Upon entering the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö, Sweden, you’re given three things: a barf bag, a bingo card, and a challenge. The latter applies as soon as you walk into the spacious open plan exhibit. Your senses and gag reflex are immediately put to the test as you’re greeted by a pungent odor (think ammonia mixed with moldy cheese) and a chalkboard vomit counter indicating how many days it’s been since a guest last lost their lunch. At the time of my visit, it had been 14 days since the last vomit, and I intended to keep it that way.

The interior resembles a science lab with bright lights and various specimens held in jars and tucked under glass cases. Within the displays are 80 examples of what are considered the world’s most disgusting foods. From chunky whipped animal fat to crispy fried crickets, fermented shark meat, and a milky carbonated soda, there are items that appeared familiar and others that I couldn’t have conjured up in my wildest dreams. Once you set aside the initial shock factor, you’re left to wander the museum and dive a little deeper, asking the question: What makes a particular food disgusting?  

The answer at its core is truly subjective and deeply personal. For some, it might be the ingredients that will churn your stomach. For example, gomutra, an ayurvedic drink from India that contains the urine from a pregnant cow, may play a sacred role in some religions but would be considered downright noxious to others. While North American rocky mountain oysters appear to be a delicious treat until you discover that you’re eating battered and fried bull testicles.

Perhaps the process of preparing the dish is what one might find repulsive. Casu marzu, a specially prepared pecorino cheese sounds innocuous enough. However, the wheel is halved and left outside for flies to lay eggs inside. The hatched larvae then feast on the cheese with their excrement resulting in partially digested soft cheese. The end product is then eaten, squirmy maggots and all, resulting in a pungent taste that will stick with you for hours.

There is also an ethical aversion to certain foods, the dishes that one might find downright deplorable. Baby mice are drowned in rice wine to create a Chinese elixir that purportedly helps with asthma and liver disease. In Japan, there is ikizukuri, sashimi made from living seafood with the fish often still moving as it’s consumed. And of course, we have foie gras, the controversial French delicacy made from the fattened liver of a duck or goose that’s been roughly force fed through a tube inserted down its throat.

You’ll mull over your distaste as you weave through the displays, each one either containing a real sample or a replica of the food. Alongside the dishes are multilingual plaques that detail the name of the dish and what region of the world where it’s derived. Some of the curations are even accompanied by a smell jar. My pride (and the vomit counter) nearly took a hit as I cautiously sniffed su callu sardu, a Sardinian cheese matured in the stomach of a baby goat that was slaughtered after drinking its mother’s milk.

It’s important to acknowledge that culture and familiarity come into play when discerning disgusting food. This American easily recognized the Twinkie, a soft sponge with a creamy center made from ingredients that can’t possibly be good for you. I caught myself balking over kiviak, a western Greenland dish where a seal carcass is stuffed with hundreds of small arctic birds, before remembering that I hail from the country that produced the monstrosity that is the turducken — a chicken, duck, and turkey nestled inside one another like some sort of edible matryoshka doll (and perhaps something that should be considered as a future entry into the museum).

There were other curations that I have tried on my travels around the world. I sampled fermented shark, known as hákarl, in Iceland, stinky tofu in Taiwan, and balut, fertilized and developed duck embryo, in the Philippines. I felt cultured and, dare I say, confident of my international foodie endeavors, that is, until I came upon the museum’s tasting bar.

If you can stomach it, you’re offered the opportunity to sample a rotating menu of international oddities to mark off on your bingo card. At the time of our visit, the bar featured century eggs, durian fruit, fermented shark, the aforementioned su callu (my nose was still recovering), salty licorice, and an assortment of crunchy insects. Our tasting ended with a hot sauce that is so dastardly you actually had to sign a waiver before sampling a pin prick of the liquid.

My takeaway from my visit — which did not reset the chalkboard — is that one person’s disgust may be another person’s delicacy. And while I can’t give you a concrete answer on what makes a particular food disgusting, I can implore you to literally and figuratively consume the exhibits at The Disgusting Food Museum and come to your own conclusion.