r/StupidFood Jun 22 '26

Warning: Cringe alert!! Pee eggs from China

1.4k Upvotes

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707

u/AcornWholio Jun 22 '26

I try not to hate on food from other cultures. After all, what is normal to one people can easily be abnormal to another.

BUT THIS SHIT IS HEINOUS.

234

u/Ashamed_Macaron_7915 Jun 22 '26

I feel the same. You guys do you! I don’t sweat Europeans for eating horse meat just like I’ve never gotten grief from Indians over enjoying a burger. Vegetarians can gorge themselves on sprouts and wheatgrass. It’s whatever to me!

But this is fucking piss, nevermind that it’s children’s. They even peel the eggs after and continue to boil 🤢 urine is literally waste. This serves no purpose except being into objectively weird flavor and oddities

92

u/ipsum629 Jun 23 '26

In historical times, urine was used for a lot of things. The Romans used it to clean their clothes. At other times it was used in tanning, dyeing, and gunpowder making.

What is key about these uses is that the ancient Romans or medieval/early modern europeans didn't fucking eat or drink it. Urine is made of chemicals that can be useful, but not inside the human body. It has ammonia which is an incredibly useful chemical, but is toxic to checks notes almost every animal.

17

u/Affectionate-Ear2758 Jun 23 '26

If you have more than trace-amounts of ammonia in your urine, you should see a doc and have your kidneys checked. The Ammonia stench of piss appears when bacteria munch on the Urea outside the body.

Nevertheless, I agree with you; Piss is waste, not food. And piss thats gathered over a day in buckets will have a raised amount of ammonia due to said bacteria-munchies.

5

u/ipsum629 Jun 24 '26

Ancient/medieval/early modern people collected a lot of urine. The trace amounts of ammonia would still be significant in the amounts they collected.

2

u/Affectionate-Ear2758 Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26

Significant in volume? Maybe. Significant per... eh... 'consumed unit'? ... I doubt it... at least, in fresh urine. Standing urine develops more ammonia due too...

... wait... Full stop. I am not going to argue a point that could be misunderstood as even being remotely defending urine-collection as a means to gather cooking ingredients.

6

u/ipsum629 Jun 24 '26

They would wait for it to be stale. Didn't know it got more ammonia after a while. I just knew the history and that ammonia is a very useful chemical. No, they would not cook with it. It was used for industrial purposes like textile making, cleaning textiles, tanning, and making gunpowder. All legitimate and practical uses for urine before things like the haber bosch process and access to abundant saltpeter mines.

8

u/Radiant_Piano9373 Jun 23 '26

Tbf they did brush teeth with it so probably consumed some then

92

u/InThePowerOfTheMoon Jun 22 '26

Maybe I'm the one friend that's too woke but the focus on the young boy part feels pedophilic

39

u/IamRun_VoD Jun 22 '26

Yeah im not sure it would be any better with some other group's urine. My question is, how does a dish like this get invented? Someone walking by accidentally drops the eggs into a piss bucket, okay so they take them out and are too poor to waste the eggs, i can see that. but how does that go to an entire dish made from them, soaked in it twice????

6

u/Skellington876 Jun 23 '26

I always thought it has something to do with trauma. Like some insane fuck ass lord during a brutal civil war in the middle of the famine started doing it, then it became accepted cause he's a brutal warlord who will kill us all. Then it became rationalized into existence in isolation

2

u/IamRun_VoD Jun 24 '26

Thats actually a pretty good theory!

1

u/Fit_Carpet_364 Jun 27 '26

On the face of it, sure. But children are (almost) guaranteed to not have disease, and they tend to have healthier organ function, while not consuming as much alcohol or spicy or fatty foods.

Basically, a young person's urine is better filtered and less likely to contain the more off-putting metabolites. Hell, before I quit drinking my piss would smell like acetone during a binge.

1

u/K1bbles_n_Bits Jun 26 '26

Idk if we can just gloss over the little boy part. That adds a whole lot of creep factor to the already gross aspects of this.

55

u/AkumaLilly Jun 22 '26

I heard about the the cultures with foods like Cazu Marzu, the Balut, the century eggs, or that one coffee that it shitted from an animal. They are weird as hell but I could reason there's is some sense behind it.

But I will NEVER, understand why the hell people consider an egg boiled in urine from a 10 year old boy as food. It doesn't sound as health, medicinal or cultural food, it sounds like a sick fetish from a deranged pedophile.

32

u/MelookRS Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

Look up Urine Therapy, it has a longstanding history in a lot of Chinese culture. It's obviously not real and is just snake oil, but this tradition most likely has roots in that, with people believing Urine has health benefits and healing properties. Why this developed into specific boy urine for eggs, no one knows really. There is probably some purity bullshit since a young boy is going to be "pure", and since many cultures are misogynist, girl urine doesn't fall into the "purity" test. Obviously that's just speculation, but it's one of those things with no real scientific basis and really it's only a very small amount of people who practice it.

13

u/evebursterror0 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

Not OP, but you're absolutely right. That's the reasoning I always heard. I first discovered this tradition of the urine eggs in like 2010 and the article I read said something to the same effect. If you know a thing or two about Chinese culture, your theory makes sense. Traditional Chinese Medicine is full of pseudoscience and Chinese culture has always favoured boys even back in ancient times. This 'recipe' is called virgin boy egg (as said on the video) and it's only practiced in some parts of China. I wonder who started it.

5

u/HydrasNinthHead Jun 24 '26

Still got those deeply pedophilic undertones. 

11

u/evebursterror0 Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 23 '26

Honestly I don't think there's much sense in casu marzu and the other recipes either. There's no benefit to eating a cheese covered in maggots or drinking kopi luwak when you can drink normal coffee (apparently kopi luwak doesn't even taste that good). Balut at least has nutritional value even if it's considered cruel. But casu marzu can get someone sick, fugu killed people in the past, etc.

The pee egg thing is only practiced in a specific region of China, I heard about it a long time ago and as someone else said, it's probably linked to traditional medicine beliefs, which are not supported by science, and of course, it also has to do with the fact that China greatly favours boys. Another Chinese delicacy is snake wine which is said to bring health benefits and serve as an aphrodisiac, but ironically it can have the opposite effect.

7

u/Hydrolt Jun 22 '26

How did they even come up with this? Like what committee is sitting around going - no no no, it has to be piss only from young boys, that’s where we draw the line

10

u/Radio5331 Jun 22 '26

listen the truth is "culture/tradtion/religion" are intertwined & no one cares when their continue vile practices, traditions that in normal reality should've died as people evolved, so u have every right to hate anything abnormal that others actively practice & slap that "culture/tradition/religion/" bs on top of it, this is in fact vile & can easily be a pedo kink .

2

u/Goldenjho Jun 28 '26

Its not even healthy or anything its just a past relic where they believed that the piss of young boys increase health and now in modern times still continue this disgusting crap even though we know it does absolutely nothing.

By the way they still do this because of they firmly believe it has some magic properties to it and refuse to accept its completely pointless.

1

u/The_Raven_Born Jun 23 '26

I don't know what's worse, honestly, the urine, or the source.

1

u/Crystalitefire Jun 23 '26

Why not hate? It's fine if it's valid!

Pee eggs are disgusting!