despite all the shit going on in this chapter, all i can think about now is the first time i was exposed to balut. a coworker brought some in for his lunch and it was the most rancid fucking thing i ever smelled, worse than any other corpse i've had to deal with. bro opened his little lunchbox and i had to leave for air because of it. he insisted it wasn't rotten, but i think it was definitely fermented or some shit and i could not in a million years imagine trying to get that shit anywhere near enough to my face to try to eat it, texture/flavor be damned. absolutely fucking rancid & further cemented my world view that 99% of "delicacies" are just garbage nobody would ever willingly want to eat normally. every culture in the world gave rise to some clever dickhead in the group thinking "hey, this one idiot in the group who's always hungrier than everyone else will eat this thing's rotten testicles if i tell him it's rare and special for him, and that way the rest of the group won't need to lessen their share of the actually edible meat" lol