Anything That Moves

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

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Portions of this book have appeared in different form in
The New Yorker.

Copyright © 2013 by Dana Goodyear

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goodyear, Dana.

Anything that moves : renegade chefs, fearless eaters, and the making

of a new American food culture / Dana Goodyear.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-63206-2

1. Food—Social aspects—United States. 2. Food habits—United States. 3. Cooking—Social aspects—United States. 4. Extremists—United States. 5. Cooks—United States. 6. Gourmets—United States. 7. United States—Social life and customs—1971– I. Title.

GT2853.U5G66 2013 2013025054

394.1'2—dc23

For Rummy and Willa, my darlings

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

| PART I |

SQUISHY OR SWANK?

One.
T
HE
S
CAVENGER

Two.
G
RUB

Three.
B
ACKDOOR
M
EN

| PART II |

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Four.
T
HE
R
AWESOME
T
HREE

Five.
D
OUBLE
D
ARE

Six.
H
AUTE
C
UISINE

| PART III |

DISCOMFORT FOOD

Seven.
G
UTS

Eight.
O
FF
M
ENU

Nine.
T
HE
H
UNT

 

Coda

Acknowledgments

B
ugs, horse, brains, whale; leaves, weeds, ice cream flavored with lichen-covered logs. The disturbingly familiar and the alarmingly rare, the unregulated, illegal, and indeterminate. A new American cuisine is forming, one marked by extreme and challenging ingredients. Animals never before considered or long since forgotten are emerging as delicacies. Parts that used to be for scrap are centerpieces. Ash and hay are fashionable ingredients, and you pay handsomely to breathe flavored air. I haven't yet heard of an American chef with the nerve to serve actual dirt—in Tokyo you can get a fancy dirt soup, and compost is an ingredient at one of Spain's most celebrated restaurants—but a high-end meal in this country feels incomplete these days without a little mound of “soil” made from cocoa or coffee. Going out to a nice dinner often precipitates a confrontation with a fundamental evolutionary question: Is that food?

My relationship to food is that of an acrophobe to a bridge: unease masks a desire to jump. A well-fed child with the imagination of a scrounger, I remember holing up in the back of the station wagon eating the dog's Milk-Bones, which were tastier than you might expect. Thinking of the sorrel that grew under our swing set still makes me drool. In winter—we lived outside Cleveland at that point—we drizzled maple syrup on the snow. My mother, who taught herself to cook by reading Elizabeth David, made everything from scratch, down to the English muffins. (She says I once asked her peevishly if it wouldn't be more convenient to buy some frozen food.) My father hunted. We always had a meat freezer full of doves from the eastern shore of Maryland and elk from the Rockies.

As I grew older, I remained curious. When I was in college, I got a summer job in Hong Kong at the
South China Morning Post
. After being teased in the lunchroom by a Singaporean colleague for being squeamish, I tried chicken feet. In Hanoi, I went to a dog restaurant and ate seven courses of “hornless goat.” (Back home, I told my disgusted family that dogs may have been domesticated to serve as a source of meat in lean times. They still thought I was gross.) In Africa, I ate African animals; in South America, South American ones. But at home I was a “normal” eater—no chicken feet, no pets.

Until I started hanging out with foodies. Coined by the critic Gael Greene in 1980 to describe the devoted fans of an untrained Paris housewife who cooked in heels, the word
foodie
has taken on a new life in the age of social media. An American foodie documents what she eats with the avidity of a competitive birder, and publishes the images online for the world to see. So-called food porn is the most popular content on Pinterest, one of the fastest-growing websites in history, and it dominates the photo-sharing sites Instagram and Flickr. It's everywhere on TV. And, as with any fetish, the more outlandish and rarefied a find, the more a foodie likes it.

In “The Food Wife,” a 2011 episode of
The Simpsons,
Marge and the kids become thrill-seeking food bloggers, sampling pig snouts, walrus moustaches, pine-needle sorbet, and a “regret course” of human tears. Matthew Selman, who wrote the episode and considers it a love letter to his kind, arranges family trips around restaurant reservations and finds himself ordering “the most organy, taily, brainy, nosy thing in the world—
because
it's exciting and dangerous.” He has a hard time with the terminology, though. “I wish there was a word other than ‘foodie,'” he says. “How about ‘super food asshole' or ‘pretentious food jerk'?” But somehow this piggy, cute, overweening word is right.
Gourmet
is too grand—too faux—for this movement;
epicure
is too ancient. We needed a word in English—a keen, young, democratic word—to describe the epidemic of food love.

