Andrew Zimmern is a minor American TV personality who’s primarily known for travelling around the world and eating strange food for the camera. (He’s also a chef, author and teacher.) Admittedly, when he visited Swansea market in Wales he didn’t exactly impress me with his boldness. To quote from a supposedly authoritative TV guide (the atrocious punctuation and misspellings are all from the original):

“In Swansea, Wales, the hometown of the poet Dillon Thomas, Andrew visits the Swansea Market and reveals bones, heart, kidneys and pluck used in recipes. The market also has wild game such as partridge, wild pheasant and pigeon. Joined by Carol Watts, Andrew tries a dish called faggo consisting of pig heart, liver and fatty meat as well as cockles, a type of mollusk, laverbread, toast with seaweed paste, and whelks, a sea snail served with pepper, vinegar and sea salt.”

Anyway, he was a bit more adventurous recently and visited Isaan in the north east of Thailand. Unfortunately, he belied his reputation as a man who will eat anything. Whilst he was happy to chow down on roasted rat, dung beetles, grasshoppers, raw (still warm) calf liver and silk worm grubs, he baulked at raw cow placenta and the partially digested contents of a cow’s stomach.

However, the food that produced in him the greatest revulsion was pizza, with fake cheese, fake seafood and fake hot dog. Earlier in the week I had a pizza from Pizza Hut with a similar fake cheese (possibly the same recipe as was used in the USA by Domino’s [Polydimethylsiloxane – yummmy!]) The base was impossibly sweet, and the imitation crab sticks impossibly vile. However, I managed to force down a few slices. Perhaps Travel Channel should ditch the overweight balding guy and employ another overweight balding guy (i.e. me).

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