Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV): Part 2

by Rolf Potts on
Where does the Travel Channel take us? Rolf Potts embarks on a
one-week gonzo experiment to find out

JACKASS COMMENTATORS AND DUBIOUSLY RANKED DESTINATIONS
Day 2, Hour 17: 9:04 am.


The first Travel Channel show of the day has already begun by the time I wake up and turn on the TV. As the picture tube slowly comes into view I can hear some jackass droning on about the gentle wonder of interacting with elephants in Thailand. When the screen finally flickers on I realize that the droning jackass is me.

The show is 21 Mind-Blowing Escapes, which is the Travel Channel’s version of a VH1 clip-show where comedians poke fun at celebrities. Instead of comedians, this show features travel writers; the “celebrities” are places, and nobody makes fun of anything. In addition to Thailand, my commentary pops up in segments featuring Venice, Angkor Wat, the Grand Canyon, and the Greek island of Santorini.

The strange thing about this show is that when I initially did my talking-head interview it was entitled 25 Mind-Blowing Escapes — which means that at some point four destinations were scrapped. Instead of just lopping off the bottom four places, however, the show’s producers seem to have scratched out destinations at random. The country of Bhutan, for example, was originally hailed as the world’s fifth most mind-blowing escape; now, for reasons that aren’t explained, it’s not on the list at all. Hence the inherent arbitrariness of any TV show that ranks destinations like they were NCAA basketball teams. Somewhere in Bhutan, the tourism minister is probably hurling is clipboard against a locker room wall.
During a commercial break, I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth and notice that the
haggard, puffy-eyed face staring back from the mirror bears faint resemblance to the
chirpy, advice-spewing version of me that appeared on 21 Mind-Blowing Escapes. I’m
only beginning my second day of the experiment, but my TV marathon has already begun
to take a physical toll.


NOTES ON THE SEMIOTICS OF WATERPARKS

Day 2, Hour 18: 10:42 am. Desperate for variety, I’ve made my way down to the Plaza
Hotel gym, where I can watch the Travel Channel while I work the treadmill. The gym’s
aging TV screen is scorched with a faint grid of keno numbers, but for the most part
it suits my purposes. The only problem is that any time I start running faster than 20
minutes per mile I can’t hear anything but the sound of myself clomping along on the
treadmill.

This lends my TV viewing experience a curious new perspective. Right now I’m watching America’s Favorite Waterparks while running nine-minute miles. At the beginning of the hour, when I could hear the voiceover narration, this show struck me as a mildly informative little rundown of aquatic fun-parks in the United States. Without the sound, however, the show has become an incomprehensible video loop of teenagers racing down water-slides, young boys getting into splash-fights, and chubby families bobbing in wave pools. It’s hard to discern one water park from another. Amid the repetitive flood of images, I begin to notice a persistent visual pattern: Nary a minute passes without another shot of some massive aquatic gravity-tube ejaculating a swimmer through the air on a frothy gush of water.

Somehow I suspect a spunky 24-year-old northern California feminist is at this very
moment hashing out a PhD thesis entitled “Phallocentric Fun-Parks: A Lacanian
Symbology of Patriarchal Imagery and Recreational Male Privilege in American Hydro-
Amusement Communities.”

WHAT DO HOSTS DO WHEN THEY’RE NOT HOSTING?

Day 2, Hour 20: 12:55 pm. After nearly two hours of treadmill action I’m back up in my
hotel room, where I’m developing a crush on TV-host Samantha Brown. As I watch her
show, I’m thinking I’d like to marry her for the simple end of diversifying my bloodline
with perky, winsome offspring.

Today Samantha has been cavorting her way through Spain and Italy on a show called
Passport to Europe. At the moment she is learning how to flamenco dance. In previous
scenes she trained as a bullfighter, sampled horsemeat with Italian wine, reenacted a
scene from Romeo and Juliet, and guzzled beer in her hotel room. I like it that Brown is
always drinking on camera. I’m also charmed by her self-deprecating humor, and her raw
exuberance for most everything she encounters.

The weird thing about Samantha Brown, however, is that it’s hard to discern what she
does when she’s not gallivanting off on a weekend getaway to Valencia or Verona. Whereas personalities like Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern work as chefs when they’re not on TV, Brown’s main line of work appears to be going on vacations for the Travel Channel. This makes it a tad confusing when she “escapes” to the Tuscan countryside or enthuses about “getting away from it all” at a spa in Baja. Just what is it that she’s getting away from? Isn’t that trip to the spa part of her job?

