The ‘Surprize’ apple looks deceptively normal from the outside – its yellowy-orange exterior gives no indication of the surprise waiting inside. Take one bite though, and its pale-pink flesh is bound to leave you shocked and confused for a second.

The new variety of apples is currently available in 120 Tesco stores across the UK, priced at £1.75 ($2.82) for a pack of four. According to Tesco fruit product developer Ciara Grace, “This apple is a real head-turner on account of its unusual pale orange and yellow skin. But the real fun starts when they take a bite and see the unique pink flesh inside. It was named Surprize because of the fantastic reaction it gets.”

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They say everything tastes better deep fried, but who’d have ever guessed that also applies to maple leaves? Well, the dish is real – it’s called Maple Tempura and it’s a fall delicacy in Japan. Surprisingly, it isn’t just made by picking up random fallen leaves and frying them. There’s actually an elaborate process involved in making these sweet, golden snacks.

To prepare Maple Tempura, the leaves are carefully selected and preserved in salt barrels for over a year. Then, they’re removed from the salt and dipped in a batter made from flour, sesame seeds and sugar. These batter-coated leaves are then deep fried for over 20 minutes, until crisp.

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‘Air Food One’ is a food delivery service in Germany that exclusively caters to people who happen to love airline food. I’m not sure what’s more surprising – that the service exists, or that there are actually people who like the flavorless reheated stuff that is generally passed off as food on an airplane.

Anyway, the service is being provided by a German grocery store in collaboration with the company that makes meals for Lufthansa. It includes weekly home delivery of meals that are supposed to be ‘business-class quality’. Apparently, online grocery store Allyouneed.com noticed there was a demand for airplane food from its clients, so it teamed up with airline caterers LSG to satisfy their cravings.

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In a bid to get customers addicted to his food, a scheming restaurant owner in China resorted to unethical means – he laced his noodles with parts of a poppy plant from which opium is made. When questioned by the local police, he admitted to spending 600 yuan (about $100) on two kilograms of poppy shells to secretly add to the food.

The diabolical deception came to light when Liu Juyou, a 26-year-old customer, tested positive for opiates during a routine urine test at an anti-drunk-driving program. Liu was stupefied by the result and swore that he never touched any illegal substances. But the police didn’t pay attention to his pleas and detained him for 15 days.

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The idea of a burger that tastes like human meat might sound repulsive, but that didn’t stop a couple of London chefs from trying to cook it. It is going to be offered to diners through a pop-up restaurant in East London on Tuesday, September 30.

The human-flesh-tasting burger is a product of ‘Messhead’ – a collaboration between chef James Tomlinson of ‘London Mess’ and ‘Miss Cakehead’, a freelance creative director who specializes in gory food creations. It was created to mark the start of the fifth season of the zombie television show The Walking Dead.

Thankfully, the two chefs didn’t have to resort to cannibalism to figure out the taste of human flesh. Instead, they just read accounts from well-known cannibals, like explorer William Seabrook and notorious murderer Issei Sagawa.

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Tihar Food Court, a new restaurant in New Delhi, serves its customers a regular fare of north Indian dishes – rice, flatbreads, lentils, samosas, and more. You’d probably get to eat these dishes at many other restaurants in India’s capital, but here’s what’s special about Tihar Food Court – the food is prepared and served by convicts serving time for murder at New Delhi’s infamous Tihar Jail.

The restaurant opened earlier this month within the sprawling Tihar complex – South Asia’s largest prison – as a rehabilitation effort on an experimental basis. It is a rather simple eatery with indoor and outdoor seating for around 50 customers, and cream colored walls decorated with paintings made by prisoners. The small staff consists of a manager who is also a police constable, and seven convicts who have displayed good behavior over several years of imprisonment.

To be eligible to leave prison for a few hours of work at the restaurant, inmates must have a high school education and need to have maintained an ‘unblemished’ record for at least 12 years. They mostly pick prisoners who are due to be released within two years time, so they don’t feel too tempted to escape. The inmates walk or ride a cycle to work everyday completely unsupervised, as the authorities apparently trust them enough not to provide an escort.

