Eat On The Wild Side!
Here’s a geographically-ordered romp through the world’s strangest food customs, dishes and ingredients. I’ve been receiving emails from these folks for several years, each highlighting short articles about random things I needed to know more about right away! – which I could remedy by going to their website. And now there’s a book that gathers them all in one fabulous, fully-illustrated artifact. I couldn’t have designed a better rabbit-hole myself.
Although it’s organized by region (not excluding Antarctica), the most fun way to experience this book is by randomly opening it and starting to read. You will find juxtapositions of the delightful and the disgusting (Italian spaghetti ice-cream sundaes and fried octopus ink sacs); food pioneers, among them Tom Carvel (soft-serve ice cream) and Maria Orosa (Philippine banana ketchup); and deep dives into subjects you didn’t even know you wanted to know more about (a two-page spread on “Oregon’s Mysterious Mycology”).
This book has considerably lengthened my bucket list (as if Tony Bourdain’s shows weren’t bad enough – Hawaii Spam Jam, here I come)! But they throw historical as well as contemporary tidbits into the frangipani. Did you know that prospectors in the Yukon gold rush (1896) were required to bring a year’s worth of food with them? On page 253, there’s a reproduction of one department store’s suggested packing list. Seventy-five pounds of sugar, $3.00. Ten pounds of coffee, $3.00. Seems a little light on the coffee to me.
Uses of foods in non-gastronomic ways are also explored. A page on “Pantry Alternatives to Tarot Cards” describes using vegetables in ways similar to reading entrails, but less messy. Oh, and “gastromancy,” practiced by the ancient Greek oracles: intuiting the will of the gods through the gurgling of the stomach. This continued through the Middle Ages, when it was considered witchcraft, to the 18th century, when it fell out of favor as the “prophets” were revealed to manipulate their gut sounds to simulate voices.
And about Antarctica? The last article includes a roundup of every base station’s cuisine, including their specialties. Most are what you’d expect: the European Union station boasts foie gras, Yorkshire pudding and chicken Parmesan, while the Polish station prides itself on a traditional Polish Easter breakfast. There are some edgy innovations, though – the Japanese station has adapted the cold noodle dish nagashi somen, where diners pluck up noodles moving through running water in a bamboo slide, to present the noodles flowing through a channel cut directly into the ice. However, the consensus appears to be that the Chinese Great Wall station has the best cuisine, and a hydroponic garden, to boot.
Still, even with the lure of good food, Antarctica will not be added to my bucket list. There are so many other places to go and things to eat in this excellent book, I’m sure I won’t miss it.
