Anything That Moves (18 page)

Cosentino and Dotolo bemoaned the scarcity of high-quality offal in the U.S. “All innards end up in commodity—it's so stupid!” Dotolo said. “We say, ‘You kill all these cows, where are the hearts?'”

“Hamburger,” Cosentino said.

“Dog food,” Dotolo replied.

“It's a dirty, fuckin' nasty business,” Cosentino said. “The offal goes as payment to the slaughterhouses. They bulk it up.” After much searching, he said, he had found a source for green tripe—intestine stained from a diet of grass and left in its natural state. “White tripe is bleached with Clorox,” he said. “Doesn't it say on the bottle, ‘Don't Drink?' I'd give you a bag to take home but it's still frozen.”

“I'm not a tripe person,” Hendler said. “I'm a nice Jewish girl from New York City.”

•   •   •

B
y 5:30 on the night of the Head to Tail, there was a line out the door. The theme of the night, chalked on the specials board, was “Respecting the Right to Choose the Meat We Eat!”

“And people don't like offal,” Cosentino said smugly. “They think it's gross.” Harold McGee, the food writer, was one of the first to arrive. He has helped Cosentino with technical problems over the years, such as how to pasteurize blood without causing it to coagulate and lose its color. He sat at the bar with a friend, and when the
amuse-bouche
arrived—whipped calves' brains and toast—he tapped his temple and nodded. I struggled with the brains—not with the creamy, mild taste, but with the idea of them. For me, they were, as Claude Lévi-Strauss might have said, “bad to think.” The reference felt too pointed, too much of a put-down of bovine intelligence—as if the highest possible use for this young brain was to feed mine.

A few seats down sat the Dapper Diner, a heavy Asian fellow with a side part, who was wearing a lavender shirt, a striped periwinkle bow tie, a maroon vest, a silk handkerchief in the pocket of a brown sport coat, and a thumb ring. He was tweeting a picture of the menu. “I just tweet,” he said. “I don't write.” (His bio on Twitter, which I looked up later, reads: “I eat. My 4 basic food groups are foie gras, sweetbread, truffle, & pork belly.”) It was his second Head to Tail. “Last year, he did bone marrow éclair,” he said, a huge smile breaking over his congenial face. “I love offal. Other places are doing it, but not as much as here. You see sweetbreads and liver showing up more and more, but here they've been playing with it longer.”

The first course was homemade rigatoni—purple from Chianti, bitter from endive—served with a venison liver sauce and the first fava beans of spring. “This is me taking it back,” Cosentino had explained to the waitstaff earlier. “‘I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti'—because for years when we started doing this menu they called me Hannibal Lecter.” The sauce was peppery and greasy, like bits left in a pan.

Out came a fishy, deep puttanesca with a kick. In place of noodles, Cosentino used strips of pig skin, and he had named the dish
“
Porca Puttana!
”
—a nasty thing to say in Italian.

Cosentino's wife, Tatiana, a formidable blond woman who is his partner in the cured-meats business, was also dining at the bar with a friend. “Pig whore?” she said when she saw him. “That just rolls off the tongue?” He kissed her on the cheek. “Pussy pasta?” he ventured. “It's unctuous and gelatinous and we are a country of crunchy. It's an experiment in gooey, icky, sticky textures.”

Tatiana said that Cosentino no longer felt so alone. Pig ears and tripe had practically become clichés. “Now everyone's doing it,” she said. “Beef heart is gateway offal. It sounds scary but it tastes like a sirloin.”

After we had eaten the head, feet, heart, and spleen of a lamb, puffed beef tendons, and some oysters, it was time for dessert. The waitress delivered a shallow bowl containing a molded cream-colored panna cotta, golden popcorn, and pink flakes of shaved torchon, with strawberries on the side. The little animal-rearing lesson—and sick joke—was that the panna cotta was covered with popcorn (duck food) popped in foie fat and covered with foie-enriched caramel: extreme
gavage
, cannibal-style.

“I missed most of that, what did she say?” Tatiana's friend asked after the waitress had finished describing the dish.

“She said, ‘Foie, foie, foie, maple, foie,'” Tatiana said.