•   •   •

L
ate-Roman eating habits are, to us, the emblem of the society's decadence, a forerunner of and justification for its fall. According to Patrick Faas, a historian of Roman food, “Rome became the giant stomach of the world, devouring everything,” during its five hundred years of imperial rule. The rich considered birds' brains a delicacy and relished moray eels, which they kept in swimming pools at home. (Vedius Pollio, a friend of Augustus, supposedly preferred his eels fattened on human flesh.) In the third century AD, Emperor Elagabalus served coxcombs, peacock heads, and, as an accompaniment to womb-in wild sow, peas with gold, lentils with onyx, beans with amber, and rice with pearls—dishes it is not too hard to imagine in a high-end restaurant today.

Elagabalus was beheaded and, by the standard we apply to Rome, we are due for a comeuppance, too. The big picture about food is frightening: the Western diet overexploits unsustainable resources and, increasingly, our bad habits are being embraced by rapidly industrializing countries with large populations. In the aftermath of Michael Pollan's
The Omnivore's Dilemma,
which demonstrated the problem with a food system devoted to beefsteak and corn, Americans are opening up to previously unthinkable alternatives. In ambitious restaurants, the mainstream twentieth-century Western diet, with its narrow array of acceptable animals and plants, is being questioned. Most of what I consider here is eaten for pleasure—it is expensive, nonessential—but often it refers to necessity, the kind of deep, bone-licking eating that people do when they must milk every last calorie.

Daniel Pauly, a marine ecologist who studies global fisheries, believes that we are not so much changing our preferences as reacting to forces we choose to deny. “This idea of ‘liking things' is actually a reflection of the pressure on the environment,” he says. “You like what you can get. I grew up in Switzerland eating lots of horse meat because it was cheaper, and so I liked horse meat. China has had an immense population for a long time and cannot afford to be very selective. They eat anything that moves.”
Anything that moves
: using that phrase about another culture's eating habits used to be an insult. Now it is a foodie-to-foodie brag, used to celebrate unchecked appetite. Taken another way, it speaks to the hidden side of food culture, where markets are created and desire is conjured; it's a seller's guiding principle. But Pauly is a scientist interested in evolutionary tactics—he admires survival—and, like the foodies who have adopted the expression as their proud credo, he means it as a compliment.

•   •   •

W
riting this book, I set out to explore the outer bounds of food culture, where the psychological, rational, legal, ethical, and indeed physical limits of edibility are being tried—and sometimes overturned. What I found was a collection of go-betweens, chefs, and adventurous eaters—scofflaws, innovators, and crusaders—who are breaking with convention to reshape the American palate. Eating alongside them tested my stamina and tolerance for risk. There were things I was surprised to learn I could not bring myself to eat, and others I was disturbed to discover I relish. In our contemporary cuisine, I see anxiety behind the hedonism and resourcefulness tricked out as decadence. After centuries of perfecting the ritual of “civilized” dining, there is a furious backpedaling, a wilding, even among the chefs who employ the most cutting-edge techniques. At the same time, the traditional foods of poverty are being recast as elite. It is the height of sophistication to tear the meat from an animal's bones with your teeth and bare hands. To look at the food for sale in our best restaurants, you'd think that our civilization had peaked and collapsed; what we see on our plates is a post-apocalyptic free-for-all of crudity and refinement, technology and artlessness, an unimaginable future and a forgotten past.

In the past couple of years, extreme foodie-ism has become astonishingly mainstream. In December 2012, when talk of the Mayan apocalypse was in the air, Gevork Kazanchyan, a former L.A. County health inspector, hosted a multicourse dinner, with craft-beer pairings, at a barbecue restaurant in Long Beach—hardly a culinary epicenter. Advertising the event, Kazanchyan had called for only “brave, open-minded diners with no medical nor psychological restrictions on what they can consume.” It was an outrageous requirement—whose diet contains
no
restrictions?—but it was only slightly more explicit in its demands than what high-end restaurants today routinely ask of their patrons. Beside each place setting was a stack of sealed envelopes containing descriptions of the courses, which were to be kept secret until after each was served—taste first, judge later.

Kazanchyan is in the unfortunate position of loving food yet knowing too much about microbiology to be at ease when eating it. Sometimes, the food-safety geek in him prevails. “It was a bunch of new-age gastro-enthusiasts versus me,” he told me, describing a recent party at his house. “A buddy of mine who's a craft cocktailian and Ph.D. student in organic chem came over and was making egg-based cocktails. I was like, ‘Dude, why are you not using pasteurized eggs?' He's like, ‘Dude, it's one in twenty thousand.' I'm like, ‘It doesn't make it a permissible safe practice.'” In November 2012, Kazanchyan published a cover story in the
Journal of Environmental Health
about the potential hazards of artisanal cocktails: fresh produce, raw eggs, and hand-shaped ice. “Unfortunately, theatrical components may not be quite so compatible with applicable public health regulations,” he wrote—even though they taste “all sorts of good.”

