Strange Food

Have you ever checked out "Bizarre Food with Andrew Zimmern" on the Travel Channel? If not, ya oughtta: it's a travelogue accompanied by (yes) bizarre food -- or just interesting local food in (often) fantastic global settings to which Andrew travels in pursuit of seemingly oddball eats. Either way, it's a whole lotta fun (a fact of which I was reminded today, thanks to a Gadling interview).

Zimmern's view on victuals is well worth watching (or reading about) -- take just this one sentence from a Vietnamese trip, for instance:

"In Vietnam, after a day cruising Ha Long Bay on a hundred year old Chinese junk, we went to the island of Cat Hai where they have been making fish sauce the same way for a thousand years."

Don't you just want to know more? And eat the fish sauce?

Besides the cool travel/foodalogues, there is also interactive food fun to be had on Zimmern's Travel Channel site, like a video contest: three minutes of food footage created by you (the title of the vid contest should give you an idea for the content: "How Bizarre Are You?" -- check out the "Eating Live Octopus" video for some inspiration, if needed). And a cute "Bizarre Quiz" (which assigned me fairly non-bizarre foods -- or not bizarre in Montana*, anyway) -- or win the bizarre food photo contest (sponsored by -- yeah -- Pepto Bismol).

Eating odd-to-you foods abroad is a big part of the fun of travel -- and even if you're not able to ingest something which once utilized more than four legs (scorpion on an herbed cream cheese and cucumber crudite?), or a body part meant to function near a brainpan or excretory organ (when it was functioning), you'll love eating the local food which you may already love, but in exotic locales: tapas in Spain are a good example of simple fare familiar from home but served in totally cool ways; crepes from a steaming street stand in Paris on a cold spring night are a part of my "happy place" thoughts (you know -- the peaceful thing you're supposed to think of when in some stressful situation... like imagining yourself relaxing on the beach before a job interview or when the plane seems like it's about to crash).

I once would eat just about anything, but a few things never took my fancy: I don't hanker to have balut (fertilized duck egg, as in duck fetus), for instance -- just doesn't do it for my happy place (Deep End Dining calls balut the "culinary heart of darkness"). However, I usually do have a pretty good gotta-try-it attitude... but Andrew Zimmern's got a whole 'nother food philosophy that most humans just can't get anywhere near. Check out his personal site and TV show for some inspired eating anywhere from your own local cafe* to street stands on the other side of the world:

• Andrew Zimmern
• Travel Channel: Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern

Other cool food blogs from near and far:

• Deep End Dining (note the balut video and live tentacles video)
• EatingAsia
• Phnomenon: Food in Cambodia
• The Girl Who Ate Everything

And for some interesting travel tidbits, check out the crew blog from the other foodie-travel Travel Channel hit, "Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations".

_{Student Travel blog home | Share on Facebook | | Top photo: © Travel Channel; bottom photo: © Kathleen Crislip}

*So I took the Bizarre Foods quiz twice, and the object is clearly to assign you a level of worldiness and derring do and serve you a bizarre food choice accordingly. The first time I completed the quiz, I was given calf's brains -- which, in fact, I already ate in real life (the first serving was in Missoula, Montana, at the Oxford Cafe, many moons ago). The second time I took the quiz, I changed an answer (the question was along the lines of the strangest place you've ever woken up, and on my second go-round, I went ahead and picked "Turkish prison" because I got the question's drift and there are -- in my estimation and experience -- equally strange places and jails in which to wake up...). Yeah, so, I changed an answer and got bull testicles (plus another bit) as my dish... and I already ate those, too. Coincidentally, also in Montana. So, is Montana, like, my food mecca? Or is it just that Montana happens to be one of the easier places to eat every part of a bovine at cafes and friends' barbecues? Frankly, I was kinda hoping for Teriyaki Tarantula on a stick...