•   •   •

O
ne day, sitting at a Guatemalan bakery in a nondescript, mid-central-nowhere part of Los Angeles, wearing a T-shirt showing an octopus next to a bottle of soy sauce, Jonathan Gold said, “When I was an editor at the
LA
Weekly
, in the mid-eighties, there was a woman who worked there and was in a lesbian meat collective. She first approached me because she thought I might have a line on where to get some lungs—which I didn't, because they're not allowed. There's too much surface area for the USDA to inspect and they're too prone to infection. But I always loved the idea of twenty women getting excited because Tuesday was going to be spleen day.” Gold's colleague was ahead of her time; twenty-five years later, he said, women had finally started getting into meat. “There's a whole sanguinary thing going on that's beautiful,” he said. “If women can take charge of their own sexuality, why not take charge of their own carnivorousness?”

It seemed to me that Abby Abanes, the founder of a thousand-member Meetup dining group called Pleasure Palate, had done it. Abanes is in her mid-forties, shy, with frizzy dark hair and a face dotted with small moles. She was born in the Philippines and moved to L.A. when she was five; she lives with her mother in the San Gabriel Valley. Several years ago, she decided she needed more friends and a hobby; partly inspired by Gold, she became a foodie. The first time I met her, on a bus down to Tijuana for forty-eight hours of binge eating, she was wearing an oversize T-shirt with a butcher's diagram of a pig on it. Hers was an utterly normal life, perverted by food. Since I, too, was on the bus and took part in the binge, I suppose that the same thing was happening to my life. All I lacked was the food-themed clothes.

As the first to cover the Kogi truck and a participant in the first “tasting” at Umami Burger, when it was just a BYOB one-off on lower La Brea Avenue, Abanes has achieved a modest foodie celebrity. She maintains eighty-three Pinterest boards, including Anchovies/Sardines, Bacon Love!, Avocado, Banana and/or Peanut Butter, Durian, Oxtail, Snickerdoodles, Cute Food, and Spam. When her group gathers, three or four nights a week, everybody knows the rules. “Don't eat yet!” one of them told me. “We're all like vampires over the corpse while Abby takes pictures.”

One cold, clear winter morning, I went with Abanes on a Pleasure Palate outing to the San Gabriel Valley: a bunch of ladies, down to eat weird stuff. The last to arrive was Cecilia Fabulich. She pulled up in a metallic beige Prius with the license plate “DINE LA.” A competitive cook, who once won the Judges' Trophy at the Grilled Cheese Invitational, Fabulich told me that Pleasure Palate members pride themselves on discovering restaurants. “We like to dig out new places. It gets really—” She thrust her elbows back fiercely. “Sometimes I write on
Chowhound,
and I have felt that Jonathan Gold kind of stalks us on there.”

As we stood in the parking lot, someone passed around a small foam tray of preserved eggs from 99 Ranch. Bisected, they were like sulfurous planets, with rings of amber-colored jelly and rotten green paste, and a sludgy gray-green center. I speared one with a toothpick and put it close to my face. It reeked of a urinal. I moved it toward my mouth, but some force field repelled it, and I could not get it in. This was supposed to be the warm-up; I was glued to the bench. I secreted the egg in a napkin and put it in my pocket.

We introduced ourselves by naming the most outlandish food we'd ever eaten:
balut
; Korean fermented bean soup;
nattō
(“fermented soybeans—the more you stir it the slimier it gets”); “
balut
, blood soup, or the little worms I had in Mexico”; “the goose intestine I ate Wednesday night”; “I think I've had cat meat once.” After learning that one of the women was a nurse, I decided to stick close to her. At different restaurants around the mall, we ate jellyfish, stinky tofu, and insect snacks. At a place that served steamed pig intestine and pig's-blood soup, I leaned across the table and murmured in the nurse's direction. “Are there issues about food safety?”

“If it's an infected pig, sure,” she said brightly. “I've had patients who've gotten really sick.”
Infected pig
: not the words you want to hear when you sit down to lunch. I turned my attention to the crinkly, golden intestine, which looked suddenly friendly.

Leaving the mall, we walked a few blocks to Nature Pagoda, a health-food restaurant with a B rating, run by the owner of a Chinese apothecary. The waitress brought two cracked white tureens to the table. One held soft-shell turtle in a broth as dark and dank as tank water. The meat was tough, like turkey, but the soup was delicately flavored with ginseng and astragalus; goji berries and gobo root bobbed on the surface. In the second was ox penis. “For the first time, I'm scared,” a woman named Emilie said. She had been to medical school and had worked in the urology department at UCLA. From an herbaceous, pondlike bullion thick with sticks and ruffles of black fungus, she spooned a piece of penis. “That's the corpus cavernosum,” she said—the collagenous structure that fills with blood to create an erection. At the end was a hole, the urethra. Emilie explored it with her chopstick. “That's a big hmmmmm,” she said.

