Andrew Zimmern – Bizarre Foods

By starrymag | April 8, 2015

Q) How did you guys come up with the idea for Bizarre Foods and how many pitches did you have until you actually got approved?

A) Well it was, I think, like a lot of really good ideas. This one, once we got it in front of the right people, it went pretty fast but I was working for basically four years trying to sell this idea. After about two years, I finally got a decision maker at a Scripts Network, not Travel Channel, in front of me and she expressed a lot of interest in my ideas and as a side bar, talked about some of the other people that were on Food Network at the time and I realized I didn’t want to be the 100s, I couldn’t compete with Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse, and Rachael Ray and all these people, I would just get lost in the sauce. And my show was about travel and so I went home and I said I want to be the food guy on Travel Channel. I don’t want to be one of 100 trying to crack the A-group roster in that Food Network. So that’s what I did, I retrained the pitch, I got in front of some people at Travel Channel, they said this is a great idea. We’d love to see five minutes of what this might look like, show us a sample of your work. And so I had a reel of local stuff. I was in local news. I had done a lot of work for HGTV and been a guest, done some guest spots on other networks including Food and put that together and they said that’s great, let’s see what the show would look like and I went out and asked a local production company if they would shoot it for me and literally we showed that five minutes of network, they said great, here’s the money. Now, make it for real and then they made a special called – that ended up being called Bizarre Foods of Asia. And then it ended up being bought for one season. I think actually 10 episodes, and we shot them all before the first one aired and the first one did well, second one better and the third one was in Ecuador and it had a moment in the show where a witch doctor basically kicked the crap out of me on his way to exorcizing my demon and the day after that aired, the Leno Show called and said we have to talk to this guy. It was pretty hysterical stuff and the rest as they say is history.

Q) Well, we know you are going to be visiting Kazakhstan, can you talk about any of the foods that you ate there that maybe you regretted instantly after trying?

A) I approached this job much differently than I did when I was doing the same thing 15 years ago before a TV show were even in the first season or two when we were making the first 30-40 episodes of Bizarre Foods. I take a little bit of disassociation from the pleasure of the eating as part of the game. That being said, I had nothing but fantastic things in Kazakhstan. Obviously in the farm country, they slaughter a sheep, they stuff the stomach with every piece of meat from the animal until it’s about the size of a rounded manhole cover, and everything but the skin is inside it, and they. And on top of the earth where it lays, they make a fire out of dried animal dung and let it burn down and you go eagle hunting and come back later and eat the stuffed stomach with all of the meat and goodies inside. Horse mare is milk, fermented horse mare is milk is the most popular drink there. It’s called kumis and I love the stuff. I traveled a lot in Central Asia, the market overflowing with fruits and vegetables from some of the southern central Asian countries apricots and pomegranates were in season from Azerbaijan and just unbelievable food. Everything there except for a handful of items is 200 kilometer inspired and I happen to love meat so Shashlik stands where everything is, the guy owns the farm animals, and slaughters them and ages them and cuts them and marinates them and grills them over a local hardware that burns like mesquite. It’s fantastic stuff. I really enjoyed the foods I had in Kazakhstan. Some people may not like the idea of horse rib meat cut from the bone and shoved down one of the horse’s intestines and dry aged but we eat it all the time with pig from Italy and call it sobrassada. I love horse meat and I love the fat of horse meat. It’s very, very clean and good for you and I just had a fantastic eating time there. They have a national dish called Besbarmak that is one of my favorites. It’s a homemade flat noodle, like a lasagna shape that they smother with sautéed horse meat and caramelized onion that’s one of my favorites dishes in the world and you just can’t get it anywhere and I got to enjoy it twice in rural farm houses there. It was just extraordinary. And I got to eat a roasted rabbit meal down by the river in the foothills of Alpine-sized mountain eating the rabbit that I, an eagle that I hunted with had retrieved for me. That’s a once in a lifetime food experience you just can’t duplicate anywhere else.

Q) Andrew, appreciating all that and the fact that you found lots of food that you’ve liked over time, there still must have been sometimes where something you’ve ate and it just turned out to just not be good, no matter what, not necessarily in Kazakhstan but somewhere else. Can you give us one or two examples of things that just did not work out for you at all?