Hence, while it’s easy to imagine what Bourdain does in his spare time (eat, drink, bang
groupies), or what Zimmern does when he’s not filming Bizarre Foods (eat, sleep, look up adjectives to describe the taste of seared yak scrotum), I’m at a loss to envision what Samantha Brown does when she’s not pretending to go on holiday in front of a TV crew.

A part of me imagines her sitting on the floor of a trash-strewn Hell’s Kitchen apartment, snorting crystal meth and listening to Danzig records while she drills hollow-points into
ammunition for her .50-caliber Barrett M82 sniper rifle.

ANTHONY BOURDAIN DOES NOT SPEAK TRAVELESE

Day 2, Hour 21: 1:55 pm. I’ve noticed that there’s a sameness to the narrative language on all the Travel Channel shows. Since I began my TV marathon, both Andrew Zimmern and Samantha Brown have used the exact same phrases — “vacation paradise,” “land of contrasts,” “it doesn’t get any better than this” — to describe wildly different places and experiences. The words heaven,” “breathtaking,” “dreams,” “treasure,” and “unforgettable” are intoned like Travel Channel mantras, and just today I heard the phrases “hidden gem,” “secret gem,” and “unique gem” on three successive programs.

This type of language belongs to a distinctive media-dialect called “travelese,” a word journalist William Zinsser coined in his 1976 book On Writing Well. “Nowhere else in nonfiction do writers use such syrupy words and groaning platitudes,” Zinsser noted. “It is a style of soft words which under hard examination mean nothing.” At the time Zinsser was alluding to print-based travel journalism, and 35 years later the overwrought cadences of travelese continue to plague magazine, newspaper, and guidebook writing.

The thing is, for all the consumer travel articles sopping with words like “quaint” and “wondrous,” the print world offers plenty of verbally disciplined, literary-minded travel reportage by writers like Peter Hessler, Tim Cahill, Susan Orlean, Pico Iyer, Kira Salak, Gary Shteyngart, and Paul Theroux. Unfortunately, travel television does not appear to offer a comparable respite from its more mindless tropes: Almost without exception its program language is indecipherable from that of its commercials.

In saying this, I certainly don’t absolve myself from the equation. I’ve gone years without ever using the word “majestic” in a print story, but I used it twice in less than one minute of airtime on 21 Mind-Blowing Escapes. Beyond that, I described Venice as “romantic,” Angkor Wat as “magnificent,” and the sunset at Santorini as “magical.” Back when I was being interviewed for the show, I’d also pointed out logistical hassles and tourist hordes at all three places — but those simply aren’t the kinds of details that make it into TV clip- shows about travel destinations. Indeed, if the Travel Channel doesn’t seem to convey much critical or intellectual substance, it’s probably because television itself is a medium that doesn’t tolerate nuance and reflection.

The network’s sole exception to this phenomenon is Anthony Bourdain, whose No Reservations is at once counterintuitive, given to opinionated perspective, and self- aware of its limitations as a TV show. Yesterday Bourdain guided us off the sun- dappled tourist-trail to visit the eateries of “the three most fucked-up cities in America” — Baltimore, Detroit, and Buffalo. By the end of show he had done a fair amount of rust-belt dining, but he’d also given the audience subtle lessons in socio-economics, immigration history, and urban planning. In Buffalo, he refused to discuss hot-wings (“you can have Al fucking Roker describe them to you on some other show,” he said). Today’s Miami-based episode simultaneously skewers South Florida tourist clichés, documentary TV fakery, and the basic assumptions of every other food-travel show on television. A running joke of the episode is Bourdain’s stubborn avoidance of Miami’s most stereotypical cuisine-culture; he eventually relents during the final moments of the show. “I’ve finally done the Cuban thing,” he quips in the concluding scene, “satisfying my network masters’ request.”

YOUR MEDIA CRITICISM WILL DO YOU NO GOOD HERE

Day 2, Hour 31: 11:20 pm. I’m nearing the end of another full day of TV viewing. A show about amusement parks, Extreme Terror Rides: Death-Defying Drops, is flickering on my screen. According to my notebook, this is the eighth hour of programming today that has been dedicated to water parks or roller coasters.