“It tastes like tendon,” Fabulich said. “It needs Tabasco.” Gold, writing to me once about some boiled ox penis
he
had eaten, had used just one apt word:
chewy
. I overcame the urge to spit it out.

Our final destination was a cute Hong Kong‒style dessert shop called Tasty. Girls with long ponytails, wearing knee-high socks and fur-trimmed coats, sat in booths decorated with big pink paper camellias. After a few minutes, a waitress wearing a yellow apron appliquéd with daisies brought a glass parfait dish to the table. It contained layers of black rice, coconut milk, mango, and a translucent pulpy substance with the fragrant flavor of lychee. That was
hasma,
frog fallopian tubes. At the end of the day, Abanes said, “I'm more of an oxtail kinda girl.”

C
onscientious foodie-ism works only if you know what you are eating. A few years ago, Dave Arnold, the genial, mop-haired food pioneer who at the time ran the Culinary Technology Department at the International Culinary Center, published a piece in
Popular Science
called “Why I Eat Lion and Other Exotic Meats.” “As the food revolution continues to gain traction, our ancestral lust for robust, unusual meats is starting to spark and reawaken,” he wrote, and provided recipes for
sous-vide
yak, bear, and lion steak (“57°C for 24 hours. Tastes like pork but richer”). Later, he was horrified to discover that his source—the owner of Czimer's, outside Chicago, which supplies much of the beaver, bear, and lion served in America—had pleaded guilty several years before to illegally selling numerous endangered tigers, including two Bengals, and an endangered black spotted leopard from the Funky Monkey Animal Park, in Crete, Illinois. The meat, unloaded from a van into a back building, sometimes late at night, was, needless to say, not inspected by the USDA; according to the plea agreement, one of the animals, a liger—a lion-tiger cross—was shot and killed in a trailer in the parking lot. Czimer's sold much of this illegal meat as “lion.”

The conflict between foodies' embrace of novelty and the conservative impulses of animal-rights and environmental groups is growing starker. If you are a Gold, though, the struggle is just another form of sibling rivalry. When Jonathan Gold got back from Korea, in the fall of 2008, he published a piece about eating whale in Ulsan, a port city in the south. “I am surprised to discover that the whale is delicious, leaner than beef, with a rich, mineral taste and a haunting, almost waxy aftertaste that I can't quite place,” he wrote. “I am already anticipating the nasty glare I will inevitably get from my marine-scientist brother, Mark, who as the leader of Heal the Bay has dedicated his life to pretty much the opposite of this. I swear: I'll never eat whale again.”

Mark responded, on the
LA Weekly
's Letters page: “Bro—now you've crossed the line. For far too long, you have been chowing down on every marine critter I've spent my life protecting, from shark's fin soup to live prawns to bluefin to wild-caught sturgeon (largely freshwater). What did I do to you in our childhood to justify this ichthyocide?

“Now you're on to whale meat. This time you've crossed the line. IT IS ON!”

In the summer of 2009, I went fishing in Iceland and—local custom—bit the dorsal fin off the first salmon I caught and swallowed it. I got through it, with the help of a cook who cut the fin three-quarters of the way across for me, and a slug of vodka. A few days later, in Reykjavík, some of my fishing friends took me to a sleek Icelandic-Japanese restaurant. They ordered whale and invited me to try it. The truth is that it didn't occur to me to say no; yes had generally been my reflexive answer to a food challenge. The whale—I didn't know enough to ask what kind—came to the table. It was unappetizingly red, with an oily flavor that recalled the smell of a burnt wick in a hurricane lamp. My friends spent the rest of the meal talking about the high mercury content of the meat and the polarizing politics of the hunt. It all tasted like brain damage to me.

Several months later, The Hump, a Santa Monica sushi bar with a reputation for catering to thrill-seekers, was accused of serving an endangered species of whale to undercover vegan activists. The sting operation was orchestrated by Charles Hambleton, one of the producers of
The Cove,
a documentary about the dolphin hunt in the former whaling town of Taiji, Japan. Hambleton is a soft-spoken man in his late forties, with a distracted, trembly affect he ascribes to all the tuna he ate on location: he and the film's director, Louis Psihoyos, both got severe mercury poisoning.

