Aug 06 2009
Stuffing Our Pie-Holes
Lately I’ve been into the travel show, Bizarre Foods. Man, that guy — Andrew Zimmern — will stick just about anything into his pie-hole. Sautéed goat balls, cattle spleen sandwiches, still-beating fish hearts, fermented plant foods of many types, insects galore. I admire him. He’s got the guts to eat all sorts of stuff. And digest it.
Zimmern’s motto is, If it looks good, eat it! The above basil plant looks good to me. I have often harvested a small sack of leaves and pureed them along with pungent, raw garlic, olive oil, pine nuts, and parmesan cheese, (gotta love what those microorganisms can do to milk!) then tossed the resulting green goop atop pasta. Mmm, pesto.
Of course, the ultimate reason behind stuffing your face is not to have a culinary experience, but to survive. And from watching Bizarre Foods it has impressed upon me that through the ages human beings have put all sorts of items — plant and animal and fungi — into their beloved organs of sustenance: their pie-holes.
We may have difficulty realizing it now, with our supermarkets abundantly stocked with quality foods, but the earliest food explorers experimented with their diet not so much in a spirit of adventure, but out of hunger.
Stuff your pie hole or die. That’s what eating ultimately comes down to.
Now where did I put my chipotle powder?
