Some bravery as a side dish

1) Monkey brains. Brain-eating in general is a tough realm for most of us to embrace. Brains don't really make for a sublime dining experience; Larousse notes that “they are considered as an easily digestible substance, often given to invalids and children,” though not everyone finds them easy to swallow. Even fans of cow-brain sandwiches had to abandon that acquired taste after the federal government banned beef brains as food over concerns about mad cow disease.

But few brain-food customs could be more unsettling than monkey brains. Still considered a delicacy, or at least a foodstuff, in parts of South Asia, Africa and China, there's no doubt monkey brains have their constituency. An admittedly small one. 

Cookbook author Monica Bhide — not a monkey-brain fan — claims to have seen them for sale near the train station in Bombay, India, for instance. “I pretty much eat anything, but I don't get that,” she says.

It's a bad practice to draw too many lines along the evolutionary chart, but monkeys are frankly a bit far up the food chain, and the primate part brings with it faint suggestions of kuru. Google yourself up some “monkey brains” and you'll find a blend of scientific studies on simian cognition and Kipling-esque tales of exotic meals in shadowed, humid corners of the world. That mix pretty much sums it up for us.

Incidentally, there's a whole subset of monkey-brain mythology centered around eating the brains of live monkeys, though it's more urban legend than fact — perhaps inspired by a scene from the 1978 film “Faces of Death.” Culinary detectives have been chasing live-brain tales for years, without success.

MSNBC.com lifestyle editor Jon Bonné grew up eating beef-tongue sandwiches.