I’d like to take a moment to talk about my relationship with my greatest culinary nemesis--the peanut. This diabolical little legume is a one of the “Big 8” food allergens which, combined, account for roughly 90% of all food reactions in the U.S. The possibility of stumbling upon this deadly ingredient hovers like an angry cloud over most of my culinary experiences, the
evil peanuts threatening to rain down upon me at any moment and send me into the throes of anaphylaxis.
As a lover of all things edible, this dietary restriction weighs me down like a true physical handicap. It’s like my tongue has a lame leg and as a result there is a huge range of experiences that it can’t share with the world. For instance, Thai restaurants are virtually off-limits to me. I remember my first (and only) Thai spring roll: it was delicious. The crunchy vegetables and soft wrapper were delightful--that is, until my body began to reject the subtle poison that was cleverly laced throughout the dish and I proceeded to regurgitate my dinner right back onto the plate.
I wrote about aversions in my last blog, but I failed to mention how food allergies may factor into one’s aversions. I can think of only two instances in which my natural instinct of self-preservation would affect my dinner order. I can think of only two foods which literally put the fear of death in me: blowfish and peanuts.
The fear of food is a strange and unfamiliar emotion for most. Imagine that you’ve just ingested a Japanese blowfish and a young amatuer chef comes to your table and congratulates you on eating the first blowfish he’s ever prepared. How do you feel about what you’ve just eaten? Do you feel the panic creeping up on you? Do you feel the poison stewing in your belly, begging to diffuse throughout your bloodstream? Do you feel the certainty of life fading away? I get the same feeling every time I’m offered a home-baked cookie.
I realize that there are worse afflictions than a food allergy. However, given the response that most people have when I pass on an offering of peanut M&M’s, one would think that I’m in great suffering. “How do you live,” people ask me. I’d like to take this moment to assure the world that I do, indeed, survive without peanuts. In fact, I survive better without them.
For some reason, when I tell the average person that I can’t eat peanuts, they follow up with the question, “Does that mean you can’t eat peanut butter?” Then, after I’ve explained that peanut butter is, in fact, made almost entirely of peanuts and that no, I can’t eat it either, the generic response is, “Peanut butter is so delicious! You have no idea what you’re missing.” I have yet to understand why the average person feels compelled to rub dirt in my wounds. Do they ask a blind man how he lives without seeing the sunset?
Contrary to common belief, I’ve tasted peanuts, peanut butter, peanut flour, and peanut oil. Contrary to popular opinion, I hate peanuts--the look, the taste, the smell. You’d be surprised, when a particular food is associated with swift death, how quickly you develop a distaste for that food. Even the stench of peanuts makes me feel sick. It reminds me of sitting in the cafeteria at Scobee Elementary, trying my best to shield myself from flying peanut butter cracker particles. I was assigned to sit next to a buck-tooth girl named Meghan. Every day she ate her damned peanut butter crackers, exclaiming at how delicious they were, spewing the sickly-sweet scent of poison into the air, smiling to reveal the peanut butter and cracker particles clinging to her big protruding teeth.
Back then I used to hope that I would grow out of my peanut allergy--that I would bite into a PB&J one day, on a whim, and nothing horrific would happen (of course, I also hoped that I would grow up to be a velociraptor). I suppose that both would still be nice, but I really don’t need to be reconciled with that fiendish food, the peanut. I’ve been living with the allergy for my entire life, and it’s a part of my identity. I read the ingredients label of suspicious foods, I carry a shot of epinephrine in the glovebox of my car, and I steer clear of bake sales. My name is Jon and my problem with peanuts is really no problem at all.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Thursday, October 11, 2012
I Wouldn't Eat that...
Out of the great multitude of food television personalities present today, my undisputed favorite is Andrew Zimmern, host of the Travel Channel’s Bizarre Food. It’s not just because of his charm and his warm personality, its because the man loves food enough to eat anything (and he’s kind enough to let the whole world watch). In case you’re not familiar with the show, Zimmern travels all over the world, partaking in strange and often revolting local “delicacies.” Viewers can see Zimmern eat all types of aversive foods, from cockroaches to rats to various animal penises.
Why is Zimmern’s show so well received? Why do we love to see him eat the foods that make us cringe?