A) Oh God, sitting here on this call I’m blanking. I’m sure I’ll think of one in a minute and toss it into the mix. I will say this, there are foods that I don’t enjoy every single day that we’re shooting. A lot of times they don’t make it to air because the moment wasn’t right or it wasn’t a worthy part of our story for inclusion. We shoot almost 50 hours of tape on every camera. We have a very intense shooting schedule and we could make two episodes out of everything that we are recording on this show. It’s really that good. Most of the things that I don’t like fall into the category of improperly cooked things, but I have to tell you that oftentimes the other circumstances do make it charming. And I’ll give you an example from Kazakhstan as I – it just popped into my mind. The rabbit that we had was a wild hare that the eagle caught for us and it was glorious, I mean just incredible experience up in the mountains and on horseback and this 16 pound Golden Eagle is on my arm and goes from the top of the crest of this mountain a quarter mile down the valley where it sees this rabbit moving and lands on it and waits for me to get down there to grab it. That’s an amazing experience. We ate the rabbit on the banks of the river and I skinned it and cleaned it and we pan-friend it and we were hungry. It was a cold afternoon and was it cooked properly, maybe. I did my best. It was a tough old hare so from – in terms of the pleasure of a Gorman, how much did I take from it, I’m not sure very much. As a total experience, did it blow me away? You bet because the ambiance was absolutely out of control and that’s how it is in a lot of countries we visit with a lot of the foods we eat. The aggregate of the experience is absolutely extraordinary. So the answer is that most of the time it’s just not cooked right. Occasionally I get things that are just awful, but someone’s grandmother made it for me and it’s at those times that frequently I would rather feel it’s more important to be a good guest than a wise-ass TV presenter and I respectfully compliment the chef on the color of her blouse or his moustache or whatever.

Q) I’ve got to ask you because you’re a guy from New York who moved to Minneapolis and ate Lutefisk, what was your experience like and what is it like to learn a totally different food culture like that?

A) I’m still so angry about lutefisk. It just pisses me off. I am batshit crazy about this issue. Lutefisk for those that don’t know is cod that’s been salted and dried and then it’s rehydrated in water with lye in it. And then it’s dried – then it’s rehydrated, then it’s rinsed with water for like eight days and the results turn it into like fish jello. It’s a clear, I mean it just destroys a great product which is salt cod. And there is no reason to process it with lye. Even in the countries where lutefisk is popular, they all have salt cod and there’s salt cod dishes and dried fish dishes that are made with it that are incredible. So, I mean some countries, Latin-speaking call it bacalao, the French call it brandade, I mean everywhere in the world salts and dries cod and other types of white fish. Why this weird pocket of Scandinavians decided that they had to treat it with an animal poison is absolutely beyond me. So, it just pisses me off because I love salt cod so much.

Q) I know that you call yourself a culinary explorer, why is it important to you to travel the world and experience all these different cultures and cuisines?

A) Oh because I think only a selfish, heartless, misdirected bastard would have all those things come to him and expect to draw any conclusions from them. I really could care less about the food. That doesn’t mean that it’s not important to me in a lot of ways, it’s just that the people are what’s important to me, the level of understanding that is required for all of us to survive on this planet is monstrous and we’re nowhere near harvesting the kind of information and respect and admiration for other people’s cultures. We don’t understand them, we don’t have patience with them. We don’t practice tolerance with them, and I think it’s approaching a criminal level, especially in the west looking out to other cultures that don’t look like us, smell like us, and feel like us. It occurred to me a long time ago that American culture is very unique in that we inhale other cultures with our mouths and off the ends of forks, first and foremost. It’s the first way that we understand and come to appreciate and learn about other cultures is through their food in America. And I thought to myself, this is really interesting because we love Mexican food but the jury is out in America about really how we feel about Mexicans. Same with Ethiopian, all the time people tell me how much they love Ethiopian food but they never want to investigate Ethiopian people or Ethiopian music or Ethiopian dance or art and that’s for some people that’s fine. It’s not okay with me. I think we have a lot to learn from other cultures. And in other cultures’ experience and history, if we share it all, will come the solutions to direct us for the future of our growingly increasingly small planet. So, if all that is true, and I believe very strongly it is the only way to learn about them is not the diluted version that sometimes exists here. It’s necessary to go out and see these things in the cultures that birthed them and to be, and experience what it’s like to walk in another person’s footsteps. I’m not down on America. I’m the most patriotic person I know, but we have a horrible habit in this country of making it convenient for us and I think when I’m out of my comfort zone and I think the same is true for all the people on this call, when we’re traveling, we are put in a position to grow and stretch and do things we would not ordinarily do when we’re at home. You would not catch me on a city bus in Minneapolis for all the money in China. Not because I’m against buses in Minneapolis, just that there’s two cars in my garage and I’d rather get a lift from my friend or call Uber or whatever it is. I mean, it’s just like my lifestyle doesn’t involve that. But when I’m in Bolivia, I’ll spend 14 hours on a rickety bus being driven by a 12 year old on a treacherous mountain road without any knowledge about where I’m going to get my next meal or when I’m going to the bathroom or how I’m going to sleep. You would never catch me doing that here at home in Minneapolis or in the place I was raised in New York. I mean, I just, that is just abhorrent to me. I am the best version of myself when I travel. So let’s merge all those ideas if I’m the best version and vision of myself when I travel, that’s where I want to be learning those cultural lessons and it’s where I want to tell stories.

