think you will try it, you should drink rice wine. And put a little lemon juice on blood pudding :3

ok you convinced me. Blood pudding on my bucket list.

VungTauDon wrote:

khanh44 wrote:

Don't get why people are scared to eat shrimp sauce. It's not gross or anything. The taste may not be appealing to some but it's not something to lose sleep over.

I just don't like the smell and the only way I would lose sleep over it would be if it was in the room while I was trying to sleep

Yeah. almost foreigners have trouble with shrimp sauce smell or having stomache after eat @@

khanh44 wrote:

hwanghuydo wrote:

I love blood pudding and if you think you will try it, you should drink rice wine. And put a little lemon juice on blood pudding :3

ok you convinced me. Blood pudding on my bucket list.

I've eaten those blood cubes in, what is it, bún bò Huế?  I survived.  I knew they weren't tofu.  Odd thing is I will eat them and my partner won't, and he's from here.

hmm I might have had it than. Are they tasteless?