Jeffrey Steingarten - It Mustve Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 2003

Copyright 2002 by Jeffrey Steingarten

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The pieces in this collection first appeared, in somewhat different form, in Vogue .

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
It must've been something I ate : the return of the man who ate everything /
by Jeffrey Steingarten.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-375-41280-8
1. Gastronomyhumor. 2. Foodhumor. I. Title.
TX631 .S72 2002
641.0130207dc21 2002024676

Vintage ISBN: 0-375-72712-4

Author photograph Hiro

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.0

JEFFREY STEINGARTEN

It Must've Been Something I Ate

Jeffrey Steingarten is Vogue's food critic and the author of The Man Who Ate Everything . He trained to be a food writer at Harvard Law School and on the Harvard Lampoon . On Bastille Day, 1994, the French Republic made Mr. Steingarten a Chevalier in the Order of Merit for his writings on French gastronomy. Chevalier Steingarten discloses that his preferred eating destinations are Memphis, Paris, Bangkok, Alba, and Chengduand his loft in New York City, where he has recently created well over a firkin of cultured butter.

Essays in this collection have won a National Magazine Award and several prizes from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. The Man Who Ate Everything was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the Julia Child Cookbook Award and the Guild of British Food Writers' Prize for the year's best book about food.

ALSO BY JEFFREY STEINGARTEN

The Man Who Ate Everything

For Anna, Judith, and Sonny

Contents

THE WAY WE EAT NOW

Technically, it is known as the Calamari Index, or C.I., and it measures precisely how far we've come as a nation of eaters over the past 30 years. In the sixties and for most of the seventies, calamari consumption in this country was among the lowest in the world. (They were most popular in Cyprus, Japan, Korea, Spain, Greece, and Italy.) Very few Americans would go near a cuttlefish. Everything about them was repulsive. My own Personal Calamari Index, or P.C.I., was truly pitiful as well.

And then, in the mid-eighties, the C.I. totally took off. Calamari began cropping up on every street corner in America. Raw fish would quickly follow. Today there is hardly a restaurant anywhere that doesn't offer fried, flavored, crispy calamari as an appetizer, paired with a themed dipping sauce. We love to munch on the multitude of crunchy little tentacles. We are amused to watch the curled rows of tiny suckers slide into our mouths. I have recently been eating bugs, as well. We'll get to that in a minute.

Thus, by graphing the weight of calamari the average American man, woman, and child consumes each year, we obtain an exact yet simple indicator of how completely we have overcome our inbred revulsion toward certain foods and, whether yielding to social pressure or truly opening up and evolving as human beings, have learned to love them. In the interests of accuracy, we should call it the Cephalopod Index, or C.I., because official statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations combine cuttlefish with squid and octopus under the overarching category of cephalopods. According to the FAO, between the early sixties and today, U.S. cephalopod intake soared by 184 times!.

What better example can one imagine of the universal truth that no food is inherently revolting? Infants are not repulsed by the sight or smell of rotten meat crawling with maggots. Forty- two cultures around the world eat rats. And now, the creature that once inspired only nightmares to disrupt the Anglo-American sleep cycle has become commonplace.

What divine or cosmic force has wrought such a change? I would venture that at least half the credit is owed to the present author and his relentless international campaign to coax and, if necessary, humiliate people who hold on to phony allergies, bogus intolerances, nutritional nonsense, and provincial preferences. Once you master the chapter entitled Fear of Formaggio , you will surely understand. Sadly, I nearly meet my comeuppance in Taro, Taro, Taro.

As I related in the introduction to my first book, The Man Who Ate Everything , when I became Vogue's food critic, I felt an ethical responsibility to rid myself of every psychological and cultural prejudice and inhibition preventing me from becoming the perfect omnivore, the ideally neutral critic. Six heroic months later, I had reached my goal, with two exceptions. First, I had failed to shed my distaste for desserts in Indian restaurants. But as I feel I completely opened my heart to them, I refuse to blame myself for what others might perceive a monumental personal failure. And second, under the press of time, I had temporarily recused myself in the matter of bugs.

Though insects are crunchy, nutritious, high in protein, inexpensive, and easy to cook, most people I know in northern Europe and North America (excluding Mexico) avoid them. Elsewhere, people are especially fond of locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, termites, butterflies, beetles, and the larvae and pupae of large moths. In Presencia de la comida prehispnica , Teresa Yturbide reports that when the Spanish conquerors arrived in America, they found the Maya and Aztecs enjoying roasted corn worms, tacos stuffed with grilled toritos (avocado bugs), and the red and white worms that breed and live in the maguey plant. (To retain their fat, the red ones were first roasted over low heat, then crushed with roasted tomatillos and chiles, and eaten with blue- corn tortillas.) Plus, they ate jumil bugs, wood larvae, green worms, the pupae and eggs of the big-shoed wasp, honey ants, vine ants, ant eggs, sage worms, and sun-dried chia worms, which are as long as your hand and have tentacles on their heads.