The Bizarre Truth: How I Walked Out the Door Mouth First . . . and Came Back Shaking My Head Audiobook (Free)

Andrew Zimmern, the web host from the Travel Channel’s strike series Bizarre Foods, has an extraordinarily well-earned status for traveling far and wide to seek out and sample anything and everything that’s consumed as meals globally, from cow vein stew in Bolivia and large traveling ants in Uganda to raw camel kidneys in Ethiopia, putrefied shark in blood pudding in Iceland and Wolfgang Puck’s Hunan design rooster balls in LA. For Zimmern, regional cuisine – bizarre, gross or downright stomach about The Bizarre Truth: How I Walked Out the Door Mouth Initial . and RETURNED Shaking My Mind turning as it may end up being to us — is not simply what’s served at mealtime. It really is an initial avenue to discovering what is many authentic – the bizarre truth – about cultures everywhere. Having eaten his way around the world over the course of four periods of Bizarre Foods, Zimmern has launched Bizarre Worlds, a new series in the Travel Route, and this, his first publication, a chronicle of his journeys simply because he not merely likes the “taboo treats” of the world, but delves deep into the ethnicities and life-style of far-flung locales and looks for probably the most valued of the modern traveler’s goals: The Authentic Knowledge. Written in the intelligent, often hilarious voice he uses to narrate his TV shows, Zimmern uses his ventures in “culinary anthropology” to illustrate such designs as: why going to regional markets can reveal more about destinations than museums; the importance of going to “the final stop within the subway” – one of the most remote area of a location where its substance is frequently revealed; the necessity to look for and catalog “the last container of coca-cola in the desert,” i.e. disappearing foods and ethnicities; the profound variations between eating and eating; as well as the pleasures of snout to tail, regional, fresh and organic meals. Zimmern takes readers into the back of a souk in Morocco where locals are eating a whole roasted lamb; plus a conch fisherman in Tobago, who may be the final of his kind; to Mississippi, where he dines on raccoon and possum. There, he writes, “People said, ‘That’s roadkill!’ ‘Zero it’s not,’ I stated. ‘It’s a cultural story.’”

Whether it’s a session with an Incan witch doctor in Ecuador who blows open fire on him, spits on him, thrashes him with poisonous branches and beats him having a live guinea pig or drinking blood in Uganda and cow urine tonic in India or eating roasted bats on an uninhabited island in Samoa, Zimmern cheerfully celebrates the undiscovered locations and weird wonders still remaining in our increasingly globalized world.