Q) So for any of your viewers or really maybe anyone who wants to do a little more traveling to experience other cultures and other cuisines, how do you recommend they go about it? LHow should they start researching, because I’m assuming so much research goes into your show before you get on the road?

A) Well we make a television show. I recommend to other people who are traveling not to make a television show. It’s, I mean it’s kind of funny, but I know a lot about China. I’ve been there I don’t know, 15 times. I’ve shot six episodes of TV there. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to China for less than two weeks and yet I’ve never seen the Great Wall. My wife has been to China twice, neither time making television, both times she has seen the Great Wall. I am not saying everyone needs to go down the tourist highway, but there’s something pleasurable about not being there for work. You get to see the Great Walls of the world. I always tell people, “you have to do enough research so you’re comfortable going there and you’re taking reasonable precautions.” I mean, don’t fly to Kabul, Afghanistan tomorrow on a whim. That’s just poor gamesmanship. But I do believe in going to the last stop on the subway. And I do believe that the best traveling that I ever did was in my 20s where I picked a place pulling bong hits and drinking beer on the couch and you throw a dart at a map or put your finger on the globe when it was spinning and then you bought a ticket for the nearest city that was affordable and made your way to that place. I mean, that adventurous side of travel is still thrilling to me and we actually do try to inject some of that into the show wherever possible. I do think that if you’re on a planned holiday, I’m taking my family to Italy this August, I’m always telling people don’t go to Italy in August. It’s crowded. Everyone else is there. You’re competing with all these people. But my, 10 year old has not seen Italy and the time that works is August and so I’m doing the thing as a parent right now with what do we do? And so we are actually going to go to a couple of cities and spend two or three days in each. And then I’m going to rent a house somewhere which is very affordable, much more affordable than the hotels for sleeping four people in the cities we are going to I could tell you that. And we’re actually just going to get to settle down and live so that every morning for a week my son will understand what it’s like to walk in a little town and go to the market and sit and have something to eat and shop for what we’re going to make for lunch that day and wander in in the evening and try to wango a dinner invitation to someone’s house by standing around and looking curious and American. And all the other things that I try to do when I’m traveling, I’ll get to expose him to and I really believe there’s a lot of truth in all that for everyone to learn from. The other thing that I would suggest that I tell all my friends I mean I live in a suburb of Minneapolis. I don’t know what’s more typically American than that. Everyone is like oh where are you going, I say to them where are you going for vacation? Oh, we’re going to Cancun with the kids or whatever. And I always tell them, I said make sure that you leave the hotel every day and it’s a very simple thing but if you think about it when most of us are on vacation and we go somewhere, maybe there’s a beach involved, we sit down at the hotel and we get a little lazy. The last time that I was in Cancun, I dragged my family every night for dinner into the city which is on the other side “of the tracks.” It’s not on the side of the road where the beach is. And it was one of the best vacations we ever had. We got to see some incredible Kuantan food and meet some really cool people and go to some really slick places, none of which we would have seen had we stayed in the hotel and maybe wandered down some nachos at Senior Frog. I can’t think of anything worse.