Back when I was gearing up for this Travel Channel marathon, my primary guidebooks were media-studies classics like Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and Todd Gitlin’s Watching Television. My hope was that these readings would help me understand the far-flung televisual landscape, lend my travel- TV analysis a postmodern flair, and make me sound smarter than I really am. Most of these writers argue that television is more about creating feelings and sensations than communicating information or conveying reality — and that has certainly been the case with what I’ve seen thus far.

The problem with my pre-trip media-theory research, however, is that I geared my expectations toward a cross-cultural mode of travel that doesn’t seem to exist on the Travel Channel. For example, I had hoped to harness the insights of science writer Bill McKibben, who pioneered the art of marathon-TV analysis in his 1992 book The Age of Missing Information (which contrasted a full day of multi-channel television programming with a full day spent in nature). When McKibben analyzed travel shows 20 years ago, he noted the irony in the fact that the Travel Channel aired a special on Nuremberg without highlighting the city’s notorious reputation for Nazi rallies in the 1930s. “Three things make Nuremberg famous,” the Travel Channel chirped on the day McKibben was watching, “its Christmas market, Nuremberg gingerbread, and the Nuremberg sausage.”

If the Travel Channel hasn’t glossed over many foreign destinations in the past two days, it’s because it hasn’t shown many foreign destinations. Of the 31 television-hours I’ve experienced so far, I’ve spent less than two hours outside of the United States. Thirteen hours of programming have been dedicated to American junk food, 11 hours to American amusement parks. If visual media provides us with a grammar of seeing the world, as critic Susan Sontag once suggested, the Travel Channel appears to be telling us that the world doesn’t stretch very far beyond the local fun-park or burger stand.

[Read more of Rolf Potts’ series Around the World in 80 Hours here]

Around the World in 80 Hours (of Travel TV): Part 1

by Rolf Potts on

PRELUDE

Day 5, Hour 77: 9:53 pm.

Twenty-three hotel floors above the gritty neon splendor of downtown Las Vegas, I am nearing the end of a bewildering travel experiment: For the past five days, I have been watching the Travel Channel for the entirety of my waking hours, without ever changing the station or (save a few key occasions) leaving my hotel room.

My goal has been to create an intensive, vicarious televisual adventure — to glean five days’ worth of travel experiences from the glowing parameters of a single TV set and figure out what the Travel Channel might be saying about how one should see the world.

In the 77 hours since my experiment began, I have witnessed many wonders. I have, for example, seen three grown men shriek like schoolgirls while locked overnight inside a dubiously haunted English inn. I have learned that ants in the Ecuadorian Amazon taste like lemons, that Gulf Coast raccoons taste like turkey, and that Andean guinea pigs taste like roast pork shoulder. I have learned that nachos are not authentic Mexican food, and that the Japanese have invented a toilet that can both wash and blow-dry your ass. I have seen two separate shows that sing the praises of deep-fried Twinkies, and I’ve heard the phrase “like a party in your mouth” used to describe the culinary merits of three separate food products. I have seen a restaurant full of Americans cheer like hockey fans while watching two guys devour a 10-pound pizza in less than an hour.

I have also watched commercials — more than 2000 of them in the course of five days. According to the tally marks in my notebook, I have been invited to visit Jamaica 16 times, been warned 51 times that my existing health insurance might not be adequate for my retirement needs, and thrice been asked to ponder how Cheez-It is able to bake so much cheesy goodness into such small bites.

I have left my hotel three times in the past five days, and been nearly robbed once.

In exactly 7 minutes (once the guy who ate the 10-pound pizza finishes eating a 4.5-pound steak), my TV marathon will culminate with two back-to-back episodes of a show called America’s Worst Driver, which — like many shows on the Travel Channel — doesn’t appear to be about travel.

Brandishing my notebook, I stare at the screen with a fatigued sense of resolve and ponder the events that brought me to this moment.

I.

WHY I CAME TO VEGAS TO WATCH TV FOR A WEEK

Day 1, Hour 2: 10:37 am. I am currently watching a show called Food Fun Factories. Its tagline is “hit the road and put your taste buds to the test,” which (given the content of the show) seems to infer that you should plan your vacations around the manufacture of junk food. On the screen, a man dressed as a jellybean is hugging a small child at a Fairfield, California, candy factory.

