exotic meats

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Tripe is actually really good, the hard part is finding the restaurants that serve the food though, rather than deciding on what to try.

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I'm turkish, and having various kinds of tripe soup with lots of garlic and vinegar after a long night of drinking is pretty standard. Right now I live in spain and most restaurants serve various kinds of tripe. They also serve a lot of cheek meat that I love. One thing I haven't gotten around to trying yet is pigs ears, about which I've heard mixed reviews.

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Ive had pigs foot/ear that was used to flavor tomato sauce, I just tried a little peice, nothing spectacular. What is really funny about this whole trend is that people are paying tons of money, to eat crap. Snoot, ears, feet, tail, those are [censored] parts of the pig, and the only reason to eat them is because there was nothing else available. People are paying top dollar to eat like poor people, and dont even realize it.

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That's how I've felt when eating with Asians sometimes at authentic places and at home. They love to eat chicken's feet and gelatinated blocks of blood and even just huge hunks of cartilage(which is basically flavorless but has a not particularly appealing texture, to me anyway).

To me this is all just trash, even if you find something to like in the flavor. And ligaments and tendons and cartilage have next to no flavor, so what's the point? Yet even wealthy Asians will shovel this stuff in happily. I've gone to a big Asian meal where there was basically almost nothing I would consider "real" to eat -- just tendon and blood and cartilage. Just scraps. I can eat it, but it's not fun and not satisfying.