Q) I was wondering if you have ever been denied access to anywhere that you tried to go to film a show?

A) Oh gosh yeah. These days most people say yes. The show is on in a lot of places in the world. People know who we are. The first year, everybody said no to us because they thought it was, it was around the time that Borat came out and everybody thought that a show called Bizarre Foods with our premise had to be a joke. Every place we go we have people who just aren’t comfortable with cameras around. Sometimes because of social reasons, sometimes because of religious ones, sometimes because they’ve gotten burnt and ripped off before. There’s a lot of restaurants that have said yes and then two days said no because they thought to themselves we don’t want to be represented or lose control of telling our story about our brand. And that’s increasingly becoming the case in television. People are realizing that if they are a busy place, TV is not going to help them do more business, as a matter of fact it may detract from their business by putting them into too small of a box. We’ve had our insurance carrier deny us going into Afghanistan. We had a state, a Chinese Department of State issue deny us our last visit to Shanghai. We deal with production problems all the time that are, I think they are just part and parcel of doing business of making TV. It’s pretty typical. We’ve also had incredible successes. We were the first ones that were allowed to go into Cuba four years ago and shoot. We were the first non-news show to go in there. We were the first show of our kind to get to spend time in Botswana, one of the more famous protected tribes. So, you get as many great success stories as you do sort of get the Heisman from certain people for one reason or another and I fully expect to go to Afghanistan. I fully expect to return to Shanghai with my crew. I think sometimes it’s timing and sort of circumstance but we get denied all the time.

Q) I can well understand that that can be challenging at times. You mentioned some of the foods that you experienced in Kazakhstan, and I was wondering where, what would you say is the biggest influence in that culture? Because it’s Central Asia but it’s had some Russian influence, it’s had probably some, a lot of Middle Eastern influence, and other influences that have come in western influences as well. So, what would you say is the biggest influence on its foods for example?

A) Well, I’ll tell you, it’s a fascinating question with that part of the world and that country in specific, especially in the modern Europe more people have cell phones in Kazakhstan than have electricity. Almaty has a Ritz Carlton there, a stunning one that’s bought and paid for by some local oligarchs and I mean it’s just stunning, modern hotel. And very few customers, so there are some humorous parts to all of this incredible growth. But I think the biggest impact on that culture over the last 20 years has been the resurgence in national pride. You have to remember for 100 years or whatever, the Kazak national vibe was suppressed, right? Then what, ’93, ’94, the country gains its freedom so the biggest thing, kind of like the same thing we saw in Cambodia where the original Khmer culture is the thing that everyone is trying to resurrect and make stable again because it had been depressed and made illegal for so long. Same thing with Kazak culture, it was illegal for a long time for them to practice their national sporting ritual of hunting with eagles to the point that there were only six people left in the country that knew how to do it. Now that number is back to 50 or 70 and it’s enjoying a resurgence, and it used to be that every village had eagle hunters in them. I mean, that’s a fascinating sort of thing to think about. Over the last five years, the country became wired, at least in its cities and obviously its TELCOM companies have brought media to handheld devices. So, here you have a country that just wanted essentially from a historical standpoint, moments ago won its independence that now all of a sudden can see pictures of the rest of the world instantly on their phones and laptops and television. That’s very, very powerful and I think it’s changing the nature of that country very quickly. There’s 111 different ethnicities in the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan, fascinating place.

Q) You mentioned that you like meat and that horse meat turns out to be quite good, is that true, is most meat once it’s done well, no matter where it’s from, end up tasting good or are there certain kinds of meat that just are not good no matter what you do to it?