Since I don’t own a TV, I am viewing the action on a 24-inch RCA that sits atop a cream-colored cabinet in Plaza Hotel suite 2333, Las Vegas, Nevada. At $22 a night, it was cheaper to fly to Vegas for the week than it was to rent a comparable hotel room 10 miles from my Midwestern home. My room smells faintly of cigarettes and features a king-sized bed, late-’80s-style muted beige neo-Greco décor, and a synthetic potted plant that probably gets taken outside and hosed down once a year. The casino auditorium downstairs advertises a nightly extravaganza called “The Rat Pack is Back.”

I’ve been intrigued with the Travel Channel ever since I started making my living as a travel writer twelve years ago. Sometimes I’ll catch snippets of its programs when I’m staying in American hotels, and in recent years I’ve occasionally appeared on the network as a talking-head commentator (primarily on a pair of countdown clip-shows about international destinations). These fleeting Travel Channel appearances haven’t done much to deepen my understanding of the network (they were filmed by an independent production company), but they have attracted more attention from long-lost friends and family members than all of my books and travel articles combined.

Indeed, the Travel Channel has built up a significant viewing audience since its inception in 1987, a truth borne out by its $975 million valuation when the Scripps media conglomerate bought a controlling stake in the network one year ago. Given this popularity, I’ve begun to wonder what kind of message the Travel Channel is sending.

Where do we go when we watch travel television? Who do we meet? What do we learn? Since the word television literally means “seeing far,” I’ve decided to tune in for five full days and check out the view.

For the sake of discipline and full immersion, I have resolved not to use my cell phone or the Internet during my experiment. A small plastic cooler holds enough food and drink to last me the week. The only information I’ll take in for the next 78 hours will come courtesy of the Travel Channel.

On the TV screen, the candy factory footage cuts away to a hearing-aid commercial hosted by the guy who played Bobby Ewing on Dallas.

NOTES FOR A TRAVEL CHANNEL DRINKING GAME

Day 1, Hour 6: 2:08 pm. By mid-afternoon the Travel Channel has shuttled me to Alaska, where Bizarre Foods host Andrew Zimmern is dipping a chunk of bowhead whale-flesh into a jar of fermented blubber-oil.

I’m nearing the end of a midday stretch of programming that has featured three of the most popular personalities on the Travel Channel. Zimmern is a jovial, bald, pot-bellied cook from Minneapolis who travels around the world sampling dishes like boiled llama brains and fried deer genitals. Samantha Brown, who appeared at noon on Passport to Great Weekends, is an extroverted everywoman who takes brief, activity-filled trips to popular vacation destinations. Anthony Bourdain, whose show No Reservations aired an hour ago, is a grizzled, articulate, and coolly glamorous chef who travels the world using food as a window into culture.

I’ll talk more about each host’s respective show as the week progresses, but for now I think I’ve learned enough to create a drinking game that will ensure Travel Channel viewers get nice and buzzed by the end of a given episode. Assuming one has a bottle of whiskey on hand, it goes like this:

  • Bizarre Foods: Do a shot every time Andrew Zimmern nibbles on a morsel of, say, pickled gerbil rectum and stares off into the middle distance for a moment before comparing the taste to pork, beef, chicken or fish.
  • Passport to Great Weekends: Do a shot every time Samantha Brown emits a monosyllabic expression of enthusiasm, such as “Yay!” “Ooh!” “Aah!” “Wow!” or “Woo!”
  • No Reservations: Do a shot every time Anthony Bourdain does a shot.

On the TV, Zimmern noshes a bite of whale and compares it to his grandmother’s pot roast. I find myself wishing I’d brought booze with me.

NOTES FOR A TRAVEL CHANNEL DRINKING GAME, PART TWO

Day 1, Hour 13: 9:30 pm. Thirteen hours in, and I’ve just begun my fourth consecutive episode of a show called Man v. Food, which is hosted by Adam Richman, an affable and hyperactive bloke who seems to be channeling his TV persona through the hybrid aura of Jay Leno, late-period Elvis, and Cookie Monster.

The premise of Man v. Food is that Richman travels to a major American city and declares his intention to eat an insanely large food item — say, a 30-pound sloppy joe — in one sitting. For the next 20 or so minutes, Richman visits other popular eateries in his destination city, wolfing down meals in normal-sized portions while continually alluding to the gastronomical challenges presented by the 30-pound sloppy joe. At the end of the episode Richman strides into a restaurant, strips naked, rolls on a condom, and makes wild, passionate love to the 30-pound sloppy joe while a crowd of rowdy locals cheers him on.

