I’m first-generation and my family is Nigerian, and while I personally don’t eat the heads, we do entire dried fish quite a bit. Locally, we refer to it as “oporoko,” and it’s primarily imported from Norway, rather than Iceland, as another commenter has mentioned. It’s also very widely available in African and Nigerian food stores in the United States.

Similar to the what’s said in the link another commenter posted, I would say it is one of my favorite foods.

The roots of their demand are somewhat tragic:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-42137476

Skip to the bottom few paragraphs if you want to get straight to the reason.

In Iceland they also eat the heads, it's a local delicacy, I would caution against it.

Can you provide a comparison if possible to other types of food; I have that typical Westerner squeamishness towards the idea of eating fish "heads"

The smell and texture were such that I felt an urgent need to temporarily become a vegetarian. But one other HN'er was present at that dinner and gave in to peer pressure, maybe he'll chime in.

Same in the Philippines. The smell will drive non-Filipino's out of the area. The locals love it, but I never heard of such a thing before arriving here.

Depends on the fishhead. One of the best meals of my life involved lingcod cheeks at the Tjoruhusid in Isafjordur, Iceland.

If you can imagine the difference between leavened bread and non-yeasted bread - it's a bit like that. The cheeks specifically were lighter, fluffier, and more buttery in comparison to the otherwise delicious but more dense fillet.

I love Fish Cheeks!

I don't usually eat fish that are big enough to have big meaty ones but even on tiny fish they're amazing and usually worth the effort to dig em out. Even on Salmon its worth it.

Cheeks seem to be the best part across a wide variety of animals - both fish and mammal.

I'm Icelandic and my mom eats _everything_. Yet, I've never heard of anyone eating cod heads. Do you have a source?

[I'm also Icelandic] when people say they eat "cod heads" they usually don't mean you eat the head whole, although it's also boiled for e.g. broth or stew. They usually mean that they eat the cheeks and tongue of the fish, and sometimes the eyes.

This is a delicacy in Iceland (gellur & kinnar) and I'm surprised you haven't heard of it., you've been missing out. Here's a video of a fishmonger (in Icelandic, but it mostly speaks for itself) extracting the two. Gellur (tounge) at around 1m30s, kinnar (cheeks) at 3m50s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcmHCoMQ01c

The cheek or other head tissue on the fish is usually the most delicious. On cods the cheeks are particularly big, but on most fish there's a small and tender cheek muscle you can easily get to.

Fun story: I was once at a wedding in Singapore where they served fish, and all the ethnic Chinese there were getting the whole fish including the head, but the waiters were serving all the foreigners (mostly Europeans) fillets. The natives were shocked and impressed when I asked for what they were having, and proceeded to eat edible parts of the head, including e.g. the eyes.

I had to explain that Iceland was a bit unusual as European cuisine goes, and much closer to the Chinese tradition of not needlessly throwing away useful food just because it looks odd.

You're right! I have had "Gellur". Didn't really think about where they came from though. :-)

I actually worked one summer doing exactly that, back when I was 15. Without any doubt, the absolute worst job I've had. I'd previously worked summers in my uncle's _fresh_ fish processing and that was totally fine. The stuff we were racking and drying at that other place though was anything but fresh. Ugh, the textures, the smells, it's all coming back to me... Kinda hard to reconcile that as a delicacy.

It sure was formative though. All uphill from there, haha.

The old joke about "knowing how the sausage is made" is also true about drying fish.