Obviously disgust is very culture dependent. In general I like a lot of offal and stuff that people struggle with. The other day we went to a Communist Sardine Festival which is exactly what it sounds like - basically you pay 8 euros and choose if you want a plate of sardines or pork with taters and some salad. Virtually everyone chooses sardines and the upshot is that they make millions of them and ultimately they keep refilling you with sardines (and wine in fact) until you explode. The pay-off is that you have to listen to a load of speeches from the local communist party... though, in fairness, they obviously realised that that was the unpopular bit and drastically reduced the number of speeches from last year.
Anyway, that's just setting the scene, nothing disgusting there you might say and you'd be right. But then, cos we hung around for a bit until most people had gone, they decided to do a special treat for the stragglers which was a load of snails. Now I like snails in general but I think that a number of people struggle with them - I dunno if any of you have had snails in Portugal but they are done very differently to how you get them in France (when in my experience you normally get a fairly small number of relatively large snails strongly flavoured with garlic). Basically you normally get a massive bowl with literally hundreds of tiny snails in there - the whole lot are boiled up in maybe chilli and garlic and a few other spices and stuff, maybe some kind of vinegar come to think of it. You get toothpicks and you have to pull each snail out and then gobble them down. It's incredibly labour intensive as each one is quite fiddly to get out - now, here's the thing, the back half of each snail that you pull out is often all kinda black and slimy and... basically it's the equivalent of the vein in a prawn, it's shit. And it's a bit like with prawns, some people insist on having them de-veined, but as far as I know ninety percent of people here just wolf 'em down shit and all. I think there might be differences in how they are prepared or maybe when they are picked or something cos the ones the other day were relatively unshitty, but last year we had a massive bowl and most of the snails were pretty much half snail half shit-tube, and basically, like I said, it's labour intensive enough to eat 'em anyway, it's just too much effort to be all squeamish at the final step so in the end I just ate everything.
But overall I rather like the dish so I shouldn't complain too much - while I'm on the subject I've also eaten sea snails which are absolutely enormous and, in my experience, not at all pleasant, they are just like a massive chewy lump of tastelessness, I hope to eat those again if I can help it.