Why Andrew Zimmern eats weird food
Photo credit: Andy Kropa/Redux | Patrons of the Mud Truck, a coffee shop on wheels established in 2001, purchase coffee on a Monday morning at Astor Place in Manhattan.
Not too long ago, Andrew Zimmern was in Tanzania, living with the Masai, drinking two-week old room-temperature clotted milk that "just absolutely turned into rancid, horrible cheese."
And that was all in a day's work for Zimmern, who hosts the Travel Channel's globetrotting show, "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern," airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m. And, in case you're wondering, he loved it.
Zimmern, 47, who spent the first 31 years of his life in New York City, and now calls Minnesota home, spends his time going to exotic locales and dining on the local cuisine -- what the indigenous people are chowing down on during their daily lives. This means that when he was in Phuket, Thailand, where he went for last week's third season premiere, he'd consume (relatively) innocuous foods like cashews and beef stomachs, as well as the certifiably bizarre -- fried grasshoppers, stingray and red weaver ants.
And don't think this is anything like "Fear Factor" -- Zimmern, whose motto is: "If it looks good, eat it," downs these foods with the same aplomb as if he was served a hamburger. It is all part of the long-time, iron-stomached chef's goal of "seeking out the relationship between food and culture."
"I wanted to get out there and experience stuff that was a little more culturally significant," Zimmern continues. "The foods that had the most amazing narrative behind them, were the foods that were shocking to people on one side of the world, but very familiar to people on the other."
Zimmern, who's jovial with a snarky, yet kind of goofy, sense of humor, got his start with unusual foods with his parents.
"My family was definitely the type to drive six hours to eat a roasted baby pig under some aqueduct in the middle of Spain," he says. "My dad thought that was fun. I got infected with that same fever."
That exuberance brings him to some far off locations in the coming weeks -- Sicily tonight -- and in the coming weeks, he'll hit Samoa, Uganda, Ethiopia, Texas and Maine. Yeah, you read that right -- there are bizarre foods right here in America. New Yorkers might be surprised to know that people in the south eat snakes and people in Alaska eat fermented fish heads.
And that's not to say that New York doesn't have its share of strange eats. Some people might find it bizarre to eat tongue, but, as Zimmern points out, if you "go into the Carnegie Deli, you see sliced tongue on every table."And if that's not enough tongue, one of Zimmern's favorite Chinese restaurants in NYC is Congee Bowery where he loves to pack away the duck tongues with chilies and ginger.
But it's a big world and there are a lot of places for Zimmern to explore beyond the city. Last Sunday Zimmern lifted off for Australia where he'll be dining on some of the local fare, including fresh kangaroo and fresh wallaby.
With all of the weird foods just mentioned here, not to mention the other rancid, fermented, animal parts -- from snout to tail -- he's eaten, you might wonder if Zimmern's ever gotten sick on the job, left spending his nights praying to the porcelain god.
"I've yet to spend a night around the commode because of my job," he says, adding a shocking bit of information. "When the cameras stop rolling, I keep eating.
"When you're in some backwater town in southern Thailand, eating some sort of putrefied skate-wings or something," he says, "I like going there, hanging out with these people, finding out all I can about the food and then eat it. Actually eat it, eat it."
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