• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Would You Try The World’s Most Dangerous Cheese?

June 26, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Cheese is milk that’s been fermented and aged, but the process is a controlled one that strikes the right balance of bacterial activity to delicious cheesy goodness. Some traditional approaches to making cheese have pushed the boundaries of what’s safe for human consumption, and perhaps the most talked about is casu marzu.

Advertisement

Casu marzu is a delicacy that hails from Sardinia. It looks a bit like the consistency of scrambled egg, and is created with the aid of maggots that remain alive and leaping in the cheese when it’s eaten by humans.

Advertisement

The larvae are from the cheese fly Piophila casei. They’re pretty active, capable of jumping 15 centimeters (6 inches) in the air. It’s considered harmful in the food industries, but as a detritivore, it can be dead handy in forensic investigations – and as a cheese addict, it’s pivotal for the creation of casu marzu.

Also known as the cheese skipper, or ham skipper (they also love ham), they get their name from their incredible ability to propel through the air as larvae. Where these leaping larvae get a bit dangerous is when it comes to ingesting them – intentionally or otherwise – as, according to the University of Florida, they’re often cited as a cause of intestinal myiasis. That icky condition is basically when maggots set up camp in your digestive system.

“Intestinal myiasis occurs when fly eggs or larvae previously deposited in food are ingested and survive in the gastrointestinal tract,” explains the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention. “Some infested patients have been asymptomatic; others have had abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea.”

For this reason, larvae-containing casu marzu is often reported as the “most dangerous cheese in the world,” and yet the BBC’s Vivienne Nunis was told that it’s been a delicacy enjoyed for thousands of years in Sardinia. Nunis certainly wasn’t put off, describing the flavor as, “Very strong, a little tingly. It’s very nice, it’s like parmesan cheese. I didn’t notice the maggots at all.”

Advertisement

Typical cheese production entails heating milk and adding bacterial cultures and enzymes to ferment the dairy, but in casu marzu, the fermentation is assisted by the cheese skippers. A wheel of cheese is cut open to give the flies a chance to lay their eggs, and as the larvae emerge they start wriggling around inside it, fermenting it as they go.

According to Atlas Obscura, casu marzu is made using sheep’s milk – but if live maggots aren’t quite challenging enough for your palate, perhaps you could try introducing the ham skipper to whale cheese?

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China vehicle sales slid 18% in August – industry body
  2. Fed’s Powell: Reopening economic bottlenecks could be “more enduring”
  3. Can You Cry Underwater?
  4. Japanese Mission Sends Back “Unprecedented” Up-Close Photo Of Space Debris

Source Link: Would You Try The World's Most Dangerous Cheese?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Where Are The Real Geographical Centers Of All The Continents?
  • New Species Of South African Rain Frog Discovered, And It’s Absolutely Fuming About It
  • Love Cheese But Hate Nightmares? Bad News, It Looks Like The Two Really Are Related
  • Project Hail Mary Trailer First Look: What Would Happen If The Sun Got Darker?
  • Newly Discovered Cell Structure Might Hold Key To Understanding Devastating Genetic Disorders
  • What Is Kakeya’s Needle Problem, And Why Do We Want To Solve It?
  • “I Wasn’t Prepared For The Sheer Number Of Them”: Cave Of Mummified Never-Before-Seen Eyeless Invertebrates Amazes Scientists
  • Asteroid Day At 10: How The World Is More Prepared Than Ever To Face Celestial Threats
  • What Happened When A New Zealand Man Fell Butt-First Onto A Powerful Air Hose
  • Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements
  • Earth’s Weather Satellites Catch Cloud Changes… On Venus
  • Scientists Find Common Factors In People Who Have “Out-Of-Body” Experiences
  • Shocking Photos Reveal Extent Of Overfishing’s Impact On “Shrinking” Cod
  • Direct Fusion Drive Could Take Us To Sedna During Its Closest Approach In 11,000 Years
  • Earth’s Energy Imbalance Is More Than Double What It Should Be – And We Don’t Know Why
  • We May Have Misjudged A Fundamental Fact About The Cambrian Explosion
  • The Shoebill Is A Bird So Bizarre That Some People Don’t Even Believe It’s Real
  • Colossal’s “Dire Wolves” Are Now 6 Months Old – And They’ve Doubled In Size
  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version