Sixty people showed up to the dinner in Long Beach. I sat down next to a guy named Thad, who was in his mid-twenties, with dark, slick-backed hair, dark jeans rolled at the cuff, argyle socks, and a leather jacket. He was from West Virginia, and he still had a bit of a twang. Across the table were his friends Erika and Kevin. The three of them had met a few years earlier, working at an Apple store deep in the San Fernando Valley. They were ordinary young aspiring professionals. I asked Thad what brought him. “The food,” he said emphatically. “I'm hoping for brains. Hearts. Bone marrow.”

Erika was from Bolivia, accustomed to all of those things but afraid of most seafood. She let on that she was a little nervous. “Nervous means excited,” Kevin said. He was half Salvadoran and half Vietnamese, an unflappable eater. He's had eel heart, still beating, and he's pretty sure he's eaten dog, marked as “meat,” in Vietnamese restaurants in L.A. With Filipino friends he tried
balut,
an unhatched duckling, cooked in its shell and eaten entire: eyes, beak, feathers, and bones.
Balut
, a Manila street food,
has a reputation among American foodies for being one of the most psychologically challenging things you can eat. A blogger who writes with equanimity about eating python calls it his “culinary heart of darkness.” To me, the idea was horrifying in its simplicity: an unmediated encounter with food, and with lots of parts—feathers, beak—that are decidedly
not
food. And not so much as a sprig of parsley to distract the eye.

Thad grew up eating green beans boiled to gray and burned pork chops and, when he was of age, drinking Miller Lite. After getting hooked on food porn on TV, he decided to read Anthony Bourdain, the former chef whose uninhibited approach to eating has inspired a nation of food adventurers. Thad became obsessed with finding the kinky stuff. “You can eat anything,” he said. “There's so many stipulations, like ‘Oooooh the texture, oooooh sweetbreads.' But if it's prepared the right way it can be great.” He started eating at places where he could get pigs' ears and tails and organ meats, and he has accepted that there are certain kinds of finicky girls he can no longer date. Being in Los Angeles gives him a huge advantage. “You can find just about everything if you look,” he said.

The first course came out: a Kumamoto oyster in a petri dish, in a matrix of coriander-flavored agar gel, with habanero cotton candy and several oils that, through the use of tapioca maltodextrin, had been made to resemble “a festering disease.” Erika looked dubious. “No preconceptions, no fear,” Thad said, digging into the awful, slippery, gummy mess.

We ate
huitlacoche
—corn fungus—alongside snails and black trumpet mushrooms. “We wanted this to be a little uncomfortable,” the chef said. “
Huitlacoche
is the most famous of the gross decomposers. Farmers used to get really upset when they'd find it on their corn, until they figured out that they could sell it for three times per pound what corn costs. It's ridiculously expensive—ours cost thirty-one dollars a pound.” Accompanying the course was a Belgian brown beer made with deer sinews and tendons from a Chinese apothecary, and birds' nests that the brewer stole from his mother.

“I'm waiting for the body parts,” Thad said. When a course of octopus tentacles came out, still wiggling, Kazanchyan provided instruction. “Pulverize the tissue,” he said. “It needs to stop moving before you swallow it.” Otherwise, he said, the tentacles might lodge in the throat—a problem that is said to cause several deaths a year in Korea, and makes live octopus among the most dangerous foods in the world. “Right up there with blowfish and rhubarb,” he said. “Now we're talking,” Thad said. Everybody chewed for a long time. A sucker attached itself to the inside of Thad's lip.

“I'm offended by the word
foodie
,” Thad said at last. By this time he was drinking my beer.

Kevin pointed at him. “
You're
a foodie,” he said. “You have a list.”

“What is the definition?” Thad said, tucking into a stuffed lamb heart. “Wanting to explore and eat anything out of the norm? We're becoming more open. Young people are more open. I am not a foodie, Goddamn it. I just like good food.”

Jonathan, a strawberry-blond roaster at an artisanal coffee shop in Orange County, espoused a more complex view. Late in history, with America's institutions crumbling around them, he and his friends felt mistrustful, even paranoid. They had retreated into Home Ec, believing that if the worst were to happen, at least they'd know how to pickle their own vegetables. “Our generation feels lost,” he said. “We're wanting to be self-sufficient.” Near the end of the meal, Thad got his marrow. It was made into a ridiculously rich crème brûlée, which was served in a hollowed-out femur bone the chef had sawed himself.