Goodyear runs the tables on the freak end of the food spectrum here, going deep into the muck and worldviews of bug dealers, blood-drinkers, pet-eaters, the historic food importers who first shaped the American palate, rogue chefs, coup-counting foodies who get their kicks eating whales and ant pupae, law-breaking devotees of the raw food movement and outlaw chefs doing secret dinners for those who style themselves as true devotees of cuisine because they will eat, well, anything. It's a buffet of gastronomic weirdness, of weed dinners and police stakeouts and back-alley deals where ants and lion meat are traded for fat stacks of cash in the way that duffel bags full of cocaine once were.
If food is the new sex and food is the new drugs and the eating of anything and everything is the new social rebellion of this still young-and-dripping new century, then Goodyear is a fair guide to the underbelly. She looks, she tastes, she hangs out and she reports on the street-level emergence of what she believes is a new food culture and a new way of thinking about what, exactly, food is.
To her credit, she doesn't judge. She seems to move through this world in a slick bubble of anti-bias, putting those who cook tarantulas competitively on the same footing as a guy like Craig Thornton who runs Wolvesmouth in L.A. — a private, invite-only (from an email list that runs in the thousands) recurring dinner party in his apartment — while flaunting all rules and laws about who gets to cook what for whom. She shows us the out-and-out insanity of those who will eat raw chicken meat of dubious provenance, gotten from questionable sources, but never points her finger, jumps up and down and shouts, "Holy crap, look at these nutjobs over here!"
And while that might appear noble, it's also the book's major weakness. There are moments which, to me, seem to not just require, but demand some jumping and finger-pointing — for an educated, embedded voice to step back a moment from the wash of blood and guts and semen and say, simply, that this, then, is too much. That some people, in their quest for the new, the rare, the strange and the slimy, take their obsession too far.
But Goodyear does not. She goes in with her eyes wide and her mouth open and leaves it to us to decide what, on this extreme edge of cooking and eating, is food and what is not.
Jason Sheehan is an ex-chef, a former restaurant critic and the current food editor of Philadelphia magazine. But when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about spaceships, aliens, giant robots and ray guns. A Private Little War is his newest book.
Read an excerpt of Anything That Moves