3.5
a squeamishly interesting book about wildly, crazy, adventurous eaters! I have to admit there is not one food item in this entire book that I'm even remotely interesting in trying, seeing or smelling, but it sure was fascinating learning about how many people out there are pushing against convention and boldly going where not many of us would dare. More power to 'em, including this brave author who doesn't shy away from fearless eating herself!

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I love weird/gross food, and because of this I made my way through the whole book. Had I not the stomach for it (or for puns), I would not have pushed through the writing. I found myself scanning for the next engaging section.

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A new American cuisine is forming. Animals never before considered or long since forgotten are emerging as delicacies. Parts that used to be for scrap are centerpieces. Ash and hay are fashionable ingredients, and you pay handsomely to breathe flavored air. Going out to a nice dinner now often precipitates a confrontation with a fundamental question: Is that food?

Dana Goodyear’s anticipated debut, Anything That Moves, is simultaneously a humorous adventure, a behind-the-scenes look at, and an attempt to understand the implications of the way we eat. This is a universe populated by insect-eaters and blood drinkers, avant-garde chefs who make food out of roadside leaves and wood, and others who serve endangered species and Schedule I drugs—a cast of characters, in other words, who flirt with danger, taboo, and disgust in pursuit of the sublime. Behind them is an intricate network of scavengers, dealers, and pitchmen responsible for introducing the rare and exotic into the marketplace. This is the fringe of the modern American meal, but to judge from history, it will not be long before it reaches the family table.

Anything That Moves is a highly entertaining, revelatory look into the raucous, strange, fascinatingly complex world of contemporary American food culture, and the places where the extreme is bleeding into the mainstream.

My Review: I will try almost anything once. Almost anything, stuff like eyeballs and mountain oysters and (unknowingly) dog. Mountain oysters are tasty, eyeballs are gross, and I vomited for an hour after being told the greasy, slick, icky meat was dog.

There is stuff that these damnfool eejits are *paying*money*for* that there is not a single, solitary, remote, fat, or slim chance that I would consent to sit at a table with, still less eat.

Actually, I could stop there and the review would be complete. But there's a bit more I'd like to say. Dana Goodyear writes for The New Yorker, and it shows. Her phrases are often quite euphonious, but in the end more snacklike than mealtimey:

Appetites are hard to legislate, and people usually end up doing what they want to do. The year {Upton} Sinclair wrote The Jungle, he got his first summer cold. It was the beginning of the score of ailments that led him to John Henry Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium (sic), which promoted vegetarianism, and to the writings of Horace Fletcher, "The Great Masticator," who prescribed chewing your food extra-thoroughly.

I stopped subscribing to The New Yorker for that reason. Okay, back in the Shawn era we had them memorable 10,000 words on zinc, its extraction, refinement, and many uses. But now we have ephemeral, mildly interesting stuff like...

...like...

...and there you have it. The chapters in this book could have been entitled "Notes from LA" and I would've skipped gaily past them, being largely uninterested in when not actively hostile to LA. And I would've been not one smidgin less well-rounded a person.

Goodyear's entertaining moments describing the feuds and rivalres among these freaky-deaky foodies are pleasant enough. Her description of eating some of the offal these folks consume made me mildly queasy, and never...not once...made me curious enough to try some of the disgusting crap the effete of palate and overloaded of wallet gourmands herein profiled savored.

I received this copy from the publisher via LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. That made this review possible for me to write without resorting to invective, vituperation, and contumely. Had I spent $27.95 on it, I''d be so moltenly angry even yet that it would be unwise to approach me without something normal and wholesome like a double cheesburger with bacon, mayo, and onions plus an extra-large fries prominently displayed as a token of goodwill.

Make that burger a triple.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )

I received this book for free as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program; this review is not affected by this fact.

A little bit of a nitpicky point - from reading other reviews, it appears that many of the chapters were in fact previously-published articles. Each one was fine, but I think as a book, it would have benefited from a bit more honing of a central point, so it didn't feel so much like a collection of essay. Just my opinion, but it would have improved my read.

That being said, I did enjoy it. The "gross foods" part, of course, was fascinating (not sure I could eat a chicken-in-an-egg, especially with the textural description). The author did a great job at getting to (or at least appearing to get to) the underbelly of various areas of the industry. As much as I know that food service is never easy money, I was tempted to go truffle importing. ( )

This book was a weird combination of boring, fascinating, and disgusting. Rather than one cohesive line of thought, this book is set up more like essays of similar theme. I think the title is a misnomer meant to be both shocking and attention grabbing. The subtitle is much more accurate of the themes and topics in this book. Surprisingly, yes, this book is about 99% about "anything that moves" -- there's very little discussion about vegetarian/vegan foods. Perhaps this is because the EATING of plant-based meals holds little social controversy?

I waffle in giving this book 3 stars. I can't really recommend the book because I found it to be underwhelming (2 stars at best); but at the same time, Goodyear is a compelling writer -- worthy of 4 stars. Part of why I can't give this book more stars is Goodyear's lack of sampling her research. She was pregnant at the time of the majority of her research. I can understand the need to not buck conventional wisdom; but there's only one chapter in the entire book (the very last chapter) that illustrates her trying "anything that moves." There are references throughout the book to her tasting things or her remembered experience of tasting a dish. That alone, nullifies much of her "street cred" for the topic of interest. ( )