Fierce Food
Budget Travel offers a review of a book any serious foodie should read, entitled Fierce Food: The Intrepid Diner’s Guide to the Unusual, Exotic, and Downright Bizarre. With its emphasis on the unique aspects of cultures all over the world, this book fits well with Budget Travel’s goal to get people out and visiting new cultures.
The author, Christa Weil, claims to have eaten two thirds of the unusual, exotic and downright bizarre food featured in the book. The foods featured include grasshoppers, boiled sheep’s head, armadillo and tarantulas. Weil also includes a few familiar foods, like coconut, but such items are few and far between. Each food is thoughtfully labeled “tastes like chicken,” “aphrodisiac,” “revolting,” or “eating may cause pain/death.”
The book is a more an alphabetical guide to extreme eating than a cookbook, but the food descriptions are thorough. Weil, a London journalist, includes not only the taste and texture of the foods, but also details the preparation and history of each.
According to Publisher’s Weekly, the utility of the book is also clear - she describes food that many travelers would skip without knowing more about it, such as “foo-foo (a lump of starch in soup) or hakari (putrefied shark meat).” Okay, well, maybe we would still skip the shark.
For an excerpt from the tarantula chapter, check out the full article at Budget Travel.