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Contrary to its name, Grundhofer’s Old Fashioned Meats carries a rather interesting and unique range of sausage meats. Their website boasts of 50 different flavors of fresh brats, including a few regulars – Turkey, Chicken and Three Cheese – and a few strange ones – Bloody Mary, Cherry Kool-aid and Blueberry. But the world-famous Gummy Bear brat has got to be their funkiest one yet.

Spencer Grundhofer, who founded the business in 1983 in his hometown of Hugo, Minnesota, says his love for meat developed quite early. “I started when I was 11, working at a local grocery store down the road.” Spencer quickly gained a reputation in the region as an expert in high-quality cuts of meat.

And his passion for meat took a weird turn a few years ago, when his friend decided to play a prank on him. Joe Berglund, a mechanic who works at the shop across from Grundhofer’s, gave Spencer a few friendly suggestions of what flavor brats to try. “So I gave him a list,” said Joe. “One of them happened to be Gummy brats. And he told me, ‘I’m not making those.’”

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A pet store owner in Richland, Washington, is putting herself in her clients’ shoes (or paws, if you will) for a whole month. Dorothy Hunter has decided to eat nothing but pet food for 30 days; the challenge began on June 19 and so far, she says she’s loving it. Her goal is to prove that food for pets can be just as nutritious and delicious as human food.

“You would be surprised how tasty dog and cat food can be when it’s made right,” said Dorothy, the owner of Paw’s Natural Pet Emporium. “You really are what you eat and it’s the same for your pets. I decided to eat this food for a month just to prove how good it tastes, as well as showcase nutrition.”

The idea for the project came to Hunter rather unexpectedly – she was stocking the shelves at her store one day, when she got hungry. “I didn’t have time to go get a snack, so I grabbed a bag of treats off the counter, and I was like, wow, you know, these read better than the normal people’s treats,” she said. “So I started eating the treats and I was like, you know, I could do this for 30 days.”

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The food at Ming General Japanese Sushi Restaurant in Hong Kong is so bad, it actually has its own fan following. In fact the sushi chain is so popular that it has 6 branches located in various parts of the island city, which are regularly visited by bad eaters who dare each other to finish the cheap but hard-to-swallow sushi dishes they serve.

19-year-old Don Tsang, an active member of one of Hong Kong’s ‘bad-eating groups’, said: “It’s the worst. So it’s the most popular.” To me, that’s just weird logic, but it seems to make perfect sense to these groups that actively seek out what they consider bad food, and then spend hours discussing it.

So what exactly is it that makes the food at Ming General so bad? According to food blogger Patrick Lai, 38, the deep fried scallop sushi and the mini-sized prawn sushi are the worst. “They’re very small and very skinny. I don’t know where the restaurant can find such skinny prawns.” Another notable dish, he said, is the tuna sushi, which is served with a ‘mushy brown pool of liquid topping’. The restaurant is also notorious for its unusual dishes like fruit salad sushi and corn salad sushi.

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Muhammed Karim, the mad chef in charge of spicy dishes at Bindi Restaurant, in Lincolnshire, England, claims he has created the world’s hottest drumstick sauce in the world. It’s called the Atomic Kick Ass, and yes, it’s like an atomic bomb going off in your mouth.

So just how hot is this crazy concoction, you ask? Well, Muhammed has to put on a gas mask whenever he prepares it, to avoid passing out from the fumes, so that should give you an idea. If you need more technical data, you should know the Atomic Kick Ass sauce scores 12 million units on the Scoville scale of hotness, several times more than police pepper spray.

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It looks like a large drop of water, but it’s actually a cake. This Japanese invention is as delicate as it looks and sounds, but it needs to be consumed in only 30 minutes, after which it will simply turn into a sweet puddle of water.

