The celebrated host of the Travel Channel's hit series Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern ventures beyond intrepid eating to audacious intercontinental adventure as he fearlessly and hilariously seeks out the Authentic Experience in
some of the most remote and bizarre outposts of our planet, as well as our own backyards.
Andrew Zimmern, the host of The Travel Channel's hit series Bizarre Foods, has an
extraordinarily well-earned reputation for traveling far and wide to seek out and
sample anything and everything that's consumed as food globally, from cow vein stew
in Bolivia and giant flying ants in Uganda to raw camel kidneys in Ethiopia, putrefied
shark in blood pudding in Iceland and Wolfgang Puck's Hunan style rooster balls in
Los Angeles.
For Zimmern, local cuisine-bizarre, gross or downright stomach turning
as it may be to us-is not simply what's served at mealtime.
It is a primary avenue
to discovering what is most authentic-the bizarre truth-about cultures everywhere.
Having eaten his way around the world over the course of four seasons of Bizarre
Foods, Zimmern has now launched Bizarre Worlds, a new series on the Travel Channel,
and this, his first book, a chronicle of his journeys as he not only tastes the ""taboo
treats"" of the world, but delves deep into the cultures and lifestyles of far-flung
locales and seeks the most prized of the modern traveler's goals-
The Authentic
Experience. Written in the smart, often hilarious voice he uses to narrate his TV
shows, Zimmern uses his adventures in ""culinary anthropology"" to illustrate such
themes as- why visiting local markets can reveal more about destinations than museums;
the importance of going to ""the last stop on the subway""-the most remote area of
a place where its essence is most often revealed; the need to seek out and catalog
""the last bottle of coca-cola in the desert,"" i.e. disappearing foods and cultures;
the profound differences between dining and eating; and the pleasures of snout to
tail, local, fresh and organic food.
Zimmern takes readers into the back of a souk
in Morocco where locals are eating a whole roasted lamb; along with a conch fisherman
in Tobago, who may be the last of his kind;
to
Mississippi, where he dines on raccoon
and possum.
There, he writes, ""People said, 'That's roadkill!'
'No it's not,' I
said. 'It's a cultural story.'""
Whether it's a session with an Incan witch doctor
in Ecuador who blows fire on him, spits on him, thrashes him with poisonous branches
and beats him with a live guinea pig or drinking blood in Uganda and cow urine tonic
in India or eating roasted bats on an uninhabited island in Samoa, Zimmern cheerfully
celebrates the undiscovered destinations and weird wonders still remaining in our
increasingly globalized world.