Actually, I’m just joking. The host of Man v. Food never technically has sexual intercourse with the food. But if you were required to take a shot of whiskey every time Adam Richman bites into a hot-wing or a cheese-steak and rolls his eyes back with an orgasmic shudder, you would be hammered inside of a half-hour.

TELEVISION FATIGUE, DAY ONE

Day 1, Hour 16 (plus 2): 3:13 am. I wake up disoriented, the TV blaring some wee-hours infomercial about mortgage relief (the Travel Channel only broadcasts original content for 16 hours each day; the rest is given over to paid programming).

I grab my cell phone and squint at the time. Despite the fact that I spent most of the day sitting down, I nodded off from bone-deep exhaustion less than five minutes into the 11:00 pm rerun of Extreme Fast Food.

Watching a screen all day without having the option to change the channel has been an unexpectedly taxing endeavor: My limbs ache and my eyes burn as I get up to turn off the TV for the night. I have 64 waking hours left in my Travel Channel marathon.

[Stay tuned for the continuation of Rolf Potts’ series Around the World in 80 Hours tomorrow]

The 8 weirdest foods Andrew Zimmern has eaten (video)

by Gadling Staff on

Bald-headed and brazen, Andrew Zimmern takes culinary risk-taking to new heights on his Travel Channel show, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Zimmern has traveled the streets of Nicaragua to the state fairs of Minnesota to find the craziest edibles on earth. We cringe when we see him chowing down on iguana eggs, reindeer pizza and pig stomach tacos — but he does it with such zeal that we keep tuning in. With the show’s fourth season premiering on April 26, it’s a great time to revisit some of Andrew’s strangest meals. Put down that sandwich and check out these eight clips below.

Squirrel Brains
When Zimmern visited Appalachia, he knew he was in for some down-home oddities. But at a restaurant as fancy as Ember in Snowshoe, West Virginia, the ultimate comfort food is chicken-fried squirrel.

Live Soup
In South Korea, Zimmern digs into a soup that wiggles until the last second. Talk about fresh!

Cow Urine
That’s right, cow urine. This short and, well, not-so-sweet clip shows Zimmern knocking back a glass of the stuff in Goa.

Spleen Sandwich
When you think Italian, you think spaghetti and meatballs — but probably not Spleen. But in Sicily, Zimmern sprinkles his spleen sandwich with cheese.

Baby Piglet
This clip from a Los Angeles restaurant might make you go vegetarian. Zimmern raves about the taste, but all we can see is a whole cooked piglet on the table.

Fish Eye
No cooking necessary when Zimmern visits Samoa. Just tear the fish’s eye from the socket, and enjoy.

Shark Meat
In Iceland, taking a bite out of Jaws is nothing new. Zimmern says the meat “smells like ammonia,” but tastes “sweet” and “nutty.”

Mystery Meat
Sometimes, the fear of the unknown can be worse than eating the strangest dish. Despite the “putrid, foul stench” Zimmern notes while eating “K’Lia” in Morocco, he still suffers through.

Looking for more Andrew Zimmern and Bizarre Foods on Gadling? Check out interviews with Andrew HERE and HERE.

Related:
* 8 great bug-eating videos from around the world
* 10 great Anthony Bourdain “No Reservations” clips

Talking Travel: Andrew Zimmern discusses bizarre foods

by Mike Barish on

Andrew Zimmern is best known as the host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. But before he was traveling the globe eating glands, connective tissue and anuses, he was an acclaimed chef, writer and expert in Chinese cuisine. The new season of his Travel Channel program premieres later this month and, in anticipation of that, he chatted with us about a wide range of topics.

When we started our conversation, Andrew was in an editing room helping his producers identify meats from an episode filmed in Argentina. He pointed out thymus glands and sweet breads as easily as you or I would point out our friends in a photograph. During the rest of our discussion, we touched on subjects ranging from his iron constitution to the American culinary psychology to just how educational his television program actually is.

So what are Andrew Zimmern’s favorite foods? What is the one thing that he absolutely cannot stand eating? And what other Travel Channel host does he have a not-so-secret crush on? Andrew Zimmern shared it all with us.Mike Barish: Most people know you as the guy who eats crazy things. But what are your creature comfort foods? Are there simple things that, at the end of the day, just make you happy?

Andrew Zimmern: Oh god, yes. Black licorice; really, really, really good cinnamon lollipops. I’m a nice Jewish boy from New York. Matzo ball soup or chopped chicken liver or brisket or something like that is my go to meal. I have a 5 year old boy. I have a rekindled love affair with Cap’n Crunch. That I thought died with my college pot smoking, freakazoid days.