I think that it has to do with our natural aversions to certain foods and the shock value that challenging those aversions brings to television. The old television show Fear Factor was quite popular for its tendency to unapologetically churn people’s stomachs. The show would usually contain a challenge round in which contestants were faced with the task of consuming large plates of vile foods (i.e. animal testicles and live bugs).
When we compare the two shows side-by-side, an interesting contrast becomes apparent: while the latter show treats the consumption of bizarre foods as a disgusting spectacle, the former treats it as a celebration of culinary culture and tradition. This comparison poses an interesting question about the nature of food-aversion: how is it that fear factor contestants are spitting up deer testicles while Zimmern is asking for seconds? Is our apprehension of certain foods hardwired into our brains, evoking some sort of instinctive fight-or-flight response, or are food-aversions a cultural manifestation, products of societal trends and taboos?
I attempted to understand this phenomenon by testing my own food-aversions. Though I’ve always been curious about it, I never had the gastronomical courage to sample head cheese (until last week, that is.) For those who are unfamiliar with the traditional European cold-cut, it is essentially a loaf composed of a chopped mixture of flesh from the head of a calf or a pig, which is simmered to produce a stock, and then poured into a dish where the fat and natural gelatins found in the head congeal, suspending the flesh in a savory meat jelly.
While the thought of eating the head of an animal may be especially discouraging to some, the cut of meat was not my qualm. In San Antonio, we eat a lot of barbacoa, a dish that is usually composed of slow cooked meat from the head of a cow. I learned long ago that it isn’t uncommon for restaurants to include the tongue and the eyeballs of the cow in their barbacoa tacos. Of course, barbacoa tacos were, by this time, already a staple of my diet; I’d always been aware that I was eating the head of an animal, but the newly discovered possibility of finding a big, gelatinous chunk of eyeball in my taco phased me for some time.
However, this story is proof that if the food tastes good, aversions can be overcome. It was not long before I shook off my fear of mashed eyeballs and picked up another barbacoa taco. Eventually, the shock of eating something unfamiliar fades away, and formerly aversive foods become integrated into our individual culinary cultures.
Andrew Zimmern regards his bizarre culinary encounters as an intimate form of enculturation. As he said in a Travel Channel interview, “Food is the simplest way for me to learn about another culture. Share a meal with folks and it will change your life as you see what real people are thinking and feeling.”
Food-aversions are at least partially influenced by social trends, as is evidenced by the vast differences in food preferences throughout different cultural groups. The foods one considers “normal” depend on the environment in which they were raised and the food sources available to them. Cultural groups share a relatively fixed diet, and unfamiliar foods are often the recipients of social stigmas.
However, I feel that no preconceived notion alone could have been responsible the visceral response I had to my first taste of head cheese. A feeling of dread fell over me even as I entered the grocery store and made my way to the deli counter. For me, the hardest part of eating head cheese was seeing the strange loaf of meat sitting on display. It looks like somebody replaced the fruit in your jello salad with chunks of mystery meat. Even though I was comfortable with the ingredients in the head cheese, something about it’s presentation made my stomach flip over at the sight of it.
At home, I had to close my eyes as I cut a sliver of the head cheese and popped it into my mouth. It had an intensely meaty flavor, like SPAM (one of my childhood favorites). It’s like eating the concentrated essence of beefy flavor. However, the textural sensation of the gelatinous stock made me gag instantaneously. I had to fight to keep the piece of meat down.
I was surprised at the force with which my body rejected the head cheese--a strange food which I’ve always been relatively optimistic about trying. Something about the sight and texture of the
After my experiment with head cheese, it was apparent to me that some aversions are simply products of our our own personal tastes. My aversion to the texture of gelatin, especially in the form of cold, congealed animal stock, is most likely the reason for my fear of head cheese. Just as my disdain for the taste of licorice is the reason for my aversion to Twizzlers.
Although some aversions may be rooted in cultural traditions, others are more difficult to explain. Sometimes, our instincts seem to tell us what foods to avoid, and we must decide whether to fight our aversions or to submit to them. It is important, I think, for us to try the foods we fear at least once, if only to avoid missing out on the hidden treasures of the culinary universe. As for me, I think I’ll listen to my body and avoid eating more head cheese for the time being.
Why is Zimmern’s show so well received? Why do we love to see him eat the foods that make us cringe?