Hambleton, whose father worked for Pan Am, grew up all over the world. As a child in Moscow at the height of the Cold War, he was forced to eat caviar sandwiches because peanut butter cost too much. Living in Antigua as a dive instructor and a treasure hunter, he ate whale with the old fishermen, and has no regrets about it. (His ethical line is that he won't eat factory-farmed meat.) When I met him recently, at a coffee shop in Los Angeles, he was wearing a skull ring, a memento from his work as a pirate-trainer on all four Pirates of the Caribbean movies. On
The Cove
, he planned the covert missions, setting up blinds for filming the dolphin hunt, and dummy blinds to trip up the local police. When I asked him what had prepared him for the job, he said, “I was good at creative problem-solving, long hours, nasty conditions.” I pressed him, and he rattled off his lawyer's phone number from memory.

In a couple of days, Hambleton said, he'd be leaving for western China with Psihoyos and the six-person Pirates of the Caribbean prosthetics crew, who had designed him a new face, with a broadened nose, darkened skin, and brown contact lenses, as well as a head of straight dark hair. Disguised as a Chinese-American buyer, he was going to film at an exotic-meat market in Wuhan, where tigers and dolphin heads are said to be sold openly, and use the footage for a television show about environmental crime-solving. Psihoyos would probably have to sit in a wheelchair to conceal his height. The prosthetics took six hours to apply and had to be worn overnight. Hambleton showed me a picture: shades of Mickey Rooney.

He told me he had heard about The Hump's secret menu from a source at Sea Shepherd, a renegade anti-whaling organization. The notion that Santa Monica, one of the most environmentally progressive communities in America, might be the site of such a blatant violation of national and international protections was alarming. Here was an opportunity, he thought, to carry on the mission of
The Cove
, with potentially more sensational results. Hambleton recruited Crystal Galbraith, a slender twenty-six-year-old
Cove
groupie with bleached blond hair and a mole under her right eye, who, he hoped, could lure the chefs into his trap.

Galbraith had read
Skinny Bitch
in college. “I was a normal eater at lunch and by dinner I was vegan,” she told me. One night in the fall of 2009, she put on her best dress, a knee-grazing, tight-fitting black number by The Row, and set out to save the animals. At an apartment in Santa Monica, Hambleton removed a snap from her Guess purse and sewed a spy camera in its place. Galbraith brought along a Chinese friend who was fluent in Japanese. They settled on a backstory: they'd just taken jobs in Japan and wanted to acquaint themselves with the culture by eating the most exotic food possible. “I thought, ‘This will be scary and I don't know how I'll feel, but there's no other option but to leave with a sample of whale meat,'” Galbraith told me. Her friend, Galbraith said, wasn't vegan, nor was she an animal activist. She was in it for the free sushi.

•   •   •

N
ot all that long ago, the U.S. government tried to convince people that whales, whose oil was used to light lamps, lubricate transmissions, and make margarine, were edible. In 1918, at a gathering at the American Museum of Natural History in New York described by
The New York
Times
as “a conservation luncheon,” the chef from Delmonico's served humpback pot-au-feu and whale planked à la Vancouver. The diners, “men prominent in scientific, business, and professional spheres,” praised it: so like venison! Given its cheapness, they “were almost unanimously in favor of having whale meat substituted for beefsteak and urged its immediate adoption as a feature of the national war diet.” Again, in 1943, the
Times
reported, “Whales, those greatest of mammals whose pastures comprise seven seas, will be hunted for their flesh, which will be used to help fill the gap in the nation's meat supply.” The Department of the Interior gave reassurances that the meat was “wholesome when properly handled and it does not have the fishy taste which makes seal meat almost unpalatable.”

Over the next several decades, the popular conception of whales began to shift, from floating oil factories to noble, cerebral beings. In 1970, Roger Payne, a marine biologist, published
Songs of the Humpback Whale,
a recording of humpback music he and his wife made from a sailboat: groaning whales, creaking rigging. Whales, it seemed, were more than beasts; they had culture. Other researchers, inspired by the findings, reported other varieties of advanced social behavior: humpbacks making bubble nets to trap their prey; sperm whales nursing for as long as thirteen years; and male killer whales living with their mothers into adulthood. Much remained mysterious, particularly about the baleen whales, which are too big to study in aquariums, but it was easy to make inferences from their large brains, complex neural pathways, and the behavior of their clever smaller relatives, the dolphins.