MB: It’s common for people to say, “This tastes like chicken.” Is saying “x tastes like chicken” the lazy way to describe wild foods or do you notice similarities in the way certain things taste?

AZ: I will tell you that frog has more in common with chicken just as iguana has more in common with chicken, snake has more in common with chicken. It’s all of those reptiles fall into the “taste like chicken” category. The reason is that they are very lean, white fleshed meats with a fairly benign flavor. Chicken has a deeper, richer, better flavor than those animals because the lack of fat in those animals. Fat is flavor in many instances. Those reptiles have a very thin, tinny sort of flavor that halfway through the chew the flavor evaporates. There’s nothing left. It’s how blindfolded I would always be able to tell I’m eating a reptile. I think that generations of people said, “oh, what’s it taste like?” “Kind of like chicken.” Now it’s a joke. “Tastes like chicken.”

MB: Do you think people actually dislike a lot of the things that you’re eating or they just can’t get past whatever psychological block they have?

AZ: No. Well it’s certainly more the latter, but I will also tell you that the biggest reason is the 3rd item: they’ve never tried it. When I’m in Chile, and I’m with Mapuche Indians and we bleed out a lamb, and they stir some lime juice and cilantro and onion into fresh lamb’s blood and take a spoon and pass the bowl around while it’s still warm, that’s hardcore. I don’t know who gets to have that experience. I’m sure people are shocked. I was shocked, and I was there. I knew it was coming, and I was shocked. What I do for people is that I can sit there and show them with pictures and tell them with the sound of my voice what the experience is like and what’s happening.

I think that a lot of people practice contempt prior to investigation.

MB: Where do you think that fear comes from and have you found that it’s uniquely American?

AZ: Oh it’s not uniquely American at all, although the rest of the world is more familiar with being more open-minded. Our country is the only country in the world, let’s just talk about food for a second, that eats from the center, expensive cuts of the animal regardless of how much money you make. We just come up with different grades of meat to separate the steaks that poor people eat from the steaks that rich people eat. It’s ludicrous. All we do is porterhouse and strip loin and rib eye. We don’t eat the hooves and the head and stuff except when we grind them up and put them in hot dogs and don’t tell people what it is. We eat boneless, skinless chicken breast. We take shrimp and throw away the head and the shell, where all the flavor is, and freeze the meat from the tail and worship that as if it is some kind of iconic ingredient. We’re the only culture in the world that does that. It’s completely backwards.

MB: But there are adventurous Americans, yes?

AZ: I think the best news in the whole world is that recently there has been a spate of reportage, I’ve even blogged about it, Tweeted and Facebooked about it, of all the different people who are taking pictures of their foods or documenting their food life.

MB: The food porn.

AZ: Correct. Flickr has a billion pictures that people download every year of what they’re eating. I think it’s the greatest thing in the whole world because people get on the internet and are like, “Oh my god, that’s tongue? That looks good.” That many people can’t be wrong.

I find it really interesting when I’m in China, donkey is a very common meat. It’s as common as beef or lamb, especially in the region that Beijing is the central hub to. Donkey meat is delicious. If Americans tasted it blind, it would be the most popular new meat in our country. It’s lean, it’s delicious, it tastes like veal, it cooks like beef, the skin is edible, it’s just glorious. It’s a certain species of the smaller donkey, and it’s just amazing. It is delicious. We can’t get people to eat goat in this country.

MB: Right, right. Would you say the biggest hurdle for people is the psychological, the taste or the texture?

AZ: The biggest issue with America is the psychology of it. I was in Thailand, and a lot of places that I travel to, the people eat bats. Here in our country, our kids are brought up with vampire mythology and Halloween mythology where bats represent disease and scary things and all the rest of that. If we didn’t have those messages in our culture, we would be eating foods like bats (assuming that there were edible ones around).

MB: Do you look back at the popularity of Fear Factor in the last decade where eating those things was seen as a challenge that merited winning thousands of dollars? Is that the psychology?

AZ: No, I think Fear Factor was the result of the net of it all. They were playing off our difficulties with psychology. What bugged me about Fear Factor – and believe me at one point before I had my job on Travel Channel and that show first came out, I was like, “I could win that show. Are you kidding me?” – they preyed on the worst fears in our psychological profiles. Not only did you have to eat the worms, but you had to lie in a coffin covered with them. You know what I mean? Those kinds of jeopardy shows where they put you in a difficult situation, I think, exploit that psychology. The fact that people had such a problem with it proves the point I’m making.

