This is the Disgusting Food Museum in Sweden: the most disgusting (and fascinating) food museum in the world

The tour brings together some eighty foods from around the world. Some provoke curiosity, others an immediate impulse to flee. But all of them force us to look squarely at what we tend to ignore: our food prejudices.

Among the most famous of these is the surströmming Baltic herring fermented for months, considered a delicacy in Sweden. Its smell (a mixture of rotten egg and sewage) is so potent that it is usually opened in the open air, far from any building. In Japan, another museum classic is nattō a fermented soybean that sticks to chopsticks with viscous threads; its followers claim it is the secret of Japanese longevity, its detractors that it resembles foot-smelling glue.

In the area of dairy products, the star product is the casu marzu Sardinian cheese banned in the European Union because it is made by letting fly larvae ferment it from the inside. When it is ready, it literally moves. In Iceland, the equivalent is called hákarl: shark meat buried for weeks to remove ammonia from its flesh. It is eaten at celebrations, with the same enthusiasm with which others drink champagne.

And if you thought you had seen it all, wait for Chinese mouse wine, Korean baby poop wine (a barely documented medicinal relic), or Vietnamese snake liquor, where the reptile rests (whole) inside the bottle. In America, the museum exhibits the Peruvian guinea pig, Colombian iguana casu or energy drinks with bull testicles, common in northern Mexico.

The museum does not intend to make fun of anyone. Its message is clear: disgust is cultural. What in one part of the world makes one retch, in another is associated with hospitality, identity or prestige. The simplest proof is in Europe itself: while casu marzu causes horror in Brussels, millions of French people adore blue cheeses that, technically, are also live molds.

At bottom, this exhibition functions as an uncomfortable mirror. If you are repulsed by the Chinese century-old egg (a bluish-black dish with an ammonia aroma), maybe it's because you don't grow up with it on the table. But what would others think of British black pudding, a blood sausage, or foie gras, a purposely hypertrophied liver?

It's that tension between fascination and revulsion that makes the Disgusting Food Museum not just a tourist attraction, but a piece of global reflection on food and disgust. According to its founder, Samuel West, the idea came from the realization that every country has something that provokes rejection... and that the limit is always subjective.

The merit of the museum is that it goes beyond provocation. It does not seek to scandalize, but to encourage critical thinking. When leaving, what remains is not the bad smell, but the idea that disgust is a social construct that defines who we are. And that perhaps we should train our palate to look differently at the world to come. Because on a planet where meat is unsustainable and resources are scarce, maybe today's "disgusting" is tomorrow's salvation. So the next time you travel and are served something that puts you to the test, before you say "how disgusting", think: what if the problem is not in the dish, but in your head?