A century egg (or thousand-year-old egg) is a Chinese delicacy, often an ingredient, but also eaten on its own. A duck or chicken egg is coated in a paste of wood ash and lime, and left to cure for several months, over which it turns into a colour negative image of itself. The albumin sets into a translucent black jelly, and the yolk turns a corrosive greenish hue with a creamy texture. You’d think it would taste powerful and vile, yet it’s quite mild, though with sulphurous overtones.

I went through a phase with these, and always had a half dozen around the house. One evening as I picked up a century egg, one of our house guests shuddered and said, “I thought you didn’t like those.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like them, I said I wasn’t quite sure about them,” I said, peeling the egg.

“So why would you keep eating it?”

Her tone, and the fact that she had never tried one annoyed me, but I said calmly, “If something’s considered food by another culture, I’m going to assume there’s something to it, and try it at least a few times before making up my mind.”

What she said next shocked me. With a dismissive toss of her head, she said, “Oh they just learned how to eat all that because they were starving.”

I almost dropped my thousand-year-old egg, and my face practically turned the colour of its yolk. After all, this wasn’t somebody who’d just come to the big city from Hicksville, but someone well educated who’d travelled the world and had spent many years in one of its greatest, most culturally diverse cities. I was floored by the depth of culturism, even racism, in that statement, dismissing delicacies from one of earth’s most ancient cuisines as merely something “they” (don’t forget the “they”) had learned to do because there was no other choice?

Sure, lots of our greatest foods and ingredients have come from hardship, but that’s a global phenomenon. Food created by people who had so little they were forced to improvise, or people who had to last long arid winters, or people who had to travel a lot. This is why so many of our great dishes are dried or pickled or based around offal, and yes, some of these have been taught to us through starvation.

It’s pretty unlikely though, that a starving person would slather a perfectly good hen’s egg in an alkaline paste and leave it around for several months hoping it would turn into something better... like what? Two eggs? A century egg is clearly the result of culinary sophistication, not necessity. But the true offensiveness of the statement lies in the fact that people continue to eat these dishes. If you were forced to consume something horrible because you were starving, you’d stop eating it as soon as proper food came along. But if your people continue to eat it generations later, either it’s really good (and worth trying by people of all cultures), or you’re all savages who don’t know any better.

To not try a century egg because you don’t like the look of one is perfectly okay, but to not try one because you think it’s a food not fit for humans unless they’re starving... I don’t know if this person had any idea how much she said about herself in that one line.

All I can do is hope that one day she will not try a century egg again, but for the right reasons. Why do I think it’ll be a thousand years coming?

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Bangalore, India.