"Balut": The Grossest Egg of All!

An egg is a bird embryo. And eating embryos is sort of nasty, if you think about it. But people cook up so many unfertilized chicken eggs, we sort of forget! ("Unfertilized" means no chick will hatch out of the egg.) But what if you took a fertilized chicken egg that a chick WOULD hatch out of... Would people STILL eat it?

Yep! Names like “balut” and “hot vin lon,” are what fertilized chicken or duck eggs are called. The baby fowl develops to the point that it has a head, wings, veins, and feathers. So it’s an almost-ready-to-hatch embryo...until a person pops open the shell and pours the contents into his or her mouth. The embryo is apparently crunchy. (Maybe those crunches will drown out the sounds of my screaming!)

Below, basketball writer Henry Abbott eats balut…because he lost a bet! There may be a short ad at the start of this; once the video starts, if you want to see the gross highlights, they begin about halfway through: