Food & Drink
At Su San Seafood, a Korean restaurant in Flushing, Queens, a group sits at a table, hesitantly holding chopsticks above a platter of live octopus. It is moving. While they are deciding how to approach eating it, the tentacles jump up and attach themselves to the chopsticks. Really. The group is part of an adventurous Live octopus. Lamb’s tongue. Adventurous eaters will go to any lengths to devour the strangest
Feeding Frenzy
seen contestants on Survivor survive by
eating bugs and worms, and we’ve seen
contestants on Fear Factor eat worse
than that. Andrew Zimmern, host of
Bizarre Foods on Travel Channel, has
made a career out of eating such delica-
cies as brain tacos and bull penis soup.
And Anthony Bourdain, host of No
Reservations, also on Travel Channel,
dishes on earth
is known for eating “the nasty bits”—
eaters club called the Gastronauts. But
every part of the animal, from nose
BY LIZ JOHNSON
PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER MURPHY
even for them, watching a meal jump
from plate to fork was a new—and
unnerving—experience.
“Everybody was thinking, ‘OK, I’m
going to go in,’ ” Carlijn Urlings, one of
the members, tells me later. “But you
didn’t have to go in. It would just jump
to tail. One of the grossest examples?
Hákarl: fermented shark meat.
It’s not as if we all aspire to extreme
eating. But in the past decade or so even
some the most demure eaters have been
desensitized. We’re becoming a little
more adventurous—and it shows on
up and stick.”
If that isn’t enough to give you the
willies, consider how Gastronauts
cofounder Curtiss Calleo described on
his website what happened next: “Slimy,
writhing octopus tentacles attaching
themselves to your esophagus as you try
to swallow.”
Yikes!
The Gastronauts—this chapter is
based in New York, but there’s another
in Boston—are interested in the cul-
ture of exotic food, so you can expect
to find some shocking items on their
dinner plates. But a lot of what they
eat is probably not all that shocking
in itself—at least not anymore. We’ve
our plates.
The reasons? Partly the media.
Nothing like a few bull penises and some
fermented shark meat to make you think
the bone marrow at the local bistro is
nothing out of the ordinary. But it’s also
our new, smaller world. We travel, we go
online, we see how other countries and
cultures eat. After a trip to Scotland, hag-
gis—heart, liver and kidneys all ground
up with oats and stuffed into a stomach
lining—doesn’t sound all that horrible.
And we get used to things. Think how
much has changed just since the late
1990s. Mario Batali, a fledgling star on
Food Network, had just opened Babbo,
his Italian restaurant in Manhattan,
