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Uterus Skeeball

Given all the food research that we do on the show, we thought we'd reached the point where we had come across just about every edible pig part known to man. But then we discovered pig uterus...

Uncooked pig uterus is not a pretty sight. It's a long pinkish tube with a curly-cue shape and lots of disturbing little cauliflower-like growths along the way. It's hard to imagine anyone looking at a pig uterus in a butcher shop and saying, "Hmm, that looks like something I'd like to eat!"

But pig uterus can actually be found in quite a few Asian butcher shops right here in Los Angeles. Alongside the intestines and the snouts and the livers and the hearts and the kidneys and the ears you'll find plenty of pig uterus right there for the picking.

And pick we did. The butcher didn't speak any English but we managed to communicate through a lot of hand gestures. By the time we were through, we found ourselves walking out of the shop with a nice big squishy bag of uterus.

We took the whole batch and cooked them up in a big pot. They shrunk a bit during the cooking process and took on a whitish tone that made them look even more horrible than they did in their raw form.

The cooked uterus also had a foul smell that grew worse with each passing day. It kind of smelled like sour milk. Come to think of it, it was one of the worst smelling items ever stored in our infamous Fear Factor refrigerator. And trust us  we've had some smelly stuff in that fridge. In fact, any time we open that refrigerator door we usually need to issue a red alert in the office.

We taste tested a little of the cooked uterus and were happy to find them to be as rubbery and as smelly and as awful tasting as we'd hoped they would be. It looked like we definitely had ourselves another gross Fear Factor eating stunt.

Now, all we needed was a game to determine just how much uterus each contestant would eat. We'd already done Bowling for Beetles and Darting for Crickets and Sharpshooting for Rectums and Shuffleboarding for Roaches. We were trying to think up other game possibilities when our art director, Shawni, told us about an old Skeeball arcade game she'd found in a prop shop.

We realized we'd never tried Skeeball before. And, from the looks of how badly some of our contestants played the game, they'd also never tried Skeeball before. Prepare to watch our contestants bite off way more uterus than they can chew.

by Rich Brown