Dana Goodyear

Engrossing, if often gross, book about pushing the culinary boundaries, especially when it comes to ingredients not often seen in typical Middle America. Goodyear integrates the background information pretty well with stories of the cooks, critics and foodies she interviews; I most enjoyed reading about the chefs, since the reviewers and foodies sometimes come off more as adventure-seekers rather than people just out to enjoy a nice meal. (Some of that material appeared previously in a show more slightly different form in The New Yorker, but it's woven in so neatly you wouldn't really know unless you'd already read those articles.) It's not Goodyear's fault but rather that of her subject that, being the conservative eater than I am, I ended the book feeling a little nauseated by all the talk of eating bugs, whale, and exotic but illegal plants and animals. (Actually, given the coda about her attemp to eat one extremely disgusting dish, maybe it *is* her fault -- I hope she doesn't include it in the final copy, since it ends the book on a truly sickening note.) show less

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or long since forgotten are emerging as delicacies. Parts that used to be for scrap are centerpieces. Ash and hay are fashionable ingredients, and you pay handsomely to breathe flavored air. Going out to a nice dinner now often precipitates a confrontation with a fundamental question: Is that food?

Dana Goodyear’s anticipated debut, Anything That Moves, is simultaneously a humorous show more adventure, a behind-the-scenes look at, and an attempt to understand the implications of the way we eat. This is a universe populated by insect-eaters and blood drinkers, avant-garde chefs who make food out of roadside leaves and wood, and others who serve endangered species and Schedule I drugs—a cast of characters, in other words, who flirt with danger, taboo, and disgust in pursuit of the sublime. Behind them is an intricate network of scavengers, dealers, and pitchmen responsible for introducing the rare and exotic into the marketplace. This is the fringe of the modern American meal, but to judge from history, it will not be long before it reaches the family table.

Anything That Moves is a highly entertaining, revelatory look into the raucous, strange, fascinatingly complex world of contemporary American food culture, and the places where the extreme is bleeding into the mainstream.

My Review: I will try almost anything once. Almost anything, stuff like eyeballs and mountain oysters and (unknowingly) dog. Mountain oysters are tasty, eyeballs are gross, and I vomited for an hour after being told the greasy, slick, icky meat was dog.

There is stuff that these damnfool eejits are *paying*money*for* that there is not a single, solitary, remote, fat, or slim chance that I would consent to sit at a table with, still less eat.

Actually, I could stop there and the review would be complete. But there's a bit more I'd like to say. Dana Goodyear writes for The New Yorker, and it shows. Her phrases are often quite euphonious, but in the end more snacklike than mealtimey:

Appetites are hard to legislate, and people usually end up doing what they want to do. The year {Upton} Sinclair wrote The Jungle, he got his first summer cold. It was the beginning of the score of ailments that led him to John Henry Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium (sic), which promoted vegetarianism, and to the writings of Horace Fletcher, "The Great Masticator," who prescribed chewing your food extra-thoroughly.

I stopped subscribing to The New Yorker for that reason. Okay, back in the Shawn era we had them memorable 10,000 words on zinc, its extraction, refinement, and many uses. But now we have ephemeral, mildly interesting stuff like...

...like...

...and there you have it. The chapters in this book could have been entitled "Notes from LA" and I would've skipped gaily past them, being largely uninterested in when not actively hostile to LA. And I would've been not one smidgin less well-rounded a person.

Goodyear's entertaining moments describing the feuds and rivalres among these freaky-deaky foodies are pleasant enough. Her description of eating some of the offal these folks consume made me mildly queasy, and never...not once...made me curious enough to try some of the disgusting crap the effete of palate and overloaded of wallet gourmands herein profiled savored.

I received this copy from the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. That made this review possible for me to write without resorting to invective, vituperation, and contumely. Had I spent $27.95 on it, I''d be so moltenly angry even yet that it would be unwise to approach me without something normal and wholesome like a double cheesburger with bacon, mayo, and onions plus an extra-large fries prominently displayed as a token of goodwill.

