By Dave Lake
MSN TV

Andrew Zimmern is currently serving up the second season of television's most daring culinary adventure, "Bizarre Foods." We caught up with the chef/tour guide over the phone to talk about the show's current season and to dish on some of his favorite foods, his scariest traveling moments and just exactly how you train yourself to enjoy putrefied meat.

MSN TV: What are some of the locations you travel to during your new season?
Andrew Zimmern: We start out in Phuket, Thailand, and we have Samoa and Sicily. We have a Halloween show and a holiday show, Uganda, Ethiopia, Paris, Los Angeles and good old Maine, USA.

You mentioned a few American cities there. Do we Americans eat less food that you would deem "bizarre"?
No, actually quite the contrary. No. 1, "bizarre" is sort of a relative term. If you ask somebody in another country about American cheese, they laugh. If you tried to describe a hot dog to somebody and what goes in it, they would laugh. On the other end of the bizarre spectrum, in our Gulf Coast show, we eat all kinds of critters: raccoons and possums. In Alaska we ate stinkheads. In Los Angeles you can go into Koreatown and eat a live octopus. In Maine, I was eating beaver chili and moose steaks.

Have you always had an affinity for unusual foods? To what do you attribute your incredible stomach?
Ever since I was a little kid, we traveled and we ate, not exactly aggressively but in a real "when in Rome do as the Romans do" kind of way. I got into the habit very early on of wanting to sample what the natives were eating. And I think that that's a very important factor when it comes to dining. It's necessary if you want to really see a country, to not, for example, go to the Hard Rock Café in Beijing. You want to go to Donghuamen Street and eat street food. Being raised in a family like that, I never knew any other way to travel.

Did you travel a lot as a kid growing up?
Absolutely. We didn't believe in being tourists, we believed in being travelers, and there is a difference. We were a fun-loving, fun-eating family.

You mentioned the difference between being a tourist and a traveler. Are Americans boorish overseas travelers?
I think in general we are. But I think everybody is. There's an ethnocentric sort of attitude that works both ways in our world. Everybody thinks that everyone in France cooks great food. And that's mythology. There are people there who are culinary slobs as well. There are people in Japan who come here who are boorish travelers who aren't looking at our country the way we'd like to have it looked at.

As you travel the world with giant cameras and bright lights, how do you balance respecting the country you're traveling in with needing to produce a TV show?
We actually travel very stealthily with a small crew and no lights, which I think is part of the secret. Our show is one that's able to go into some of these places and tell stories while being respectful of the culture. We're not there trying to make fun of them. We're there to try to experience what the culture is all about and give an unvarnished look at what's really going on.

Have you had any scary moments traveling abroad?
We were in an Islamic community in a very small town in Morocco the day Zarqawi was killed by the United States. And being in a country that is becoming more anti-American by the second, on a day where anti-American sentiment was very high, was a very scary day at work. I've also had scary days at work that have nothing to do with geopolitics. I was in a small boat off the coast of Iceland in search of the elusive puffin, and I've never been so scared in my life as the day I was in 15-foot seas in a little, aluminum rust bucket. It was nuts.

Can you run down the list of things you haven't been able to consume over the years?
There are only two things I've ever said no to on the show. One was tap water in a slum in Delhi, India. And the other was a raw chicken intestine in northern Thailand. Other than that I've tried everything that's been offered to me.

Well what about foods that you didn't want a second taste of? Has anything made you throw up?
In professional food eating parlance, I've never experienced a reversal. That being said, I did not want to keep eating durian [fruit] after one bite. Subsequently, I've tried it in three of four other shows in different guises, and I still didn't like it. And the only other foods that I've not been able to take a second bite of: one was the stinky tofu in Taiwan, the 14-day-old stuff; the other was a weird aloe elixir in Ecuador that had this 2-foot-long chunk of aloe in it. I realized while half of it was still in the glass that the other half was trailing down my esophagus, and it freaked me out and I gagged.

What's the most surprisingly delicious thing you've encountered? Something you were sure would be foul but was quite delicious?
The donkey in China was out-of-control good, and I would eat donkey three times a week if you could get it here. And also the roasted sparrows in Vietnam. Every day I would have a bag of these little roasted sparrows with a sweet chili sauce that was just extraordinary.

Are there any parts of an animal that you haven't eaten?
I've had everything: hooves, toes, noses, spleens.

What's the secret to consuming things that aren't a part of our normal palate? It seems like the battle is half psychological and half physical. Is that accurate?
It's really a nature vs. nurture issue. The only reason we find certain foods unpalatable is because we've been taught that they're not a good flavor. We've built associations around [foods] that make them seem unpalatable. Some of that is mythology, and some of that is for health reasons. My three-and-a-half-year-old has tried guinea pigs and grasshoppers, and loves them both, but that's because I got to him before the cultural naysayers did. When it comes to eating worms in the backyard, every time I hold one up for my son, he says, "Daddy, that's yucky," because he's got a children's book that says that worms are yucky.

That makes sense, but even as open minded as one can be, there are still going to be things you put into your mouth, like putrefied meat, that are simply going to taste foul. How did you get over that part of it?
The first five, six, seven times I ate something like that my gag reflex engaged. I think over time my gag reflex has eased because I've found out there's nothing wrong with eating these kinds of foods. Your mind tells you to relax instead of tense up. So there is an actual physical aspect to this that one can learn.

Are there ever any health concerns over what you consume? Do producers eat this stuff before you do?
Nope, nobody eats it before I do because nobody will eat it. We just had a situation where I went to Tanzania, where we were going to live with the Maasai, and they drink animal blood there. The health reports and the insurance people were really concerned because (I think it was) monkey pox had just had an outbreak in that part of the world, and cattle had been infected. The worst possible thing you can do is consume blood. It doesn't get any more dangerous than that. I told everyone in preproduction that I wasn't going to do it, knowing full well that once I got there, unless I saw some kind of obvious sign that these animals were diseased, I was going to do it.

So, the basic lesson is: People can essentially eat anything they encounter while traveling and not be fearful of getting sick.
Agreed. You can go into a snake restaurant in Hanoi and they'll open up a turtle or a frog or a snake and they'll make four or five courses out of the meat, and one of the courses will be a glass of the blood, usually with one of the organs in it, and you can drink reptile blood. You can have a beating frog heart or a beating cobra heart; that's a very easy thing for a consumer to find and do. It's not easy to go live with the Maasai and drink their cattle's blood. And I wouldn't recommend that Granny and Junior start drinking cattle blood. So with the exception of that one, your point is spot-on.

"Bizarre Foods With Andrew Zimmern" airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on the Travel Channel.

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