MB: Everybody watches you eating all these foods and most of the time having no problem eating them, but how is your GI tract afterward? What has caused you the worst bowel difficulties after the fact?

AZ: What a delicate way to phrase that question.

MB: I did my best there. Thank you.

AZ: I was given the job of hosting this program because I actually lived that way. All they had to do was send the TV crew with me and send me to a couple of more exotic places that I couldn’t afford to go or had time to go on my own. I say that to answer that question because by the time I got to filming my adventures, I had already been around the world a dozen times. I had never gotten sick. I don’t think if I was a person who had a lot of food-borne illness issues, etc. that I would even say “yes” to the offer. I don’t get sick. I’ve built up some resistance. I’ve eaten enough things in enough places. I even drink the water in countries where I tell other people not to.

I’ve had two nights in the last five years where I’ve been up all night sick, wrapped around the toilet. Both of those nights were in U.S. cities after eating seafood that when it went down my mouth, I was like, “oh that’s a bad mussel” or “oh that clam may come back to hurt me.”

MB: Anthony Bourdain takes the piss out of you fairly frequently on his show and in interviews. Do you guys have a good relationship? What do you think about him lobbing jabs at you every now and then? Is that a sibling rivalry relationship?

AZ: Yeah. It’s so funny. I think it’s also that those kinds of things are the most reportable, funniest bits. We both give each other a lot of crap in our shows. I think he’s been lucky enough to say them under circumstances where the lighting is better, and it fits within the context of what they’re doing. I’m always yelling at my editors and producers, “God, I said that funny line.” We both give each other a lot of grief in our shows. That’s very much sibling oriented. We’re very friendly off-camera. Last time I was in New York, my wife and I were with Tony and his wife. We’re friends.

MB: What would you say is more detrimental or more dangerous for people: eating things that you eat or the amount of fast food that Americans regularly eat?

AZ: Not even close, the amount of fast food. Not even close. I go to a lot of sporting events with my son. We’ll be sitting there, and I’ll get recognized and somebody comes up to me and they’re eating a hot dog or a bratwurst because we’re in Minnesota. They say to me, “I can’t believe some of the stuff you put in your mouth. How can you eat that barbecued pig snout?”

My response to them is, “when I was in the Philippines, and they butchered that pig and took the snout and grilled it, steamed it and grilled it again, chopped it up and made that snout hash and I ate it, that meat had never seen the inside of a refrigerator. It had never seen pesticides. It had never seen growth hormones. That was fresh, gorgeous porky pork the way God meant it to be eaten. And it was delicious.

The pork that you’re eating, sir, is ground up, it’s five years old. It was liquidized. It was ammonia-ized. It was food processed.It was loaded with filler and chemicals, and the government says they don’t have to tell you 25% of what’s in it. What’s worse? To me, it’s not even close.

The diet of the average American is universally mocked and ridiculed for good reason. Our culture has created a part of a food life for many Americans that is unconscionable. Our show is entertainment, but there is a very graspable message in Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern that I think is the most important message of anything we do.

MB: And what’s that?

AZ: When you broaden out the number of, for example, protein choices in your life, and start eating little fish as opposed to the American way which is just tuna, salmon and halibut and shrimp, when you start to eat 20 different types of red meat, not just two, you then spread out your choices and you ease pressure on farms and take away the power of these giant multinationals that now produces 75% of our food in this country. You actually level the playing field, and you’re eating more, in the words of one of my idols, Michael Pollan, “you’re eating foods that your grandmother would recognize.”

MB: Do you think that some of the goofiness and schtick of your show leads to people to not realize that it is as educational and enriching as other programs? There are educational principles to your show, but because you’re in a loud shirt and you’re kind of yucking it up, people go, “oh it’s just shock for shock’s sake.”

AZ: Yes. I couldn’t agree more. I do that, I wouldn’t say purposely, yeah I would. I do that purposely. When I first pitched this show to Travel Channel, I knew that I wanted to do a show that was 80% entertainment and 20% message and not the opposite because if I did the opposite in that day and age, I wouldn’t have gotten the larger audiences to tune in. The greatest success of my program is that kids, parents and families are addicted to it. I know that in my heart that there is a generation of kids who have watched me since day one who are more open-minded eaters. I think the impact of shows like my show, like Tony’s [Bourdain] show and others like it, in ten years from now is going to be even bigger and more manifest because I think there are a lot of people, and I hear it all the time, the kids didn’t eat vegetables and they made a game of it – Andrew Zimmern would eat that. I get hundreds of those letters a week and emails. It’s very powerful.