Make that burger a triple.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. show less

Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture
By Dana Goodyear
Riverhead/Penguin
Reviewed by Karl Wolff

My introduction to food writing began with Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. But it began before that, with Trimalchio's lavish banquet described in The Satyricon and the gustatory decadence of Des Essientes in Against Nature. Writing about food is challenging, since it is a sensual and immediate experience. (Look at how both wine show more snobs and Guy Fieri are mocked in pop culture. Wine snobs radiate an insufferable pretentiousness, especially to those who have no palate for the grape stuff. And, well, Guy Fieri is probably the Antichrist.) Even amongst the countless foodies and Yelp reviewers, there are extremist cadres in American food culture. What does extreme mean? It means seeking out the culinary fringes, including noshing on things that are taboo, disgusting, or illegal.

Dana Goodyear investigates different strands of extremist food culture in her book, Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture. Coming from Minnesota and with specific food allergies, I was immediately interested in what Goodyear had to say about the outlier foodies and chefs. Since I can't eat shrimp, I can eat clams, oysters, and squid. I've graduated from enjoying venison in season to hunting down providers of sweetbreads (aka organ meat). And, before I leap off the confessional soap-box, I think foie gras and raw milk cheese should be legal. In the end, I found that even my idiosyncratic tastes and personal foodie crusades are nothing compared to the extremists she interviews.

The wonderful thing about Anything That Moves is its range of subject material. There is legendary food writer Jonathan Gold hunting down the obscure and the possibly lethal in Los Angeles, ranging from food trucks to Chinese restaurants with questionable kitchen practices. There are the slow food libertarians who see the FDA as a bureaucracy just as evil as the NSA and the IRS. And there are the Las Vegas chefs, preparing rare and opulent dishes for high rollers. Surrounded by bone-stripping desert heat, these chefs have the challenge of transporting fresh produce and seafood over long distances. One chef compared prepping food for Las Vegas with colonizing the moon. (The extreme climate and geographic isolation are comparative.) There are also extreme eaters, seeking out illegal food at clandestine restaurants. If there's a way to eat whale meat, they will find a way.

Beyond the extremism element, Goodyear brings up salient points in terms of food politics. She spends a considerable amount of time conversing with entophagists. These proponents of eating insects have a reasonable point. When deforestation, overfishing, and industrial farming has created a crisis situation with meat, there have to be other ways to consume protein. One alternative is to eat bugs. At first blush, it is seen as gross. Then again, lobster and shrimp both belong to the same massive group of arthropods. It may be a while before eating grasshoppers and ants are commonplace, but if American ingenuity is involved, the gateway will probably be adding the elements chocolate and bacon. Deep fry the sucker and one only has to wait a short while before there are stampedes at state fairs.

The hunt for alternate protein sources leads to the concept of what we will eat and why. Many food prohibitions are based on religious tradition. Others are inherited from our modernized culture. The raw food crusaders advocate drinking raw milk. While there is increased risk of diseases present in raw milk, this seems more like a quibble that calls for some legislative reform and a more small-business-friendly attitude from the FDA. Other raw food fanatics consider the best organic eggs are the ones with the most chicken feces on them. Um ... ewww. One has to draw a line somewhere. That's my redline. It turns out to be not that surprising that there is overlap between the raw food purists and Ron Paul libertarians.

Anything That Moves is a fascinating exploration of the limits of American food culture. Issues like ethics, legislation, and popular taste are covered with in-depth interviews and Dana Goodyear's crackerjack writing style.

Out of 10/9.5

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First, all the good things about this book, which basically explores the more extreme edges of the foodie culture. It's very well written, very well researched, and a wonderful collection of quirky personalities. If you like reading about food trends, quirky foods, the "under belly" of the food business, or funny people (think Andrew Zimmern), you will enjoy this book and I can recommend it. It also commendably does very little preaching - Goodyear presents the facts and people and lets you show more make the conclusion as to whether these extreme foods are our future or just a weird deviation.

All that being said, personally I finished the book and felt rather depressed. With few exceptions, all of the foodies (a word I dislike, but definitely appropriate for this book) in this book seemed to be into food for a variety of reasons - health, craving to be extremist or out-of-the-ordinary, political statements against a variety of opponents, money, meeting challenges - but so few seemed to be in it for the sheer joy of cooking and eating delicious food. I just couldn't relate. show less