Disclaimer: The point of this post is not that Chinese food is awful. The point is that we are used to different things.When Eric and I were in China, we were given a variety of different things to eat.

We were presented with a bowl of something that looked like it was from the Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon. It contained curly things, tubes and bits that looked like a cleaning sponge with rubbery lumps. This was cow’s stomach.
I grabbed a lump of it and started chewing. It was really chewy. I started to move it to the back of my mouth to swallow it but my gag reflex kicked in. So I chewed it some more. It seemed to take forever to get it chewed up enough to allow me to swallow it.
While I was chewing, Eric started poking around the bowl looking for something good. He picked up a piece of lettuce. I said “There’s all of that good stuff in there and all you can pick up is the lettuce?” Eric laughed and picked up one of the cow’s stomach lumps.

Next up: fish skins. This was (these were?) piled in a bowl. It (they) tasted like they had been lightly pickled or something. They were (it was?) really crunchy. At least I could chew it and swallow it (more) easily.

In the next place, it was so crowded that we had to use a table that had some people already there. One of these was a little girl who spoke very good English. She spoke with Eric and I for a while and then spoke Cantonese with our host. After a few minutes she exclaimed “They like fish skins!”

At lunch one day, one of the bowls had 1 inch tubes that were about one quarter to half an inch diameter. I thought “those have to be somebody’s intestines”. I’d already survived the cow’s stomach, so I grabbed a few. They were chewy but not much as the cow’s stomach. When I was choking down the second one, the man next to me said “those are pig intestines.” Sometimes I hate being right.
At this same lunch, another of the bowls had liver. I love liver. If it didn’t have toxic levels of cholesterol, I’d eat it whenever I could. I started to scarf these down because it was the first food that I’d enjoyed all week. Eric, however, was more revolted than he was with the cow’s stomach. He’s hated this stuff for years.

This confirms my disclaimer. It’s not the nature of food that we find offensive. It’s that we’re not used to it.

Feel free to disagree.