A) Well, some are much harder to cook than others, great question. I’ve had some of the worst pork in the world in home kitchens in my neighborhood when we’re over at someone’s house to dinner because it’s commodity pork that’s been cooked to death and it’s just unpalatable. We’ve all had invested a small fortune in the good steak and thrown it on the grill and forgot about it for 30 seconds and found a sooty flare-up had taken over so I mean, shit happens. Horse meat is one of my, maybe my favorite red meat. I mean, it’s, I only hedge because donkey is so delicious and that tend, most species tend to be a paler pink, so I’m sort of parsing words here when I talk about red meat. Horse to me has the flavor of what beef wants to be. It’s lean, but it has a lot of intermuscular fat that can be ground in if you’re doing grinding or making sausage. I happen to like my meat somewhere around medium rare and so for luxury cuts, so that ends up being a win-win for me. It’s got better mouth feel than beef. It digests easier. It’s better for you. I adore horse and donkey, the same way I adore all the hoofed animals and venison species around the world and it’s a shame that we don’t diversify our food choices enough. In America, one of our systemic problems with our food system and that we are paying the price for right now is we are eating from too small a range of choices, especially when it comes to protein. It’s nuts. And it makes no sense, it’s not healthy and certainly a lot of the things that we put into our food system are not healthy for us. When I’m in countries when I’m in Finland and they know how to prepare bear meat, it’s unbelievable. When I’m in the Philippines, eating a whole range of different bugs or reptiles or something they know what they are doing, and they are an amazing food experience. Being in Kazakhstan or in Italy for that matter, where they understand, both countries how to prepare horse meat beautifully or China where there are whole cities devoted to eating donkey, it’s so delicious, and people make pilgrimages there. They do incredible things with that animal. Everybody worships pig here in America and I tell them I said you’d forget about pigs if you were able to eat donkeys in this country. There are some species of donkeys, smaller ones, about 200-300 pounds, that are very popular in China, especially around the fifth ring road in Beijing where what used to be farmland and used to be the donkey hot spot in China, where there are restaurants that have 100 different donkey items on the menu including things made with just donkey skin, that’s extraordinary, whether it’s steamed and turned into a thin noodle like spaghetti, made with the skin, or crisp like chicharron or braised meats seared rare luxury cuts, tossed, pieces of top rounded, just an extraordinary versatile meat that’s really good and good for you. And I’m just heartbroken that so many Americans have been weaned off of good meat and onto commodity versions of meat. The reason everyone makes jokes about everything tasting like chicken is that American supermarket chicken sucks. It tastes like nothing. I challenge anybody to tell me what commodity chicken tastes like. It’s God-awful. There’s no fat in the white meat and so it overcooks and everything tastes like whatever seasoning you put on the skin, and it’s criminal what we’ve done to our system by concentrating 75% of our food choices into the hands of just a few companies. If we can start to diversity our food system, even a little bit, I mean let’s start eating lamb and goat more in this country. Let’s start supporting local farmers and sustainable meat systems and I think we are going to go a long, long way towards opening up people’s minds. I hope my show opens up people’s minds.

Q) So, obviously eight years of doing the show is quite a long time, if you looking back had to pick one or two food, like bizarre foods that you think everyone, you wish everyone could eat before they die, what would they be?

A) Oh my God, that is a great – no one’s ever asked me that. Everyone always asks me what I want as my last meal before I die. That is a great, great question. Well I’ll tell you, I’ll answer that a couple of ways. I wish everybody could have the, some of the tribal experiences that I’ve had, living and eating with some of the first peoples of our world because I think from a social context I think that would inform a lot of people as to how far away from right living we’ve gotten in our culture. Being around people who eat with the seasons and live with the season and are in harmony with nature is an extremely inspiring experience. And we become so convinced that we know everything in this world that when you’re with tribal people who are speaking in clicks and whistles or maybe only wearing animal skins if anything at all, we still tend to think that we know it all. But people forget that every one of those tribal people above the age of 17-18 is a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, a farmer, a chef, a scientist, a warrior, it’s a skill set that we have long since abandoned in the west. And I think that’s a problem. As far as foods, I’d love everybody to try some of the “more exotic hoofed animals.” I mean, I’ll just pick donkey to throw it out there donkey or horse. I think it would convince people that we need to expand our diet and that beef in this country is maybe not everything it’s cracked up to be in terms of a red meat. And I’d also like people to eat it’s impossible, but there’s this giraffe beetle that exists on the island of Madagascar and I think in one other place in the world. It just happens because of Darwin’s island theory that it’s hard to get them elsewhere. But, the local tribal peoples in the southern tribe of Madagascar eat these giraffe beetles all the time and when they are sautéed in a little bit of butter and water and then you let the water evaporate and you just let them crisp a little bit in the residual butter fat, they taste like shrimp. And I had the same experience eating bumble bees in the mountains outside of Taipei and Taiwan. It’s a bug that when you shut your eyes and you eat it, you’re like oh my God this is so delicious, what is it? You open your eyes. It changes the direction of your life because all of a sudden you stop practicing contempt prior to investigation. And so I think foods that sort of stop us in our tracks and corrects our assumptive thinking are the ones I would want people to try.

