"Bizarre Foods" Guy Eats the World, America Style
Call it the "Fear Factor" factor: send a regular guy out into the vast world and see what kinds of crazy foods these other societies cook up and force Joe Blow to eat it. Hilarity ensues! Ratings skyrocket! A new star is born and foreign countries will be endlessly mocked for being so unsophisticated as to eat... guinea pig. The cultural agoraphobia Americans have enjoyed so much becomes abundantly well founded and we can all rest easy knowing that we only eat burgers and steaks on U.S. soil. Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern began with a promise to expose television viewers to the exotic foods of the world and the beautiful countries and cultures that cook these dishes. Instead, we are treated to extended footage of Zimmern pussyfooting around before eating something unusual.
My introduction to his show was the famous balut episode, where Zimmern traveled to the Philippines to sample their cuisine. Imagine my discomfort as I watched this show with a roomful of my Filipino relatives, smiling bemusedly at this traveler acting ecstatically disgusted by the thought of eating balut, a fertilized duck egg. After five minutes of "Ooh, isn't this so crazy-bizarre?" commentary, Zimmern eats and utters the phrase that seems to be the show's entire motto: "That wasn't as bad as I thought!"
Episode after episode rolls out with Zimmern, the hapless food traveler, eating foreign, gasp-worthy foods. Guinea pigs in Ecuador, stinky tofu in Taiwan, cow's heart in Morocco -- all are given their fair share of air time with Zimmern. While Gridskipper or Gizmodo isn't above a whale-eating post or cheeseburger in a can, these singular bizarre food entries do not an entire website make. Bizarre Foods is a show of gross-out foods to pique your interest, with a history lesson shoved in between as an afterthought.
My bone to pick with Zimmern is small, however, in comparison to how television networks have played up the "bizarre" nature of those crazy, crazy foreigners. The Travel Channel website captures this sentiment with 'Take the Bizarre Quiz' and 'How Bizarre Are You?' requests for viewers to submit "bizarre food moments." Zimmern, in print at least, realizes his show plays up the idea of food being gross and (therefore) entertaining and backtracks from this stance often in articles. Zimmern discusses his belief that no food should be considered strange, such as in this Washington Post article:
What makes bizarre food bizarre? The psychological component is pretty easy: We are culturally disposed to think of foods as bizarre when other cultures think they are anything but bizarre. If you try to describe cheese to Kalahari tribesmen, they would laugh at you. But we don't eat rare zebra guts, and they do.
It is Zimmern's endearingly normal personality that keeps the audiences coming back for more -- a cringing (for me) lesson on why Americans should be glad they live in America. Peeking out from behind the list of crazy foods, however, is what should truly be the heartbeat of this show: a lesson in culture and diversity that features the history and people of a foreign country. That is the show that Zimmern purports "Bizarre Foods" to be and executes very well, when not caught up in finding the grossest food Zimmern et al can display. Zimmern playing to the show's Fear Factor audience dumbs down the material being shown, making the show an unfortunate end result to what could have been a better cultural food program.
