Download The Bizarre Truth: How I Walked Out the Door Mouth First...and Came Back Shaking My Head AudioBook Free
Andrew Zimmern, the sponsor of this Travel Channel’s struck series Bizarre Foods, has an extraordinarily well-earned reputation for visiting far and wide to seek out and sample everything that’s consumed as food internationally, from cow vein stew in Bolivia and big soaring ants in Uganda to raw camel kidneys in Ethiopia, putrefied shark in bloodstream pudding in Iceland and Wolfgang Puck's Hunan style rooster balls in LA. For Zimmern, local cuisine — bizarre, gross or downright tummy turning as it might be to us -- is not only what’s served at mealtime. It is a primary avenue to learning about what's most traditional — the bizarre fact — about civilizations everywhere. Having ingested his way around the world over the span of four seasons of Bizarre Foods, Zimmern has now launched Bizarre Worlds, a fresh series on the Travel Channel, and this, his first reserve, a chronicle of his journeys as he not only tastes the “taboo treats” of the world, but delves deep into the cultures and standards of living of far-flung locales and seeks the most prized of the modern traveller’s goals: The Authentic Experience. Written in the smart, often hilarious tone he uses to narrate his TV shows, Zimmern uses his journeys in “culinary anthropology” to demonstrate such topics as: why browsing local market segments can uncover more about locations than museums; the importance of heading to “the previous stop on the subway” — the most remote area of a location where its fact is frequently revealed; the need to seek out and catalog “the previous bottle of coca-cola in the desert,” i.e. disappearing foods and civilizations; the profound distinctions between eating out and eating; and the pleasures of snout to tail, local, fresh and organic and natural food. Zimmern takes readers into the backside of a souk in Morocco where locals are eating a whole roasted lamb; along with a conch fisherman in Tobago, who could be the previous of his kind; to Mississippi, where he dines on raccoon and possum. There, he creates, "People said, 'That's roadkill!' ‘No it's not,’ I said. ‘From the cultural storyline.’”
Whether it’s a session with an Incan witch doctor in Ecuador who blows fireplace on him, spits on him, thrashes him with poisonous branches and beats him with a live guinea pig or drinking bloodstream in Uganda and cow urine tonic in India or eating roasted bats with an uninhabited island in Samoa, Zimmern cheerfully celebrates the undiscovered locations and weird wonders still remaining inside our progressively globalized world.
From the Hardcover release.
