I bought some oysters at Whole Foods the other day, and at home I took on the difficult task (for me) of shucking them. It got me thinking: who was the first person to actually pry (or smash) open an oyster and then proceed to eat its slimy contents?

With that in mind, here are five things I’m surprised we eat, mainly due to preparation:

• Oysters – It’s a rock, for Pete’s sake. Who sees a rock and figures there’s a meal inside?
• Blowfish – Hey, let’s take the second-most poisonous vertebrate in the world and charge $50 a serving! Who was the person who figured out which parts were safe? More importantly, why does blowfish remain a menu item when it can paralyze your diaphragm muscles and prevent you from breating?
• Lutefisk – Sorry to keep picking on seafood, especially one that’s eaten in the Midwest. In this case, you take a perfectly nice fish and soak it until it turns into a jelly-like consistency and becomes super smelly, on the verge of rotting. Wikipedia even points out that the Wisconsin Employees’ Right to Know Law specifically exempts lutefisk in defining “toxic substances.”
• Baked Alaska – Meringue by itself is surprising to me, since someone figured that you could beat sugar with raw egg whites and make something edible. Also, the part about baking ice cream seems counter-intuitive.
• Beer – Don’t get me wrong–I love beer. As a homebrewer, I know first hand the immense number of steps and how much attention you have to pay toward keeping things sterile to make a good batch. So, ancient civilizations figured out how to combine random amounts of hops, barley, yeast and water and keep it sanitary enough to avoid funky beer? Amazing.