After centuries of increasingly high-tech hunting, several whale species were nearly extinct, and the American public began to view killing cetaceans for any reason as both an ecological and an ethical tragedy. Eating them, which in spite of the government's efforts never caught on here, suddenly struck people as barbaric. “We think these animals should be protected because they're really evolved,” Diana Reiss, a leading cetacean researcher and the author of
The Dolphin in the Mirror: Exploring Dolphin Minds and Saving Dolphin Lives,
told me. “They share many of the things we do—social complexity, tool use, social awareness. They should have a right not to be killed.” A collection of overlapping regulations was put in place to reflect this special consideration. In 1972, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, making it illegal to kill whales, dolphins, and porpoises, regardless of population numbers, and banning their import, export, and sale; the Endangered Species Act of 1973 outlawed the hunt, harassment, or capture of vulnerable populations. Violations of these laws can lead to imprisonment and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) regulates international trade of all whales and dolphins. In addition, since 1986 the International Whaling Commission has imposed a worldwide moratorium on commercial whaling.

•   •   •

T
he Hump was singularly well located, overlooking the runway at the Santa Monica Airport, a great place to watch rattling vintage planes and featherweight experimental aircraft take off and land. It served things few others could or would: blowfish, which contains a deadly toxin and can be fatal if improperly prepared;
keiji
, superfatty salmon babies which, before they are sexually mature, follow the adult fish to the rivers, where they are harvested. (One in ten thousand salmon caught is
keiji,
and the price can be as high as $150 a pound.) A sign on the door read “Warning! This sushi bar does prepare live sea food in full view, at the counter.” It was routine to see a chef take out a live eel and drive a spike through its brain, and serve it seconds later. Live lobster was cut in half and presented with the tail meat draped over the carapace, and the head, still moving, beside it on a bed of ice. Eddie Lin, who writes an adventure-eating blog called
Deep End Dining
and frequented The Hump, said, “The effect of it is the animal is watching you eat it.”

Brian Vidor, the restaurant's owner, is tall, with bushy white hair and the warm but slightly furtive manner of someone who has spent too much time in camp. In the seventies, he worked as a guide in the safari park at Great Adventure in New Jersey. Then Chipperfield's, a British circus-and-carnival company, hired him to go to the Sudan to capture white rhino calves, elephants, hartebeests, and topi for a zoo in Prague. They scouted for the animals from the air, in a small plane called a Piper Super Cub, and rounded them up with trucks, darting the mothers with tranquilizers so they would not stampede when the hunters took their young.

After that, Vidor took a job with a company called International Animal Exchange building a safari park—baboons, giraffes, rhinos, elephants, tigers—in Miyazaki, Japan. For the next fifteen or so years, he traveled all over Asia, building zoos. In Taipei, he drank snake blood in Snake Alley and tried his first insect: a Jerusalem cricket, fried with garlic and red pepper, served with beer. In Singapore, he had scorpions on toast. By the early nineties, he had become a flight instructor. Landing at the Santa Monica Airport, he noticed a “For Lease” sign, and decided to become a restaurateur, re-creating his favorite Asian street foods at a restaurant called Typhoon, where part of the menu was devoted to edible insects. Several years later, he opened The Hump upstairs for the customers who had graduated to a more morally complex and expensive confrontation with omnivorousness.

•   •   •

W
hale consumption occupies a special place in the Japanese conscience. In
Tsukiji,
a book about the Tokyo fish market, Theodore Bestor, a professor of anthropology and Japanese studies at Harvard, writes that whales are the object of “ritual concern,” mourned in special Buddhist services called
kuyo
. Etymologically considered fish—
kujira
, the word in Japanese, means “major fish”—whales were exempt from Buddhist prohibitions against eating meat. (Catholics, historically, saw the issue similarly, and allowed whale on Fridays.) After the war, when there were food shortages, it became an important source of protein; General MacArthur encouraged fishermen to convert their boats to whalers. Canned whale, mostly less-desirable sperm whale, became the Spam of mid-century Japan, remembered fondly by some aging Japanese, reviled by others as something they ate only in desperation.

But subsistence whaling, a limited, coastal phenomenon, has little in common with Japanese whaling today, which takes place on both the coast and the open seas, including in an area of the Southern Ocean designated a sanctuary by the International Whaling Commission in 1994. Under a research exemption from the moratorium, the Japanese take about a thousand whales a year, including sei whales, which have been listed as endangered since the seventies. To outsiders, their reasons can appear tenuous. Originally, government scientists justified the hunt by saying it was unavoidable: in order to collect the tissue necessary for DNA analysis—a tool for understanding stock structure—the whales had to be killed. Now that it is possible to biopsy living whales, they say that they need to examine their stomach contents for proper ecosystem management. The hunt, which is accomplished by firing an exploding harpoon at the whale, is considered by many to be inherently inhumane. In any case, U.S. scientists have a hard time finding anything useful in the Japanese data, because the whalers go only where they know the whales to be, and they do not carry scientific observers aboard.