A Year of Eating Dangerously

Yesterday I was writing about the virtues of a good map and the call of adventure. Part of any road trip is the food and it is so disappointing when you travel with somebody that isn't willing to take a chance on anything out of their comfort zone. That's one of those dividing lines in human personalities, the open-minded omnivore verses the risk adverse picky eater.

Several fast food chains have capitalized so well on the apprehensions of the traveler. From coast to coast you're totally aware they serve the same mediocre food in everyone of their restaurants. Before you even step in the doorway you know the menu and the prices. There's no room for surprise -either good or bad. 

When traveling through an unfamiliar town the roadside diner, the little Mom & Pop restaurant or that one of kind bistro represents a gamble. With any adventure you want minimize risk but without risk you can't have any adventure at all. Like one trip through western Maryland where my wife and I stayed at a real old-timey hotel. One of the specialties in the hotel restaurant was deep fried calves brains. They were good though my wife wasn't the slightest bit interested in trying that. After all these years she stills worries that I'm going come down with some exotic neurological disease and she has since become a vegetarian.  

Historically speaking life has always been hard and before the Green Revolution in agriculture most the world's population was very close to famine. Out of necessity people learned to use and eat everything. Now that the world markets have an abundance of cheap food some of the necessities of the past have become modern delicacies. Once a friend's mother scoffed at a salad filled with sun dried tomatoes. As she said "that's poor people's food". Then she told us about her childhood in Italy and how for three weeks every year her village was flooded with tomatoes. If you could not afford to can the excess tomatoes then you had to dry them. She could not believe sun dried tomatoes were haute cuisine in America.

I always enjoyed Italian cuisine but it does have a dark side. Casa Marzu translates to "rotten cheese". A specific type of fly maggot is introduced into the cheese as it ages. It is illegal to sell it but officials turn a blind eye to its production. If you want a truly pungent cheese without maggots, in England they have Stinking Bishop Cheese. It was made famous by the movie Wallace and Gromit, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, though I'm told the cheese is not for children -or the faint of heart. 



Of course whatever you think is strange has to be put in the context of the time and place. Montana is the unofficial state of the Rocky Mountain Oyster, the testicles of rams or goats. In the beef industry a steer is a castrated bull and once not so long ago the testicles were a prized cut of beef.  One person in catering business, Chef Phil, cooked a five star meal around the entree of bovine testicles. His guest thought it was milk feed veal, Phil made the mistake of telling them it wasn't.

Out in God's country testicles are a lot more acceptable, you can do search and find dozens of "testicle festivals". In the Old West the larger grazing animals are popular but in the Mid-West the preference is turkey testicles. As a bit of biology trivia, the turkey has his under his left wing. It sounds like something out of a political joke but it's true. Another bit of trivia, pig's testicles are a traditional meal severed to Japanese women on their wedding night.




Asia probably has some of the most idiosyncratic dishes on the menu. Of course in Japan they have the Fugu -a poisonous blowfish served as sushi. Japan is also the home of ice cream flavors like squid, octopus and fried eggplant. The Durian fruit is a spiky melon that smells like carrion when it's cut opened. In Korea there are soups, beers and liquors made with snakes. In China they have candy made of bean paste and restaurants that serve dishes exclusively of rat.

After all that food you might want a cup of coffee. In Indonesia they have Civet Cat Coffee. This native cat is feed the fruit of the coffee tree, what we call a bean is really the seed inside a cherry. The cat digests the cherry part and excretes the beans. Civet Cat Coffee is the most expensive coffee in the world. If you can find it, the price starts at $110 pound. To compete on the luxury coffee market one entrepreneur is using elephants in place of the cats.

Food is a personal thing and I'm not sure if I'm making people more curious or more cautious. My idea of culinary adventure might be driving up and down the coast of Maine looking for the best lobster roll sandwich.

  
If you want to be viciously adventurous this book comes on good recommendation. Some of the food items mentioned in this post are written about at length the book





Maybe I'll write more about this later, I didn't even start on all the different way insects get cooked and used as food .







Of course I had to find one Youtube video of what happens when things go badly.