Q) I know you were saying earlier that you haven’t been able to travel everywhere that you’ve wanted to, but of the places that you have traveled, where have you felt in the most danger, what was kind of most terrifying while you were abroad?

A) Oh my God, I mean we’ve had some accidents in the making. I mean, we were in a van once sliding down hill in a mudslide in the mountains, rain forest of Puerto Rico. That was pretty terrifying. We were in a really bad storm in a tin boat in the middle of the Pacific off the island of Samoa where we did all think we were going to die, twice actually, just a horrifying day. But I mean I’ve gone into Jaffa Hostel in Johannesburg, an evil, evil place designed by white people to warehouse amongst others, Zulu tribal peoples and it’s become an awful slum and we went in there to try to tell some stories because I wanted people to see the place and there’s this beautiful people living there and everyone said don’t go, don’t go, it’s too dangerous and we just made a deal with the local gangster that ran the place and we went in and there are little kids touching my face and my head because they’d never seen a white person up in real life. They had only seen them in magazines or on television. I mean, that’s kind of powerful stuff and some people consider that scary. I didn’t. I thought it was my job. We went into some of the favelas in Rio de Janeiro that are run by narotrafficers because that’s where the good food stories were. I didn’t give it a second thought that there were guys shoving guns in our faces. The same way that I didn’t think when I was traveling as a civilian in Venezuela that the guys tried to rob us on the highway at night were going to shoot us with rusty guns that didn’t have bullets in them, they were just hungry. We were talking a long time ago on this call about me being a human beings being a better version of themselves when they are on the road I’m a frumpy 53 year old Jewish guy that lives in the suburbs of Minneapolis. There’s nothing very tough or macho about me when I’m at home but when I’m on the road I’m pretty fearless. I’m up for anything and I like that because then I export that back into my home life and I think I’m a little more interesting of a person.

Q) I want to know what you thought of your trip here. You have a very explosive culinary team and I know you got to partake in it a little bit.

A) Yeah I thought it was wonderful, I wanted to come to San Antonio for a long time because I like to go to places where everybody says why would you go there? San Antonio is one of the best kept secrets in America, but probably no longer a secret, especially after our show comes out. The, I mean first of all, today in America there are a radical number of chefs all going to secondary and tertiary cities because there is audience there. They want good food. There is less competition and it’s affordable to be in the food business. I don’t think I have been as impressed with the restaurants in a long time as I was with the co-op ownership restaurant and cooking philosophy of the crew. This is a restaurant that’s run by four or five really energetic young people. They change the menu every couple of weeks. They serve in a refashioned, remodeled containership. They only have 12 seats. They cook in front of the people. They do the shopping. They wash the dishes. They serve the food. They clean the place themselves but more importantly they take their tips and they donate a portion of it to charities designated by their customers and they take another portion and throw it back to all of their farmers. I’ve been in the restaurant business for 30 years. I’ve never seen a restaurant where 30 year olds are sitting there and saying in our first restaurant we’re going to like not make a profit but we are going to make our community better. And really mean it, and it’s not that they don’t want to be successful. They just measure success in different ways. It’s not about money to them. Side Bar, the food is breathtaking, a great flag bearer in Johnny Hernandez who is as plugged in and is knowledgeable about the Mexican food scene as anybody. And you have fantastic, fantastic audience there that isn’t afraid to be experimented at. Oh for sure, I mean, look there’s so many amazing people, Gwendolyn is a fantastic example. I mean, Gwendolyn is a restaurant that for those that don’t know where the chef owner doesn’t use any equipment or foods that came after 1840 something, 1850. So, yes, he has to use refrigerators because the Health Department would have a problem with him the same way he needs to use energy to run his hood system because it’s illegal otherwise but other than that, it’s talk about a scratch kitchen, that’s unbelievable. They make their ice creams. They spin their ice creams and sorbets by hand every night right before service and it loses its refined texture and so they get rid of it every night.

Q) What’s the gutsiest thing you’ve ever had to, that you’ve ever eaten? And have you ever really thought about just not trying something? I mean, have you actually denied something?

