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Anything That Moves: Renegade Chefs, Fearless Eaters, and the Making of a New American Food Culture
by Dana Goodyear
Published: 2013-11-14
Hardcover : 272 pages
Hardcover : 272 pages
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New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear combines the style of Mary Roach with the on-the-ground food savvy of Anthony Bourdain in a rollicking narrative look at the shocking extremes of the contemporary American food world.
A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or ...
A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or ...
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Introduction
New Yorker writer Dana Goodyear combines the style of Mary Roach with the on-the-ground food savvy of Anthony Bourdain in a rollicking narrative look at the shocking extremes of the contemporary American food world.
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 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.
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 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.
Editorial Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, November 2013: In Anything That Moves, Dana Goodyear draws readers into the tentacled extremities of the new culinary vanguard. Bringing her omnivorosity to hundreds of tables, she infiltrates easily a dozen subcultures of the renegades who are procuring, cooking, and devouring their way to a new American cuisine, a â??convergence of the disgusting and sublime.â?? The most inspired characters she introduces are chefs insatiably drawn to experiment with the new: ingredients, methods, and technologies that create never-before-tasted dishes. Goodyear writes with a precise poetry. Her accounts of 12-course (and occasionally 40-course) meals surprise, sometimes to the point of transcendence, occasionally nausea. Sheâ??s also unafraid to break her own spell and acknowledge the fog hovering over this hedonistic feast: anxiety over our industrial food chainâ??s sustainability when the population tops 9 billion, just as we wade into the age of Earthâ??s sixth major extinction. But even as Goodyear asserts that the bulk of our future protein will have to come from bugs (yesâ??from bugs), we see her own hunger most clearly when she experiences a meal that evokes vivid memories, â??like feasting on my pastâ??: her first hunt with her late father, who dipped a finger in the blood of her kill and marked her forehead. â??Mari MalcolmDiscussion Questions
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