I recently had a request via craigslist for balut. To be perfectly honest I didn’t even know what they were requesting, I had to google it. This is what I learned. Balut is chicken or duck eggs that have been partially incubated so there is a small chick inside. It is then hardboiled and eaten, usually in a broth. These eggs are eaten in Asian countries as common street food. It made me want to puke. The thought of eating that…how could they! This request was at the forefront of my thoughts the entire day.So….what IS the difference? I eat chicken, it fact, it’s one of my favorite foods. I also eat eggs that are laid on our farm, which means they are fertilized, and have a teeny weenie atoms of a chick started in there somewhere. A McDonalds chicken nugget has more nasty things in it then a balut egg.13 ingredients to be precise, most of which I can’t pronounce. Plus, how old is that grease?  On the other hand balut (1 ingredient:egg)  is more nutritionally superior than regular eggs.For example balut has 100mg of calcium in it, an egg has only 25mg. Hmm, So I made myself reconsider my EWW position. It was just a cultural difference I wasn’t prepared for, and certainly never thought about selling. After a lot of consideration, I did offer our craigslist customer balut eggs, but we didn’t come to agreement on price. So in the end, I didn’t have to actually have to pull the eggs out of the incubator. I was secretly glad about that, but I hope next time I am faced with the “weird” I will take a step back and actually consider the real food aspect.Normally we judge food on a yummy or gross scale. Watermelon=yummy, clams=gross, store bread=yummy I could go on and on. However, let me suggest a new way we should judge food. Real or fake. This would be a much healthier way to eat. This would mean watermelon=real, clams=real, store bread=fake, and yes even balut=real.This being said, I don’t think I will ever eat balut, likewise my children may never eat onions, it is a little hard to get off of that yummy vs gross scale after all.But I just wanted to make the argument for real food, and say cheers to all my real food friends.Thank you for starting to change my scale.