Food 
It is hard now to believe that my parents used to pay me to clean my plate as a child. I guess that's how I learned humans can eat just about anything, including the vegetables most youngsters hate: broccoli, spinach, brussel sprouts.... But that certainly wasn't the only food served in my home. While other kids in Indiana were growing up almost exclusively on beef, corn and potatoes, my folks had me trying raw oysters, fresh lobster, imported cheeses, stewed tripe, tropical fruit, and even chocolate-covered ants, just for the sheer variety of tastes. They reckoned the right time to develop a taste for the exotic is when one is too young to give it much thought. Perhaps as a consequence, I've never since been squeamish about any kind of food... and I do mean any, save one.
I can vividly remember the summer of my second year in high school, when I applied to be the outdoor cooking instructor at Camp Tamarack, Michigan. The interviewer looked at me quite seriously and asked, "Could you cook a dog?" The idea had never crossed my mind, actually, but I replied that I could, if it was absolutely necessary. I then went on to describe how I would go about doing it, using the same survival cooking skills I had learned in the Boy Scounts at Philmont Ranch, New Mexico. It was my cast iron stomach -- I was the only applicant who answered the question -- which got me my first paying job.
Fortunately, the camp never required my canine cuisine, though we did slaughter, clean, and spit-roast quite a few chickens that summer. Many of the boys from the city had never killed any living creature for food, not even a fish. A few of them became instant vegetarians as a result. But that experience taught us volumes about our relationship to what we eat. For us to live, something else must die. And even if we sit at the apex of the food chain, it is good to reflect upon where our food comes from.
In my travels since then, I've tried an incredible range of foods that are much more appetizing than they may sound at first. For example: Warm goat's milk fresh from the teat, or lamb's brain, a mushy almost tasteless delight. Ostrich steak (reminiscent of venison) and blackened alligator (in New Orleans, of course). Sea slugs (chewy), rattlesnake (boney), fried grasshoppers (crunchy) and honey bee's larvae (like licorice). Live shrimp (they tickle on the way down), raw horse meat (like steak tartare), and even -- before it became scare and forbidden -- grilled whale meat (so similar to lean beef).
Among my favorites are more traditional dishes from the world's four great cuisines: Chinese, French, Thai, and North Italian. But I also love South Indian, Tex-Mex, and Greek, Spanish, German, and the food of Japan. There's such joy in fine dining, in vintage wines, tangy sauces, and rich desserts. But I can also enjoy a simple tunafish sandwich for lunch just as much as Peking duck for dinner... plain yoghurt for a snack just as much as a plate of sushi.
If we are what we eat, then I choose to be everything this banquet called Life has to offer. Everything, that is, except one. When I was last in Korea, my hosts served me live baby octopus (the little tentacles cling to your tongue) and boiled blowfish genitals (rather like soft tofu), which was just fine with me. I loved their spicy hot kimchee vegetables, too. But I finally drew the line when they offered me... you guessed it! I once said I could cook it if I had too, but I would never actually eat it.
Or would I? -- Bon appétit?