Hakarl! Oh, you most foul of aliments, yee sick joke of Iceland! Can any food be so wretched as you are, Hakarl? Nay, for only you can dance so terribly atop the chasm between food and trash, can look so casually into the eyes of Brillat-Savarin and laugh. Not for you the clean farm-yard smells of roquefort or brie, or the pungent thrust of Munster! No! You are the soul of putridity. Not salted, nor brined, nor smoked, nor boiled, nor baked, nor fried, nor pickled, Hakarl! But buried, in a geothermal zone, for six months. Thy smell! Thy permeating odor! Thy brutal persistence!

Or, at least, that's the kind of thing I would be writing about Hakarl, an Icelandic delicacy that consists of shark that's been fermented for six months underground, and stinks to high heaven, and which I finally found a reasonably sized package in the airport, had I not eaten bitafisk the night before. Hakarl is an awful thing, and it deserves its bad press. It is one of the singularly worst ideas any people have ever had about any possible kind of food at any time. If my friends routinely had access to Hakarl, they would win my longstanding challenge to find me a food I won't eat. It makes me feel so ill I write extraordinarily bad odes to it on airplanes.

But those who think that Hakarl is Iceland's sole devilry have not eaten the dried cod, potato chip-like snack bitafisk, (photo) on which the Icelandic spread butter, for some incomprehensible reason. All I can say about this latter horror is that it smells rather like the herring oil factory I visited in Siglufjordor must have smelled in its prime. The bitafisk package smelled in the store. It smelled on my walk to the hotel. And then it smelled twenty times worse when I finally opened it to take a taste. It smelled so horribly that I had to throw the package away as soon as I tasted it. And it stayed on my hands for hours.

The only positive thing about either of these two foods, Hakarl and Bitafisk, is that they taste marginally better than they smell, and that both give you a great excuse to down great tubs of Brennivin (photo), Iceland's caraway seed flavored national liquor. Modest saving graces, to be sure, but after eating Hakarl, even modest mercies have their place.