Plus, we have a kids’ special that’s coming out this coming year that we made awhile back that people are just going to fall in love with. It allows us to tell that message with a bigger exclamation point at the end of the sentence.

MB: Is there anything that you won’t eat either because you just don’t like the taste or texture? Is there anything that you were more than willing to try and after the fact said, “Okay, good. I tried it and I never want it again”?

AZ: Walnuts.

MB: Really?

AZ: I hate them.

MB: Why?

AZ: I’ve tried them a million ways. They just don’t agree with me. They got a bad aftertaste. I eat every other nut on the planet.

MB: But not walnuts? So nutcrackers in the Christmas stockings for you?

AZ: No, can’t stand them.

MB: Another Gadling writer, Aaron Hotfelder, wrote an open letter to you when your show started its second season. It basically said, “I love the show. I love what you do, but every place you go, you’re the only person wearing shorts.”

AZ: Correct.

MB: So, what’s with the khaki shorts?

AZ: Oh my god, that’s hysterical. What happens is, and I’ll just give you an example. You go to Morocco and you’re in the desert. Yes, it is hot and all the rest of that stuff, but you have to remember that I have to carry trunks and trunks of gear and clothing and equipment when I travel. We’re gone 2-3 weeks at a time shooting multiple shows. I’ll be in Alaska one week and then in the deserts of Morocco the next. Television is not a fancy business. I don’t have stylists and handlers and all the rest. It’s me, a producer, a couple of camera guys, a driver, a scout, a PA to carry some gear and maybe a security guy in a dicey area to watch the equipment. So it’s basically a process of elimination: what can I use that I can transport the easiest with the most people? So that’s really what it comes down to. Second of all, when you’re working 18, 19 hours a day and you’re in vans, you go for comfort. So it’s also a comfort thing as well. I just find it really simple. The other thing that we actually talk about and think about a lot is that we have enough distracting stuff on the show. Leopard print type pants and white go-go boots is not – as much as I love to be an individual – it’s maybe a little too distracting. It really is.

I never had to answer that question. It’s a very good one. It’s just because it is easy to travel with, easy to clean and has good pockets.

MB: Are you familiar with the game Fuck, Marry, Kill?

AZ: Yes.

MB: Okay, so Fuck, Marry, Kill and the 3 candidates are: Tony Bourdain, Samantha Brown, and Bear Grylls.

AZ: Oh my god. Oh my god. Well Tony I would marry. Absolutely in half a heartbeat. I’ve made no bones about it. Samantha is a very dear friend of mine, and both of us are very happily married, I would definitely make a run at her if we were both single. She is just an absolute pistol, and I just admire the heck out of her. I adore her. I have very publicly said that I have a huge crush on Samantha. Yeah, so that’s a no brainer. The funny thing about Bear is that if I didn’t know him, I would have obviously put him in the kill category. I love his show. I watch his show. I’ve recorded it since day one. I just think he’s fantastic. But he’s even nicer in real life. He’s one of the nicest, most genuine, good human beings, and I’ve gotten to spend a decent amount of time with him. He’s just a gem of a human being. So I would rather not fuck, marry or kill Bear Grylls. I’d rather just hang out with him.


The fourth season of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern premieres on the Travel Chanel on April 26 at 10:00pm E/P.

Photo courtesy of Travel Channel.

Travel Channel to find new home

by Tom Johansmeyer on

The network for wanderers seems to be doing a bit of that itself these days. Cox Communications, which owns the Travel Channel, is shopping it around, with several companies expressing interest. So, will it wind up with Scripps Networks, which has the Food Network and HGTV? Or, could it wind up part of Rupert Murdoch‘s empire over at News Corp?

So far, Scripps seems to be in the lead, with Rupert’s folks not crazy about the climbing price of the channel. The latest bids, word is, are north of $1 billion. Back in June, when Cox first put it on the block, industry watchers figured it would fetch between $600 million and $700 million. Last week, the $900 million mark was pierced and has since been left in the rearview mirror.

The Travel Channel hasn’t landed yet, and it could take a while for the dust to settle. We’ll keep watching … the action, that is.