The water cake looks like a large bowl of jelly without the color, but its makers insist that it’s cake. The strange dish is a variation of the well-known Japanese rice-cake confection, shingen mochi. Mochis are trademarked desserts, only created by the Kinseiken Seika Company. A regular type of shingen mochi is made from a particularly soft type of mochi rice cake, sprinkled with kinako soybean powder and eaten with brown sugar syrup. Traditionally, it is yellow in color, with a sticky and soft jelly-like consistency.

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I always thought people taking pictures of their food was kind of silly, but at this new pop-up restaurant in the UK, I’d probably do it too. ‘The Picture House’ is the world’s first pay-by-photo restaurant – you order, click a photo of the food, share on Instagram and eat for free!

The restaurant belongs to frozen food giant Birds Eye, who came up with the idea to cash in on people’s obsession with photographing food and sharing the pics online. They conducted a survey and found out that more than half of the Brit population regularly took pictures of their meals, nine percent of them on a daily basis. So they realized, what better way to advertize their new dining range than with hashtags?

The pop-up eatery was open in Soho, London for three days in May, and is now moving to other major UK cities. They serve two-course meals that customers don’t have to pay for, if they snap and Instagram it. “We wanted to tap into this social media trend and create a new reason for people to talk about and sample our inspirations range,” said marketing director Margaret Jobling.

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Fermented foods aren’t exactly famous for their alluring smell and flavor, but South Korea’s popular ‘hongeo’ has just got to be the worst of the lot. It’s definitely classified as one of the grossest foods in the world, even for ‘foodie daredevils’ who like trying out weird dishes.

What makes hongeo so bad? Well, for starters, it’s made from a fish called skate, which just like sharks, has no bladder or kidneys. Its digestive waste simply oozes out of its skin in the form of uric acid. That’s why sharks and skates need to be eaten fresh. But the Koreans seem to enjoy defying the norm in this case.

What they do is leave dozens of fresh skates (a cartilage-rich fish that resembles a stingray) stacked up in a walk-in refrigerator. Then they wait, sometimes as long as a month, for the fish to acquire a distinct ‘aroma’, reminiscent of a public urinal. When the smell reaches its worst, the skates are ready to be taken out, sliced up and served raw.

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Cafe Olympic, a small restaurant in Nagasaki, Japan, is better known as ‘Parfait Heaven’. And for good reason – they serve a variety of jumbo-size parfaits that range in height from 1.5 ft. to a whopping 4 ft. tall.

The tallest parfait, the Nagasaki Dream Tower (120 cm), is filled with all kinds of wonderful things – ice cream, ice cream cones, chocolate cake, sherbet, soft serve ice cream, fruit, chiffon cake, coffee jello, whipped cream, corn flakes and even a slice of cheesecake. All these ingredients and more are stuffed into an extremely large parfait glass and topped off with Olympic Rings, to match the name of the restaurant and also mark the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The sinful dessert is served with a giant spoon to reach all the sugary goodness down to the bottom of the glass.

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The Templeton Rye Distillery, in Templeton, Iowa, is trying to create a revolutionary pork flavor. The founders of the distillery realized that since alcohol is used in meat marinades all the time, why not have meat that comes ‘pre-cured’? So they’re raising 25 pigs that will, hopefully, end up tasting like rye whisky. This is the first experiment of its kind, so there’s really no way of knowing how it’s going to turn out.

Now, if you’re imagining 25 pigs in a pen getting drunk on whisky all day, well, you couldn’t be more wrong. The pigs actually aren’t being fed any whisky at all. Their diet consists of a distinct feed that is mixed with the dry distillery grain from the whiskey-making process. That’s how they plan to infuse the flavor into the pigs’ meat. The swine are currently being cared for by Nick Berry, who has a Ph.D. in Animal Studies.

According to Berry, the pigs are purebred Duroc, which have a superior meat quality and are prefect for this project. He also said that the project is a natural combination for Templeton Rye and their home state’s animal agriculture industry. “I think it really falls in line with what their roots surround – whiskey making and rural Iowa and the Midwest,” he said. “This project really fits right in line with a lot of their history and heritage.”

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