A) Yes. I’ve denied food twice, both times as a lifelong culinarian, I knew that it was going to put me in the hospital, not just get me sick. I, there was some rotted poultry intestines that someone had cooked and tried to serve me in a market in the Philippines during the first year that we were making the show, and I could tell that these animals were sick animals and it was just going to get me very ill. We were in India once and there was some street food that was being moistened with a brown sludgy water that was coming out of an old pipe in the little public square where the stalls were setup and I knew, I mean I drink the water everywhere that I am. I think I am going to donate my flora and fauna to science when I die because I’m – I think I have things in me I don’t get sick, I’m the right guy for the right job, I have – somehow I have a tolerance for a lot of the stuff that everyone else everyone else on the crew gets sick when they eat the blank or drink the blank and I don’t. But, and I think it’s from a lifetime spent traveling and doing this. I mean, I’m not a bought and paid presenter. I mean, this is what I do. I am who I am in the show in real life and I’ve always traveled and eaten this way and been – had this attitude about life and food. But to those instances I’ve turned it down famously in our Cambodian episode, there was a lady cleaning fish in the same water that people were going to the bathroom in and I did not, this family also had no possessions, had no money, and they were cleaning the fish that they had gone out and caught for us to serve us. And I knew that perhaps someone might, I might spend a night of discomfort, but I wanted to be a better guest than a smart-ass TV host, and it was important for me to eat their food. Same thing with our Rome show, we just came back from Rome and we were with an eel, the last eel fisherman on the Tiber and the Tiber is a very dirty river and at the beginning of the day I was like there’s no way I’m going to eat the eel if this guy pulls it out of the water here and at the end of the day, eight hours later, I ate it because I was just in love with this man and his friends so much and I had too much respect for him to say no.

Q) Wow, did you get ill?

A) Neither time. But I mean, you’d be shocked when you see the Rome thing, much as people who remember the Cambodia episode were like how did you eat that? And I, both times I said to the camera, I know people think I’m crazy, but what am I going to do, say no to this person? They just, they have – they are so proud of their way of life and what they have to offer us, I can’t say no.

Q) When you were young, as a little boy, what was the first gutsy thing that you ate that you can remember?

A) Oh, as well, I always ate everything. I mean, my parents knew but I knew, I told them when I was seven, I told them I wanted to be a chef. I mean, I was all about trying everything but I was raised in a family of, with two adventurous parents who both loved food and traveled a lot and I traveled with them and there was no other kids ask their parents for a hamburger or chicken fingers at the restaurant and I wanted the tasting menu. I mean, that’s just how I’ve always been programmed and my father and mother have pictures of me five years old picking little begonia, tiny little snails and Paris on a trip there with them and in Mexico as a little kid with my dad, in Puerto Vallarta in the mid-60s eating beef head tacos and tacos de sesos, the brain tacos that, I don’t know, I just always, to me there was nothing wrong with all that my grandmother cooked kidneys and tongues in her house and there was nothing wrong with that.

Q) So a lot of it was the raised then, that helped influence you?

A) Well yeah, yeah I mean I’m a parent now so I know how hard it is to feed kids, but I’ve also run every experiment in the book on my son, his friends, our neighbor’s kids, and the problem is with us parents and with our culture giving messages to our kids that they have a choice. Most people don’t in the world. That creates waste and it creates things that I don’t think are appropriate for children. I think it ends up being problematic and I’m a real softie libertarian when it comes to my parenting skills but when it comes to food, it’s a precious thing and you eat what is there and I have arguments all the time with our neighbors who tell me, “well you can’t get a kid to eat fish.” And I’m like, “tell that to Japanese parents.” That’s all their kids eat, it’s your kids, children, American children, are not designed from a genetic standpoint to be opposed to eating things. In fact, the exact opposite, from a survival standpoint we are programmed to eat all the things that are good for us without limitation, and so it’s parents and our society, our culture, that imprints ideas on children beginning about age five months about food and if kids hear parents talking about things as being eww, that’s gross in reference to foods, then they will think that it’s okay when they grow up and become six year olds to think that certain foods are gross. It’s just that  I don’t like cookie dough because I don’t like the texture.

 

 

*CONFERENCE CALL*