There is a school of thought that we eat with our eyes, which I believe is just a way to say you are a visually picky eater. What exactly is visually appealing is also deeply subjective, but here are a few examples from history of people who may have taken it so far that it entered “cursed” territory. For example, the Romans, reportedly, at feasts pickled mackerels live, so they could watch the silvery fish thrash about in the vessel.
Medieval feasts would often involve live animals, primarily birds, inside of dishes, which would fly out when, for example, a pie was cut. While this was perhaps an interesting spectacle, one has to imagine the mess of feathers and other droppings inside the dish. One presumes the panicked animals then would simply fly around the hall for the rest of the feast, probably adding some unsanitary aspects to the proceedings.
Our medieval ancestors had other strange predilections when it comes to food. Obviously, they did not have the benefit of abundant produce like we have today, so they would find protein wherever was convenient. As a result, hedgehogs and porcupines can be found in a number of recipes, as well as the entirety of a pig. This would include ears, snout, tail, tongue, and womb, some of which you can still find on the menu in certain countries today.
Similarly, almost any bird you can think of was also eaten. Exactly how much meat one can get from a sparrow is questionable, particularly since it seems like they would be pretty annoying to catch, but hunger makes people do unusual things. Modern humans would probably balk at the idea of eating a pigeon, for good reason, it’s hard to imagine that meat looking, smelling, or tasting enjoyable in almost any scenario.
Ultimately, we have always let hunger dictate what we do. Food poisoning has been recognized since the times of ancient Greece, but this has not stopped us from consuming everything that moves, dairy in a time where preservation was not fully understood and any digestible root and berry from the forest. But it’s easy to be judgmental, they didn’t really know any better and had to eat one way or another.
But, we shouldn’t disregard our senses, they exist primarily to protect us from, as mentioned above, foodborne illnesses and poisoning ourselves. Hence our inherent distrust of mold which has evolved to the point of feeling repulsed by situations that might lead to mold. Images of cheese left out in the sun make us uncomfortable, even if the cheese seems perfectly fine because we know, internally, that some items need to be stored properly.