I think that it has to do with our natural aversions to certain foods and the shock value that challenging those aversions brings to television. The old television show Fear Factor was quite popular for its tendency to unapologetically churn people’s stomachs. The show would usually contain a challenge round in which contestants were faced with the task of consuming large plates of vile foods (i.e. animal testicles and live bugs).
When we compare the two shows side-by-side, an interesting contrast becomes apparent: while the latter show treats the consumption of bizarre foods as a disgusting spectacle, the former treats it as a celebration of culinary culture and tradition. This comparison poses an interesting question about the nature of food-aversion: how is it that fear factor contestants are spitting up deer testicles while Zimmern is asking for seconds? Is our apprehension of certain foods hardwired into our brains, evoking some sort of instinctive fight-or-flight response, or are food-aversions a cultural manifestation, products of societal trends and taboos?
I attempted to understand this phenomenon by testing my own food-aversions. Though I’ve always been curious about it, I never had the gastronomical courage to sample head cheese (until last week, that is.) For those who are unfamiliar with the traditional European cold-cut, it is essentially a loaf composed of a chopped mixture of flesh from the head of a calf or a pig, which is simmered to produce a stock, and then poured into a dish where the fat and natural gelatins found in the head congeal, suspending the flesh in a savory meat jelly.
While the thought of eating the head of an animal may be especially discouraging to some, the cut of meat was not my qualm. In San Antonio, we eat a lot of barbacoa, a dish that is usually composed of slow cooked meat from the head of a cow. I learned long ago that it isn’t uncommon for restaurants to include the tongue and the eyeballs of the cow in their barbacoa tacos. Of course, barbacoa tacos were, by this time, already a staple of my diet; I’d always been aware that I was eating the head of an animal, but the newly discovered possibility of finding a big, gelatinous chunk of eyeball in my taco phased me for some time.
However, this story is proof that if the food tastes good, aversions can be overcome. It was not long before I shook off my fear of mashed eyeballs and picked up another barbacoa taco. Eventually, the shock of eating something unfamiliar fades away, and formerly aversive foods become integrated into our individual culinary cultures.
Andrew Zimmern regards his bizarre culinary encounters as an intimate form of enculturation. As he said in a Travel Channel interview, “Food is the simplest way for me to learn about another culture. Share a meal with folks and it will change your life as you see what real people are thinking and feeling.”
Food-aversions are at least partially influenced by social trends, as is evidenced by the vast differences in food preferences throughout different cultural groups. The foods one considers “normal” depend on the environment in which they were raised and the food sources available to them. Cultural groups share a relatively fixed diet, and unfamiliar foods are often the recipients of social stigmas.
However, I feel that no preconceived notion alone could have been responsible the visceral response I had to my first taste of head cheese. A feeling of dread fell over me even as I entered the grocery store and made my way to the deli counter. For me, the hardest part of eating head cheese was seeing the strange loaf of meat sitting on display. It looks like somebody replaced the fruit in your jello salad with chunks of mystery meat. Even though I was comfortable with the ingredients in the head cheese, something about it’s presentation made my stomach flip over at the sight of it.
At home, I had to close my eyes as I cut a sliver of the head cheese and popped it into my mouth. It had an intensely meaty flavor, like SPAM (one of my childhood favorites). It’s like eating the concentrated essence of beefy flavor. However, the textural sensation of the gelatinous stock made me gag instantaneously. I had to fight to keep the piece of meat down.
I was surprised at the force with which my body rejected the head cheese--a strange food which I’ve always been relatively optimistic about trying. Something about the sight and texture of the
After my experiment with head cheese, it was apparent to me that some aversions are simply products of our our own personal tastes. My aversion to the texture of gelatin, especially in the form of cold, congealed animal stock, is most likely the reason for my fear of head cheese. Just as my disdain for the taste of licorice is the reason for my aversion to Twizzlers.
Although some aversions may be rooted in cultural traditions, others are more difficult to explain. Sometimes, our instincts seem to tell us what foods to avoid, and we must decide whether to fight our aversions or to submit to them. It is important, I think, for us to try the foods we fear at least once, if only to avoid missing out on the hidden treasures of the culinary universe. As for me, I think I’ll listen to my body and avoid eating more head cheese for the time being.
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