Travel Channel’s Andrew Zimmern on his life of bugs & beasts

Most food-themed travel shows shouldn’t be watched unless you have a meal in front of you to satiate your inevitable hunger. But that’s not the case with the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern.” Now in its second season, the Tuesday night program showcases the grinning chef-critic’s adventures in culinary treasures most Westerners would pass up for fear of throwing up.

Bull penis soup in Bolivia? Sure. Deep-fried chicken gizzard in Minnesota? Why not? The Morocco episode from Season 1 actually made me turn off the TV. In it, Zimmern sits at a table in the local market, ready to peel back the steamed skin and dig into the fresh sheep face on the butcher paper. The all-penis menu at Beijing’s Guo-li-zhuang might have elicited the biggest reaction from audience, but when asked about it, Zimmern just smiles and says, “That’s not even in my top five.”

So speaking of foods that would make most of us gag, what are some of the worst things he’s eaten in the name of television? “Gag-worthy for me is not necessarily what’s gag-worthy for everyone else,” he says. “The things that actually make me gag most are the putrefied foods. These are things like the hakarl in Iceland, the stinkheads in Alaska, the stinky tofu in Taiwan, the calea in Morocco. All of these are completely different, but they all are literally rotted.”

Zimmern often describes the street food as “gamey” or “gelatinous,” which some might take as a warning. But he says it’s when he smiles and exclaims, “Wow! That’s interesting” that you know he’s really trying to keep his game face on.

The food featured in the Chilean episode, which aired Tuesday night and re-airs through this week, might have reached a new level of oddness. In it, the crew found a sea creature called a piure (pictured) and that Zimmern claims “was possibly the most visually horrifying thing I’ve seen.” The giant sponge reminded him of the Horta, the giant pulsing rock in the original “Star Trek” TV series, but “it was delicious.” Luckily, the episode also led him to some tasty, less-offensive-looking bull scrota in an onion-tomato-and-wine broth made by the Mapuche Indians.

This is all part of what Zimmern says his goal is for the show: “We show people that the world is a different place and make them realize that something that’s different isn’t something to be scared of,” adding, “I believe in the power of food as a communicating agent.”

He argues that the show also gives people a chance to see how the other half lives and that non-Western nations aren’t as lacking as they might seem. “People always remember that I eat the bugs,” he says. “They forget that in the next scene, I’m in the best restaurant in town. There just might be a handful of restaurants in Bolivia who might compete as international restaurants that could compete on anyone’s list, whereas in Los Angeles there are a hundred.”

That can be a weighty task on both the brain and the stomach. So where does this New York boy-turned-Twin Cities transplant go when he needs a rest? “I’d think I’d rather be sitting in a fala in Lanamanu Beach in Samoa than just about the best place in the world.” Just hope it’s near an open market in case he gets hungry. …