Stinky-Head Soup

Having just joined this blog, I will have to tell some stories that happened a while ago before I can get to the present. It's hard to decide where to start, but this one should be good.

My history teacher is an intelligent, respectable woman who treats us as if we were college students, and pushes us to do rigorous work. She is also very kindhearted; for example, when our Junior Theses were due, she had us all wait outside of the classroom until she had it all set up. When we were allowed to come in, we found a buffet of bagels and juice, and we all got a chance to tell the rest of the class about the topic of our theses while enjoying our snack before getting to work. Anyway, she is a good teacher, but one from which you have to expect hard work and no nonsense.

One day when my history teacher was lecturing about labor in the late nineteenth century, she mentioned that she had once gone to Alaska to work in a salmon-packing factory. She described the different levels of work that people had to do: the beach packers (or something like that) who had to wade in the sea of dead salmon and pack them (this is where my teacher was), the canners, the factory supervisors, etc. (I don't remember what they really were, but it was something like that). My teacher was talking about how she was at one of the lowest levels, had to work hard for low pay, and got bad living quarters, while others at other levels had better conditions. Eventually, it was clear that she had gone off on a tangent--something that she almost never does. She described how an old eskimo woman had the job of chopping the heads off of the salmon, and how she was so skilled and fast at it that when a machine was introduced to do the job for her, they soon decided that she was better. Apparently, fish come in different sizes, and while the woman could always chop at the right spot, the machine was programed for average-sized salmon, and so if the salmon was too big part of the head would stay attatched, and if it was too small, too much would be cut off. So they decided to put the eskimo woman back in her job.

Speaking of fish heads, my teacher mentioned that instead of disposing of the heads, she and her colleagues would give them to some local eskimos who used them to make some special food called stinky-head soup. They would bury the fish heads under the ground for a few months, and then use the fermented fish heads to make their soup. My teacher said that she had never dared to try the peculiar dish, and after she returned to a more normal part of the country, she had nearly forgotten about it.

Then, she was reading an article about someone whose job it is to search for strange, disgusting foods to be eaten on the TV show Fear Factor when she came across stinky-head soup again. In his search for disgusting foods, the man had discovered stinky-head soup. It turned out that stinky-head soup was not safe enough for Fear Factor because while the fish heads are buried, they become hallucinogenic. So then, my history teacher, a dignified, respectable woman, said, "So maybe I should have tried stinky-head soup, after all."

-Philip