Chewed Awakening
Has eating pickled rat scrotums jumped the shark’s colon?
For armchair geeks with an endless appetite for extreme mastication, TV offers an all-you-can-eat buffet these days. In one recent episode of the Travel Channel's "Bizarre Foods," jovial human garbage disposal Andrew Zimmern feasted on toasted grasshoppers, worms, a pizza topped with a minor plague of insects, fresh armadillo, stomach taco, ant eggs, mosquito eggs, a second helping of worms, chicken feet, corn fungus, and some live bugs which he said tasted just like tutti-fruiti gum.
On the Discovery Channel's "Man vs. Wild," perpetually famished swashbuckler Bear Grylls strip-mines exotic locales of the quick and the dead in his constant quest for calories -- neither squirmy grubs nor not-quite-rotten zebra carcasses are safe from his hyper-omnivorous maw. His thirst knows no bounds either. Last season, he raised a fresh globe of elephant dung above his parched lips, squeezed mightily, and happily imbibed the brown guck that dribbled forth. And just to drive home the point that one man's fetish porn is another's basic cable hit, he regularly guzzles his own urine.
Anyone for seconds?
Seven years ago, when "Survivor's" producers made the original gang of castaways eat live insects in the show's second episode, it was a cathode epiphany on par with the first crack of Matt Dillon's lethal but bloodless six-gun or the introduction of a trio of female detectives who only took cases that included opportunities to masquerade as strippers or masseuses.
Sure, others (Tom Green, Julia Child, alcoholic circus geeks) had gotten there first, but it was "Survivor" that made eating gross things for money a mainstream primetime entertainment staple. After the third episode, in which the starving Pagong tribe held an impromptu rat barbecue, all the other elements of the show seemed instantly tedious. Enough with the hushed confessionals! Enough with the tribal councils! Just put some slimy, pulsating, intestine-like things straight out of David Cronenberg's worst nightmares on a plate and make 'em eat!
Thus begat "Fear Factor" and the golden age of rude food. Yes, the show was padded out with needlessly complicated stunts that looked like outtakes from a crappy Joel Silver movie spliced with a game of flag football. But "Fear Factor" graciously stuck to the same precisely timed formula episode after episode, so you didn't have to watch those parts. Instead, you could just tune in at approximately 8:30 p.m. each week and witness psychotic twentysomethings devouring cricket smoothies, maggot lasagne, and whatever else stood between them and a shot at $50,000. TV had never seemed so screamingly, wretchingly, slurpingly entertaining.
Today, on a single episode of "Bizarre Foods," Andrew Zimmern eats his way through enough disgusting stuff to make himself a "Fear Factor" millionaire. Bear Grylls attacks weevil grubs with the sort of relish normally seen only at pie-eating contests. But Grylls makes extreme mastication useful, and Zimmern makes it tasteful. Exploitation's been reduced from primary ingredient to mere condiment; the final dish is just not appetizing anymore.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]