Darwin liked to eat exotic animals, but not owls

Darwin enjoyed trying new foods and used his characteristic scientific interest in both wild and cooked animals. He oversaw the "Glutton Club," a weekly gathering of food enthusiasts who convened to eat "weird flesh," while he was a resident of Cambridge. The club frequently consumed raptors like hawks and bitterns, but Darwin reputedly choked over a dinner of brown owl and declared the flavor to be "indescribable."

However, on his travels to South America, he continued to sample more strange meats. He praised armadillos, saying they "taste and look like a duck," and a 20-pound rodent that he described as having "the greatest flesh I ever had." Later, the idea of a "Phylum Feast," a biodiverse buffet based on the Glutton Club's dietary philosophy of eating "birds and monsters... unfamiliar to the human palate," was inspired by his adventurous hunger.

Darwin's propensity for making risky eating decisions continued to develop once he boarded The Beagle. He consumed armadillos, iguanas, and pumas, which tasted "remarkably like veal." In addition to eating gigantic tortoises, he also tried drinking their bladder fluid, which was "quite limpid and tasted only faintly bitter." He consumed a 20-pound mouse that contained "the very greatest flesh I ever tasted," which is typically thought to be an agouti. Even after spending months attempting to capture a lesser rhea in order to identify the species, he inadvertently consumed a portion of it.